Nicole Junkerman
Reflections
Nicole Junkerman on Small Routines That Hold
Most routines fail somewhere in the third week. The ones that last have something in common, and it is not discipline.
Most routines fail somewhere in the third week. The ones that last have something in common, and it is not discipline.
A routine that lasts is rarely the one that looked most promising when it was first written down. The promising ones are ambitious. They assume a free hour, a clear head and an agreeable week, and they collapse the first time any of the three fails to arrive.
The ones that hold are smaller than that, and slightly dull. Nicole Junkerman keeps a short list of them and tests a new one with a single question: would this still happen on a wet Tuesday in late October, after a long day, with nothing much held in reserve? If the honest answer is no, it is a wish rather than a habit, and it is better to find that out in advance than in November.
Three qualities seem to separate the two. The first is that a lasting routine fits a gap that already exists. Anything that needs a new slot in the day has to win that slot from whatever currently occupies it, and it usually loses. Anything that fits the ten minutes while the kettle boils, or the walk to the end of the road and back, has nothing at all to beat. It fills space that was going spare.
The second is that it survives being done badly. Three pages count. Four lines count. A walk that turns back early still counts. A routine with a minimum standard attached is a routine with a built in reason to stop, and the reason always arrives eventually. Lowering the bar until it is close to the ground is not a compromise. It is most of the design.
The third is that it leaves a trace. Something has to be visible afterwards, even if it is a tick in a margin or a line of handwriting nobody else will read. The notebook method exists largely for this. Memory is a poor record of whether a month went well, and a page is a cheap and honest one.
What this looks like in practice is unglamorous. A book kept in a particular place, so that it is picked up without a decision being made. A short walk at the hour the light goes. A page written on a Sunday evening, roughly the same length, whether or not the week deserved it. The reading room and the travel journal are both made out of exactly this kind of small repetition rather than out of any single good week.
Late October is a fair test of all of it. The evenings are short, the year is tired, and nothing in the weather is helping. A routine still running at the end of this month will probably still be running in February, which is the only evidence worth having. Anything that has already slipped can be dropped without ceremony, and the list will be shorter and better for it.
There is no virtue in keeping a long one. Six is plenty, four is often better, and the point of any of them is to improve the ordinary parts of a day rather than to add an occasion to it. October has a great many ordinary days in it, which is precisely why the small things are worth the attention.
Explore more of the journal: Notebook Method and Writing Desk, or return to the Nicole Junkerman home page.