After many years of drafting new routines, interviewing hundreds of people about theirs, reading countless productivity books and conducting self-devised experiments, I still haven’t acquired a routine.
When I faced the fact that I’m not a person with a set routine, I was able to see with clarity that it wasn’t my inability to stick to a routine that was the problem, but rather my obsession with trying to achieve the ideal. In my hopeless search for the perfect routine, I found a new hope: that it’s possible to enrich our days without the elaborate netting. I stopped collecting habits and hacks, and started to collect reminders from people I interviewed that helped me embrace my own shambolic schedule: someone would tell me, “Every day is different.” Another would say, “I’m a mixed bag,” or “I struggle with having routine more than not having one.”
Routines are not for everyone. There’s nothing inherently better about being someone who can stick to a routine. It doesn’t make you smarter, more likeable, more fulfilled, more
