#34 Routine

We humans are creatures of habit, actively seeking safety in the familiar and through patterns of behaviour yet we know familiarity breeds contempt and can fast land you in a rut.

There! Just one sentence in and I’ve drawn on three idioms that are so routine, so codified in our language that you just took them for granted. Reading them without recognising them as idioms! Right? Have another read of the first sentence and see the reading rut you read it from.

The Benefits of Routine

Life is simpler with routine, whether it be in language, our daily cycle, our weekly habits, our exercise regime, our sleeping patterns, or our shopping.

Life is surrounded by routine, whether it be the eternal cycle of night and day, the four seasons, the dog’s feeding regime, the ebb and flow of tides, our work meetings, our project practices.

Things are simpler, more predictable, more reliable and more comfortable when they are structured and organised. When they are routine.

Routine brings a structure to what would otherwise surely be chaos.

New parents are encouraged to ‘get into a routine’ with their babies: set up a strict feeding and sleeping regime that ensures the babies early experiences are consistent so that they can get into a pattern.

Professionals are encouraged to be consistent, reliable and predictable, turning up to work on time reliably, interacting consistently and suppressing any volatile, unpredictable feelings and emotions to remain consistent and dependable for your colleagues.

Leaders are encouraged to be consistent, reliable and predictable for their staff.

And, who doesn’t highly prize the predictable, the reliable, the consistent, the dependable parent, colleague, leader or friend? After all, we know we can count on people who exhibit these attributes.

These are all admirable attributes of successful parents, colleagues and leaders.

However, in many cases, routine comes at a cost.

The Risks of Routine

Routines can suppress if not kill off spontaneity, diversity of experiences, innovation, courage and risk-taking.

Yes, ironically, routine increases the risk that you will lower your risk appetite.

I know this, because I spent a significant part of the last couple of decades believing in the value and power of routines (and this was well after I’d moved away from programming - although I valued them back then too!).

For me the best parent I could be, the best colleague I could be, the best leader and the best partner I could be was predictable, risk-averse, consistent, reliable and dependable. This was my goal.

I wasn’t in a rut, no way! A rut is a boring place. It’s were nothing happens. It’s what a cousin reminded me his father used to refer to as being “a coffin with the ends kicked out”.

No, I wasn’t in a rut. But I did come to coin where I recognised I was as a "slot".

What’s a Slot?

You’ll know the term “slot” from one or more different experiences: Perhaps from your childhood, gambling habits, booking an appointment or sailing (where, who knew(?), it’s defined as “a vertical opening between the leech of a foresail and a mast or the luff of another sail through which air spills from one against the other to impart forward motion”).

In the context of routine, I was in a slot. The kind from childhood. The Slot Car Set kind. Always going forward. Always in motion. Following a prescribed path. Having fun with others and having fun myself. But in a predictable, repeatable, dependable, well-defined slot.

The track was fixed. Fancy, but fixed. It had a figure-eight, it had an over bridge, and it had acceleration! But it was fixed.

And Then It Wasn’t

One day, the track got smashed. It was effectively broken up into the component parts.

Looking at it, and looking at me, I learnt so much. About both.

I saw the value the slot had brought me over those years, but I also saw the erosion of human qualities that I prized: spontaneity, diversity of experiences, innovation, courage and risk-taking.

I saw the tension between the risks and the rewards of routine in a light I’d never seen before. It helped me not only coin the term ‘slot’ for where (and how) I had been travelling, but it also allowed me to see the spectrum of rut-to-ritual that 'slot' sits on.

The Rut-to-Ritual Quadrant

In attempting to articulate things more clearly, I’ve reached for one of my good friends, the quadrant.

Consider any routine you are involved in. It might be ‘the daily grind’ of work, or your weekly sports activity, your supermarket shopping patterns, your morning coffee with a friend, your Agile Projects daily stand-up or Sprintly retrospective, regularly watching the sunrise on a Saturday morning while sleeping in with coffee in bed, your monthly book club meeting, your commute to work, your Tuesday night bike ride with friends, your weekly visit to your mum, your weekly team meeting or your daily dog walk.

Does it feel necessary and effortful (quotidian even), or is it special and precious (possibly sacred)?

Now consider the frequency of that activity. Does it happen often or rarely?

Chances are that if it’s a tedious task that happens frequently, you’ll be doing it from a rut. Vacuuming or dusting weekly – conjures up a rut, right?

But if it’s a special ritual that is less frequent, it’ll be a treasured ritual. Celebrating a birthday, conducting a sprint retrospective, holding a project closure celebration, holding a welcome morning tea for a new team member, celebrating an anniversary.

Make more sense of my thinking in this quadrant below:

Now that I’ve discovered the risks of slots and ruts, I certainly don't recommend we abandon or outsource all quotidian and high frequency aspects of life. We all need the vacuuming, dusting and ironing to be done. We all need the rubbish to be put out. And no ('normal') person can afford to eat out every night of the week.

But I’m completely convinced that minimising ruts and changing-up the slots through any of the following strategies is important to our enjoyment of life, our growth and ultimately to nourish our souls:

1. Reflect on the periodic things we do and how we really feel about them (where are they from rut to ritual and why are they there?);
2. Make decisions about how we do those things to make them less rutful;
3. Deliberately break the track up and reform it in new and challenging ways from time-to-time (it’s easy to do – remember from your childhood?); and
4. Recognise and add to the sacred rituals that we participate in across our life experiences, hold them close, and share them with others.

Not everything should be a ritual. But I believe we should challenge the mundane, the staid and the quotidian practices and celebrate the special, the prized, and the rituals that fuel us as humans.

Back to my technology roots, it’s technology that we should leave for the mundane, routine tasks and this especially applies in these times of Generative Artificial Intelligence hype.

Leaving tech and specifically AI to do the quotidian tasks (except perhaps dusting) including reminding us to break the track up from time to time will mean we can focus on the things that (I think) make humans better humans: being spontaneous and fun, generating diverse experiences, being creative, innovating, being courageous and taking some risks.

For those who find slots (or even ruts) safe and comfortable like I once did, the last word goes to the authors (Tania Luna and LeeAnn Renninger) of a book I am yet to read and can't wait to, titled "Surprise: Embrace the Unpredictable and Engineer the Unexpected":

"We feel the most comfortable when things are certain, but we feel most alive when they are not"