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CHAPTER 8

SIMPLIFY ROUTINES

The decisions you make determine the schedule you keep. The schedule you keep determines the life you live. And how you live your life determines how you spend your soul.

LYSA TERKEURST

I have a beautiful blue-green platter I pull out of my cabinet every year on Christmas Eve. It’s exactly the right size for the crab I’ve roasted in butter and spices. The table is covered with a large sheet of craft paper, and I know exactly what dishes I’ll use for the Caesar salad and homemade bread. The peppermint ice cream I made earlier in the day is sitting in the freezer, ready to be pulled out after we put on our freshly unwrapped new pajamas. We’ll eat ice cream and play games through the night until it’s time to head to our rooms to dream of sugarplums. That’s what we do every year—my entire family starts anticipating it almost as soon as the Halloween decorations come down. It’s our tradition.

I love traditions. I love how they weave together years’ and years’ worth of family time. I believe the big memories and feelings we have from our childhood are really a series of these traditions stitched together over time, creating a solid memory. After I became a mother, I was so conscious of this with my children. I created all these little traditions we use to celebrate each passing year. And now that my children are older, I believe even more strongly that these traditions have pulled us closer together as a family.

The side bonus of these traditions is the extra boost they give to your productivity. You see, traditions are one of the very best ways to take the extra stress and work out of those busy times. Let me tell you what I mean—the holiday dinner I told you about seems like a whole lotta work, but it’s all so easy because it’s a tradition. I don’t have to worry about what’s for dinner—all the recipes are already pulled together in a binder along with notes I’ve written to myself over the years on when I need to pop each thing into the oven or what I can make ahead of time.

I don’t worry about what activity we’ll do—I know we’ll each unwrap brand-new pajamas along with one present with a new game inside. I don’t even have to worry about what I’ll wear! Traditions allow me to make time special for my family, but they also make it so much easier for me to sit back and actually enjoy the time instead of rushing around stressing. You see, traditions are systems—they take the thinking out of tasks. Routines and rituals do that for us, too, but on a daily basis—they help streamline our days and make it easier for us to enjoy each day.

Sidebar with me here for just a second: yes, I go a little bananas with the cooking, but that’s because I love to cook. On holidays it’s like I get the chance to pretend I’m a big-time chef with my own cooking show—it’s something fulfilling for me. I will tell you this: I don’t do holiday cards, I don’t go crazy with holiday decorating, and if there was an award for Worst Elf-on-a-Shelf Mom, I’d be holding that prize. You do you. Do the traditions you love.

ROUTINES DON’T HAVE TO FEEL ROUTINE

We all look forward to our traditions, don’t we? Whether it’s birthday traditions, holiday traditions, or even Sunday morning pancake traditions, the anticipation of them is almost as enjoyable as the actions themselves. Traditions have a way of making events seem special, of marking time with intention. We don’t have to wait for special events to make rituals for ourselves. We can have routines to make each day feel special and allow the room we need for the tasks we really want to do each day.

Routines are essentially habits following one after the other, each one acting as a cue for the next, building momentum. And momentum is what we need. Sometimes it’s the things that appear to be really small that effect the greatest change—this is called the domino effect.

We’ve all played with dominoes at some point in our lives, lining them up in intricate patterns simply for the thrill of watching them knock one another down. But in 1983 physicist Lorne Whitehead1 discovered that while dominoes can knock down lots of other dominoes, they can also topple dominoes 50 percent larger than themselves.

Let’s think about this a second. This means a single, tiny domino alone can’t knock down a one-thousand-foot-tall domino, but if we start with one tiny domino and line up sixteen more—each 50 percent larger than the last—it could. Domino number seventeen, while taller than the Empire State Building, would topple over, brought down by a force started by a two-inch domino.

To make big changes happen, we simply need to start small and allow the dominoes to fall. Little steps lead to giant leaps toward the life we want to live. Every day we need to line up our priorities, find our lead domino, and push it over to make the next big thing happen. Small wins lead to big victories.

Instead of dominoes, though, let’s use our routines. Let’s create a process where we line up our habits in a logical order to help us build this momentum. The idea is to complete a number of things without even thinking about it—each domino knocking down the next.

In some ways, you probably already do this. Think about your morning: you get up, brush your teeth, shower, put on deodorant, and so on. How often do you have to think actively about each of these steps? The reality is, you probably don’t—you’ve created a routine for yourself. So why not design a routine with intention? A routine that allows the space you want for what matters most.

Let me explain what I mean. While working on this book, I needed to carve out space to write. I knew that if I tried to shoehorn in writing time where my day allowed, this book would take me decades to finish. I decided to prioritize this book, so I made a commitment to design a morning routine that allowed writing to be a focus.

