Everyone has routines, some of them are good, others exist simply because they’re convenient. Those ones aren’t that interesting. They don’t really serve a purpose and just help you do less, which isn’t always a bad thing. They’re just not that interesting.
This post is largely based off of an experiment Matt D’Avella did. He’s a well-known YouTuber with around 3 million subscribers and he covers filmmaking, minimalism, and creativity. During one of his series where he did a challenge for 30 days, he quit drinking coffee. Unsurprisingly, his productivity tanked during the first few days of the challenge. What was more interesting is that even after he’d got used to the lack of caffeine, he was still less productive but not for the reason you think. As it turns out, making a cup of coffee and sitting down with it at his desk put him in a productive mindset, meaning he just felt like he was going to be productive. With this, the cup of coffee was more of a placebo that he’d created from associating it to his morning productivity than a thing he genuinely needed to be productive.
This was one of the most interesting things about the video, and it got me thinking. How much of our routines are placebos? Theoretically, I could associate productivity with wearing a bright red clown nose if I wanted to and I’d begin to see genuine improvements once the placebo is registered. In fact, if I have the routine for long enough, I won’t even notice that I’m donning my nose. It’ll just happen.
Using the idea of me being able to repeatedly do something to form it into a subconscious routine, imagine that routine has been stripped away. You now have to do everything consciously and with effort. Everything that was previously effortless now requires your deliberate and focussed attention. All the things you have to do are now significantly more difficult.
Now imagine trying to do more than you’ve previously done. Imagine trying to be more productive than you previously were. Imagine how much more draining each task would be. This is the downside of the placebo, when you don’t use it this is what would happen. It doesn’t happen for a reason though, it’s purely imaginary but you’ve managed to convince yourself that it’s real.
To sum up both sides of the placebo routine: you can be insanely productive on a consistent basis as long as you keep doing a particular thing. If you don’t do that particular thing, even if it’s not even remotely related to what you want to do, you’ll be unable to.
My view on this is that you shouldn’t have a complete routine, but one thing that you always do before getting to work. This one thing could be having a cup of coffee next to you, or sitting in the same chair. Ideally, it should be something you can replicate no matter where you are. This could help you finish off that report while in an airport or on a train. Basically any environment that you can’t fully configure to your needs but are still likely to try and get something done in.
I think that a good routine could be listening to the same song before getting started. I haven’t tried this out and it could grow old very soon, but it ticks all the boxes. It’s replicable, it’s portable, and it’s convenient. Interesting side point, music is really interesting. So much so that I wrote a post about it. The routine of the same song over and over again might just become annoying after a few days, but you could mix it up a bit. This way, instead of a singular routine, you’d have multiple routines for different things.
But how many routines are too many? I think that depends on how unique the placebos for the different routines are. For example, if all the placebos are similar, you might not associate each individual placebo with the corresponding routine. This would lead to all your routines being almost worthless.
On the other hand, if you had a variety of triggers for different routines, you might find it easier, in the long run, to get stuff done as you’ve already built a variety of positive relations. This would be an interesting experiment but I don’t really have the motivation to do such a long term project just for the sake of it.