For the past nineteen days, I have been working on improving my habits, with a predominant focus on my morning routine.
A major function of my morning routine is to prime myself for my day’s work. But much of that priming will be wasted unless I also have good work habits to steer me through the bulk of my day.
My morning routine is in pretty good shape at this point. So, now I am turning my attention to improving my mid-day habits. I want clear and helpful rules of engagement for the workaday fray.
I will start with what is probably the most important work habit: one’s habitual response to finishing an activity.
Immediately after you finish any activity—e.g., after you click publish on a Substack post, hang up a video call, hit send on a message, finish a TV show episode, or polish off a meal—there comes a pivotal moment. This is the moment when you decide what to do next. Whether the rest of your day remains on track or is derailed often hangs on how you make that call.
How you navigate that crucial post-completion juncture is a matter of habit. Whether you realize it or not, you have a conditioned response to the stimulus of completion. That habitual response falls into one of two categories: compulsive or deliberate.
Compulsive responses to completion include the following:
automatically checking a social media feed (a sinkhole that can swallow your day)
checking your messages and getting drawn into whatever the latest discussion is
starting to work on whatever issue first crosses your mind or triggers a stress response
As the last two examples indicate, compulsive behavior is not synonymous with leisure. You can take restorative breaks in a deliberate manner. And you can be productive in a compulsive manner: reactively chasing what David Allen calls “the latest and loudest,” driven by fleeting urges, anxieties, and whims.
The problem with such compulsive productivity is that “the latest and loudest” is not always the best thing to deal with in any given moment in light of your own priorities. That is a major reason why, even after a busy and productive day, we can find ourselves lying awake in bed wracked with worry and stress. We don’t have peace of mind, because we’re not at peace with our compulsively-decided deeds of the day.
So a key to peace of mind is to improve your post-activity pivot habits. Instead of pivoting compulsively, form the habit of pivoting deliberately.
This is how I’m going to try to do that starting today. After finishing any activity, I’m going to do the following three things:
Check my calendar: I will glance at my calendar to get my bearings on what David Allen calls “the hard landscape” of the rest of my day: especially how much time I have until my next appointment
Consult my lists: Then I will consult my “Coming Due” next actions list for any time-sensitive to-dos I should work on now. If there are none, I will then open the next actions list that is most appropriate to my current context. For example, if my creative juices are flowing and I have plenty of time before my next appointment, I might open my “Writing” list of essay projects to work on. But if I’m short on both creative energy and time, I might consult my “Messaging” list for emails or Slack messages I need to draft and send.
Take action: After I’ve consulted at least one list based on what I’m currently well-equipped to do, I’ll make an intuitive (but now more deliberate and better-informed) decision about my best course of action. I might choose an action on one of my lists. Or I might choose an action that’s not on any list but that nonetheless seems like the best thing to do at that moment.
The point of this habit is not to rigidly follow any of my past prescriptions. The point is to take a moment to remind myself of and consider at least a few of my options before deciding how I’m going to invest my next block of time. That reflective pause will hopefully keep my higher self in the driver’s seat and save me from slipping into a base, reactive state of being that may feel easy in the moment but will very quickly lead to me feeling powerless and lost.
Hopefully the above process will be a lot simpler and quicker to do than to describe. I’m betting that will be the case if I set up my calendar and lists well. As with all my habit projects, I will report on my progress here in a future post.
Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness.
— Stephen R. Covey, as inspired by Viktor Frankl