Each morning my alarm goes off around 4:30 a.m. Yes, for a night owl like me, that’s early! But this book is important, so this is a gift of time I’m giving to this priority right now. I lie in bed for ten minutes because this is my time to center myself; I use it to pray and meditate. At 4:40 I crawl quietly from the bed so I don’t wake up John, and sneak into the bathroom to brush my teeth, wash my face, and gulp down a sixteen-ounce glass of water.

My morning water was one of the first habits I worked hard to instill in my routine. I was waking up groggy and cranky, but I learned that these symptoms are often caused by dehydration. Our bodies are made up of almost 60 percent water2, and when we sleep we are going almost eight hours without hydration, making our brains sluggish.

I used my teeth brushing as a springboard to build this habit. As my cue, I placed an empty glass in front of my sink where I couldn’t possibly miss it when I went to brush my teeth. While this one habit has been one of the biggest boosts to my morning, it has an added bonus—within fifteen minutes of waking up, I’m already 25 percent closer to my daily goal of sixty-four ounces. That’s a nice little domino.

After my water, I slip into the living room where I light the fireplace and stretch for five minutes. Then I reach for my computer and notes, which are waiting next to my chair where I left them the night before. I take one minute to set my intention and focus my thoughts on what I want to accomplish. And then I start getting into the deep work of writing.

I don’t stop until 6:10, when I close the computer, stack up my notes, and make my way to Jack’s and Kate’s bedrooms to wake them both up before heading back to my room where I slide back into bed for about ten minutes.

Wait. What?

I imagine your furrowed brow, confused at my last statement. It makes no sense. I’m up and ready for my day, and then I go back to bed? But that’s what I do. I slip back into my room and into bed next to my husband, who’s just beginning to wake up. I call this time my Million Dollar Minutes.

Ten minutes to connect with my husband, to focus with intention on my marriage, before my day begins. We rarely lie there in silence. We usually visit and we always laugh. It doesn’t really matter what we do—what matters is that during those minutes, I’m focusing solely on what matters most. I call them Million Dollar Minutes because I know that if this time were gone tomorrow, I would gladly pay a million dollars to get it back. I don’t ever want to take this time for granted, so I purposely create that space. You see, it’s not just about managing our time; it’s about savoring the moments.

There are other Million Dollar Minutes in my day—when Kate nestles next to me on the couch wanting to share a playground happening, when Jack plops himself in the back seat after school. These are the times when I know I need to slow down and give my priorities—these people I love—my full attention. If I don’t remind myself how valuable these moments are, I’ll allow them to slip through my fingers.

The rest of my morning routine is probably very much like yours—getting dressed, calling up the stairs ten twenty-five times to get Jack to stop saying he’s out of bed and actually get moving, gathering lunches, signing field trip forms, herding everyone out the door. The day is off and running, but it feels centered because I’ve started it off with a routine that has meaning for me. You can see in my routine that I take care of myself spiritually, physically, and emotionally.

Now before you roll your eyes and comment that I must have bluebirds flittering alongside my computer chirping happily or mice sewing my dress for the ball, I want to throw in an ice-cold dose of reality. This long morning routine doesn’t happen every day. I’m committed to three days a week of this practice because I know there are nights when I may stay up too late or mornings when I wake up and feel too tired to move. If I’m able to do four days? That’s a bonus. That flexibility we keep talking about? That’s key.

And I feel I have to point this out—I am excited to write this book. I wake up in the morning and think, I get to write—not I have to write. My heart is on fire with the messages I am sharing. Do you know how hard it is to hit snooze and fall back asleep while your heart is on fire? My mindset makes me want to get up, and that makes all the difference. We will be visiting this idea of perspective later in section 4.

I have a shorter routine for the days when 4:30 a.m. feels, quite frankly, like 4:30 a.m. and I don’t even want to think about getting out of bed. My shorter routine retains the important parts—prayer time, my glass of water, my Million Dollar Minutes—and allows me a quicker start to my day. We need to allow for both the ideal and the reality.

Routines afford us space and time for what matters to each of us. And because they run on autopilot, we don’t have to use up precious brainpower—they just happen. One habit springboarding the next, creating a seamless routine.

Like many of us, Brittany feels busy. She works at a four-year school, reads, travels, and has a husband she’s crazy about. She shared, though, “Even when I get things done, I still have this deeper yearning for something.” When we worked through mapping routines in the liveWELL Method course, she admitted, “I just want to feel like I [do] something meaningful3 in the morning . . . like I began with unhurried purpose.” I love that phrase she used—unhurried purpose. Doesn’t that sound like an amazing way for us all to start our days? I pushed her a bit to uncover what would feel meaningful for her. That’s the key here: for her. Not for me, not for anyone else. What is meaningful for each of us is different. Brittany came back with a four-week plan to focus on feeling hydrated and fit with dedicated time for reading. She laid plans to progress to mixing in affirmations, meditation, and a gratitude journal in later weeks. Speaking about the heart of her routine, she said, “I think I really just need to make space for clarity, quiet, and solitude.” It sounds like a beautiful way to start a morning—centered and focused on what matters most.

