What to do if your Routine is all messed up?

What can you actually do if your routine is messed up? You’ve been doing exceptionally well for weeks, say to set a small goal – write everyday or  exercise daily for 30 minutes and you have actually made it. The feeling of accomplishing this simple promise is just wonderful and it motivates us to keep up the streak.

Like Newton’s law, an object in motion continues to be until an external force acts on it. Well, this is evident in habit formation as well. You are doing well in the zone and out of the blue your relatives show up. What happens then? You’re off the routine, skip punctuality or hesitate to be persistent as you feel they might comment on you being hostile towards them. (I know they can be jerks!) It’s usual that we back slide a habit and earn for redemption later.

How to come back with this? The answer is simple if you have messed up your routine.

First, just do the simplest thing. I’ve been experimenting on this for quite some time and it worked. For instance, if you are penelopizing your work, the probable reason could be that you are seeing a big mountain in front of you which camouflages ‘it’ll be impossible to do the work’. But why don’t you just think of taking the first two steps.

When I find myself out of a particular habit that starts to show up, I follow the advice of Atomic Habits. I wanted to get into the habit of learning French again, of course I was doing well once and lost interest lately, and I tried to hoist the flag to commemorate the forsaken habit. First thing I promised to study for just 5 minutes (that was really easy to do), then it became easy as days passed. After almost 6 months my French learning improved and I’m consistent for nearly a month now.

Had I tried to do a lot initially I would’ve failed, but then just a trivial manageable promise helped to get into my routine track again. When you try, it works out. Just show up. Better to be a turtle than a meaningless hare that sprints but doesn’t achieve any.

Comment below if you follow any other technique to form habits or break procrastination.

You can also buy Atomic Habits here.