The Need For Routine

Personal July 29, 2008

As much as I hate to admit it, I need a routine. I need structure. I want to come to work and know the plan for the day, instead of aimlessly wandering around using other people as entertainment.

"You look interesting. What do you do?"

The weekends are one thing - amorphous blobs of time which you can use to do something exciting one day and mundane another (such as laundry, which I should probably do at some point). I've always treated Saturday as the "party" and Sunday as the "cleanup" (which, if nothing interesting happened on Saturday and hence nothing to clean up, can be quite boring).

But the weekdays need a framework. And not the collective weekdays but rather, the individual days, hour by hour. I've set my starting hours to be 10 to 6, although I tend to fudge the numbers a bit because creativity is *not* an eight-hour span that can be turned on and off by the clock. In fact, I do some of my best work at 2 in the morning.

This 10-6 schedule would have done well for me, except the afternoon drags on a bit too far. You come in at 10, get your coffee, and check email for an hour (even though sometimes you can sort through it in 20 minutes, leaving you 40 to check Facebook, stocks, news or someone's blog - you can argue this counts as working because you're "staying connected" with the world around you).

At 11, you're close to lunch, so you can't start anything big because you know you'll have to interrupt it with some food. So, you end up attempting a few small projects with no intention of progressing.

Normally lunch is at 12, but to beat the rush, you head out at 11:45. But wait, you don't want to leave everyone 15 minutes early. So you stay. Lunch hour really means Lunch However-Long-You-Want.

It's funny how the 10 AM and 1 PM hours are similar. After lunch you feel the need to "regroup" when your interruption really wasn't as severe as going home for a night. Nevertheless, without a plan, you're left clicking through email you already read and blogs you already saw. That's why I like to have post-lunch meetings for an hour - gets you back on track.

From there, 2-4 is really the time to get work done. You have to force it down (like the vegetables that your parents claim were good for you, though you still see no merit even to this day).

Lucky for you, if you can make it through (with a few minor breaks in between to check out a YouTube video and check up on your neighbors to ensure that they too aren't working as hard as they want you to think), you can take a second coffee break at 4. And this is a legitimate break because half the company is out lounging around, so you don't feel as bad. You figure, as long as they're sitting, it's okay.

But when 5 rolls around, you get anxious and head back to your office which is now much emptier because so many people have left at 5. You now have the space to yourself, quiet and inactive. This seems alright at first until 15 minutes later you realize that you don't like working alone, that the activity around you keeps you "busy" and now you *actually* have nothing to do but check email (because you got one new message) and post on your blog.

You try that for a little, but it's boring, so you leave. I mean, who really wants to stay at work doing these monotonous things all day long when you can *leave* and do something more exciting?

So you go home and spend the rest of the night playing on the computer and watching TV.

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