On Finding a Routine

Embarrassment of riches: retired guy has enough time on his hands to do any thing he wants, has a list of such things at the ready, and yet, some of the things he wants to do he doesn’t do–or, more accurately, doesn’t do enough of to satisfy his own self-critical assessment of his productivity. He knows this is bullshit. Partly. He doesn’t feel like he’s wasting his time–except the time he spends scrolling through the day’s terrifying political news or mindlessly scrolling through TikTok or Instagram videos–but he has a sinking suspicion that he could do better. Do better, he says to himself, and then he sets some goals around self improvement, some of which he has actually honored. Find a therapist. Check. First session accomplished and it was a good experience. He’ll go back. Meditate more. Check. Today he reached 34 consecutive days of sitting for 20 minutes, doing that whole breathing-in-and-out thing, trying to tame the hamsters, making sacred a place for some silence every day. Make music. Check. He achieves total satisfaction in this department. He’s playing his drums for a little bit of money and he’s recording original music at a pace unmatched over the last decade. Read more. Check. But is it as much as he would like? No. Would he like to be finishing at least a couple of books a month? Yes. Has he done this? No. The novel he thought he might finish by the end of January is still 200 pages away. Write more. Check. 31 days in a row on the blog in January, a well-deserved break, a couple of blog entries in February. Not bad. Is that what he wants to be focusing on as a writer? Not necessarily, but he doesn’t poo-poo the effort, because he knows that, just as it is with meditation, any writing is better than no writing. His dilemma, in part, is that he has three unfinished works of fiction on the burner and can’t decide which one to focus on and finish, nor can he carve out the time it would take to really dig in on a sustained, consistent basis. He shares the dilemma with his writing buddy. She talks about something called Task Batching. He thinks that’s what she called it, the idea of attaching one or more tasks together so as to associate them as one solid thing and better be able to accomplish both, as they are now routinely and psychologically intertwined. The goal: immediately after the 20 minute meditation, move directly to the writing desk and make at least a 40 minute commitment. He tried that this morning. There was, at first, some resistance. The thought of diving into one of those large projects, knowing that, in order to catch himself up, he would need to spend the entire 40 minutes re-reading what he most recently wrote, stymied him at first. But he went ahead and sat down at the desk. The result? Another blog entry, one about attempting to establish a routine for writing. He reminds himself that any writing is better than no writing, notices that, at 11:00 in the morning, he has surpassed the goal of 40 minutes at the writing desk, feels pretty good about himself, and decides that there’s only one other thing he’d really like to accomplish today. He needs a haircut.