For a long time I thought of routines as the enemy of an interesting life. Routine sounded like stagnation, like the slow settling into a rut, like the opposite of the spontaneity and adventure I wanted. I have changed my mind almost completely. What I have come to understand is that routines are not a cage. They are scaffolding. They are the structure that makes everything else possible.

The mechanism is not mysterious. Every decision you make costs something, and the currency is finite. If each morning you have to decide whether to train, what to train, when to write and whether today is a day for the hard work or the easy work, you will burn a meaningful fraction of your daily willpower before you have accomplished anything at all. A routine converts those decisions into defaults. And once the decision cost drops to nearly zero, something remarkable follows: consistency becomes cheap. Not easy, but cheap. 

The second effect is subtler and I think more important. Routines compound. A single training session is worthless in isolation. A single reflection changes nothing. But a thousand of them, laid end to end, build a body and a mind that could not have been built any other way. It is the boring daily repetition that actually moves the needle. So, as a reflection for today: which part of your life is running on daily decisions that should be running on a routine instead? And what would a year of that routine actually build?