ASK YOURSELF: What would give meaning to my morning? Take out a sheet of paper and fold it into thirds and title the sections: Spiritual, Emotional, and Physical. Brainstorm and think about what activities could add meaning to your life in these three areas. See if there are ways to create that space or develop a habit you can then build into your morning or evening routine.

AUTOMATIONS MAKE IT HAPPEN

This idea of routine and “taking the thinking out of it” can be applied to all kinds of tasks. Automations are systems for things you don’t do every day but need to get done—the minutia.

The word automation may sound like technical jargon, but it’s not tech at all. It’s simply a task that happens automatically without too much thinking. We set up automations because these tasks we do on an irregular basis have a tendency to fall between the cracks, like pennies between our couch cushions. They get pushed aside, to be done “later”—an obscure date sometime in the future—or they are simply forgotten.

When we don’t have these tasks scheduled somewhere, they end up getting scheduled nowhere. Suddenly we realize we haven’t done laundry in two weeks and no one in the house has clean underwear. Or even a clean shirt (this realization inevitably hits the night before school picture day). Panic takes hold and stress settles in right in its favorite spot at the back of our necks.

This is the moment when a task shifts and transforms into an urgent fire. Everything else, regardless of importance, gets shoved aside to make room to deal with this raging inferno—even if it is just a mountain of dirty clothes.

Remember, we want to be effective. We want to take care of our work so tasks never have a chance to ignite into urgency, but we also want them to happen with as little effort as possible.

Chores are a fabulous task to automate because, let’s be honest, who wants to think about chores? No one. But they must be done. As I said at the beginning of section 3, it does us no good to bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan if the kitchen is burning down around us. We have to keep life moving—even the not-so-glamorous parts.

The problem lies in when we have to burn our calories thinking about these menial tasks and deplete our brainpower so it cannot be used on the truly important items in our day. Decision fatigue loves laundry stress; they’re best friends. Let’s get our brains working at full capacity and allow ourselves to focus on what’s important—which, by the way, is not laundry.

My first home had a tiny section of my kitchen for laundry, and I was frustrated with stepping over clothes while I made dinner. I was teaching school at the time and happened to be teaching a unit on Little House in the Big Woods. Funny enough, Laura Ingalls Wilder gave me a solution. She wrote, “Ma said each day had its own proper work4 . . . Wash on Monday, Iron on Tuesday . . .” and so on. I draw the line at ironing, but Ma was a smart woman. If it worked for her, I decided it would work for me.

I didn’t want to start my week with washing, so on Tuesdays I did laundry. And then I had kids. Kids who somehow multiplied my dirty clothes pile by an exponent of twenty. It defies the rules of math, but it’s true.

Tuesdays remained a laundry day at my house, though. It was the day my kids’ clothes were cleaned. When Jack and Kate were littles, around three years old, I began calling up the stairs and saying, “It’s Tuesday—laundry day!” Because it’s an automation, they knew this meant they needed to pull their clothes hampers out into the living room before breakfast. I intentionally bought them hampers they could drag to the living room themselves. They didn’t have to ask what to do; they just did it because this was the routine.

As my kids got older, around five years old, I built on the routine. They started taking the laundry down and sorting it. I would stand over them and guide them. Could I have sorted it faster? Absolutely! But I looked at this as an investment, because soon they were sorting it without my help at all. And as they got older, I built on this routine again and added the next step: they would bring down their laundry, sort it, and then pop it into the machine. No one worried about what needed to be done, no one asked what they should do—it was all automated.

IT DOES US NO GOOD TO BRING HOME THE BACON & FRY IT UP IN A PAN IF THE KITCHEN IS BURNING DOWN around you

They knew on Tuesdays this was the task to be done. Did they do it without any reminding? I am pretty biased and believe I have amazing kids, but they aren’t robots! Of course they needed some prodding and poking from time to time, but life ran much more smoothly because I didn’t have to worry about their laundry any other day of the week—laundry simply happened on Tuesdays.

On Fridays we followed a similar automation with laundry for towels and sheets. My kids would strip their beds and bring down their towels, and the whole process repeated for house laundry. I didn’t try to tackle everything in one day but spaced it out to alleviate the stress.

By the way, did you notice I shifted to past tense there in that section? Ah, that felt glorious to type out. You know why? Because right now, laundry day is Monday for Kate and Tuesday for Jack. It’s changed. Not because their laundry has increased but because they now fully do it themselves. I don’t do their laundry at all now because, since they were little, I had been training them. They didn’t realize it, but I was investing in them every week, slowly handing over each step of the process.

