BENDING ROUTINES

Routine is an important buzzword in the professional field. It is essential to get into routines in your everyday life to properly function your time, body, mind, and work. Implementing a daily routine structure improves one’s concentration, productivity, and workspace responsibility. You come out to be more self-disciplined.

This article discusses how rigid work routines do more harm than good and reveals the trick to not BREAK routines but BEND routines. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts.

We all have that daily routine and while it may be comfortable but it’s very detrimental to your creativity and productivity. It’s great that we all have schedules to follow because routines have value in them and they are supposed to be great. There is no need to get stuck in the routine. That’s where the problem comes from. Habits are a useful tool, when we do something enough times we become effortlessly good at it. There is a famous saying by Aristotle, “ EXCELLENCE is not an ACT but a HABIT.” The problem is that no day or moment will be the same as any other day for anyone. Rigid work routines do more harm than good. How do you know whether your routine is doing some harm to you?

Here are some of the warning signs that your routine is not working good around you:

*You find it difficult to focus

*You complain too often

* You feel drained and burnt out

*You don’t enjoy the work which you did earlier.

*You are not creative anymore.

A routine is a lot like music. It provides a structure to work, however, imagine listening to the same music at the same time each day, that’s going to be boring to you. Routines do not allow us to progress the way we need to. People who are gravitated toward routine and predictability tend to be more anxious and not as strong goal motivated as those who did not possess this disposition. It’s not so easy to break out of those routines. The harder it is to set routines, the harder it is to break through them.

Here is the trick- don’t break your routine, just bend your routine. Routines are great but you have got to know how to bend them so that they work in your favor, not against you. When you bend your routine, your mind begins to think more creatively and you are more productive otherwise you are going to get caught up in the daily business of your life and your work. Rather than constraining and revitalizing yourself, and your employees, you got to bend your routines so that even your teams get that opportunity to bend the routine. This simply means that you do something different than you normally do and you encourage your teams to do something different than they normally do so that there is no boredom in your creativity, and work.

When you bend the routine, you divert from the norm and incorporate something different into your day. That does not mean that you completely throw away your schedule out of the window and depart from using your daily routine. No one is suggesting that you abandon all your routines and habits and rituals. Good habits and routines are the cornerstones of a great leader. It leads to healthy, happy, and productive leadership.

You bend your routines in the following ways,- you can rearrange the order in which you complete the task during the day, you can find a new location to do your work, and you could take meetings in different ways compared to how you do now, you could start your day differently, you could figure out what your priorities are, you can just pick up the phone, talk to new people and most importantly, you can begin to learn a new language or a musical instrument. Don’t make your leadership work a routine. Every day is different.