I know you didn’t believe me back in chapter 4 when I said kids could be trained, but it’s true. It takes time, yes. It takes investment. My biggest goal, though, is when my little birds leave my nest, they’ll fly. And I’m working to give them the tools to do that.

In our CLEAR framework, you’ll remember one of the questions is: “Is this advantageous?” Investing in others takes time but always adds to our advantage. You know why? My kids have even taken over Friday’s house laundry, so when I ask myself if these tasks have to be done by me (Is it essential?), the answer is becoming no more often.

PUTTING OUR ELEPHANTS ON AUTOPILOT

Automations work in thousands of places at home and at the office: website maintenance, grocery shopping, inventorying, ordering office supplies, dusting. The list goes on and on. We can even use automations to break down tasks that need to be done throughout the year—tasks that we don’t do monthly but still need to be done: organizing our closets, checking for expired medications, planning team-building events, surveying customers.

I create a big master list for myself of the tasks and chores I want to accomplish throughout the year. Then at the start of each month, I simply plug these tasks into my calendar. For example, we deep clean the fridge in January, April, July, and October; we go through the medicine cabinet in March and September; we start looking for summer camps in January. As you can see, some tasks happen once and other tasks, like checking for expired medications, happen multiple times a year. Using automations allows us to be proactive—to take tasks that could easily be forgotten and create space for them so they don’t slip into urgency mode.

Erika has the best laugh of anyone I’ve ever met. Kind and giving, she works as a director of nursing at a large private school where she dotes on the students like a second mother. She’s a born caregiver, but a few years ago she invested some time to start making sure she was taking care of herself by setting up automations. In her words, “I love that automations clear space in my mind5 so I can focus on other things. Because I simply pop them into my calendar, I can stop worrying about the tasks I need to do and just get them done.” The extra bonus was finding that automations helped her feel more present and mindful with her family because “tasks were no longer clogging up [her] brain.” Erika uses automations at home for tasks like changing air filters and fertilizing the yard, but she also uses them to remind her to do the chores most of us forget to do, like cleaning the vacuum filter, disinfecting the washer, and cleaning the dryer vent.

At work Erika uses automations to keep her team of nurses organized so they can spend time caring for their patients instead of focusing on the tedious chores of running a clinic. “I get so excited when I am reminded of an automated task,” she told me, “because it makes me feel proud that I set myself up for success. I love my ‘past self’ at those moments.” We women don’t do nearly enough loving on ourselves, I think you will agree. I love that these automations give Erika a moment to pat herself on the back and drop a fresh marble in her jar.

Automations can take our big, overwhelming projects and tasks and make them manageable. One of the other great ways to use automations is to break down bigger tasks into bite-size pieces. Taxes are a great example—we all know taxes are due in April, so why do we wait until the last minute to pull together everything we need? We make a mad-dash scramble to pull our documents together, and then we wonder why we feel grumpy and irritable.

Break the task down and make it easier. In January create a folder with a checklist for the paperwork you are expecting to trickle in over the next few months; in February organize your office area to help uncover any documents that may be helpful for filing; in March make your appointment with your CPA; and in April relax, because your nerves aren’t shot from the stress. Set up automations so that each of these pieces of the puzzle is assigned a time and space.

Breaking down big projects, like filing taxes, allows you to eat the elephant and make it feel easier. It also affords you the space to be proactive and do your best work. I use this strategy with our annual redesign of our planners. It’s a huge undertaking with all new designs and concepts each year, but we start work nine months before the new designs are due to the printers, giving us room to innovate and explore.

Creating automations allows each task to happen with minimal effort. That’s a system that simplifies life and allows it to run with less stress. It’s truly being effective.

It’s easy to read about these habits, automations, and routines and get caught up in how different they might look from your current daily life. I didn’t start here. No one does. Creating these simple systems takes time.

My Christmas Eve dinner wasn’t always so smooth—there was the year that I insisted on making a Mexican spread, including a made-to-order quesadilla bar. I spent an entire day caramelizing onions, roasting corn, and prepping about twenty different ingredients for everyone to customize their dinner. During the meal I stood, hungry and cranky, over a hot stove making quesadillas for over an hour while everyone else visited and enjoyed their hot food.

I can tell you, I went to bed that night with more grumbles and complaints than sugarplum dreams. But I admitted I had set myself up with some magazine-worthy ideas that didn’t really suit the night I really wanted.

My holiday dinner evolved over time. I wanted it to feel special, but I didn’t really want fussy. That doesn’t suit me. I don’t do china plates, I don’t do fancy place settings, and I don’t do centerpieces.

We’ve been making the roasted crab now for years, and it’s the only day of the year that I do it. The entire meal is eaten without silverware, so it’s messy, it’s loud, but it feels exactly the way I want it to feel—different from every other day of the year. It’s memorable, which is what I really wanted all along.