Excellence: not an act, but a habit.

Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus & Sharpen Your Creative Mind.

Chapter 1: Building A Rock-Solid Routine

Jocelyn K. Glei

In this chapter of “Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus & Sharpen Your Creative Mind,” I read about how to give structure, rhythm, and purpose to my daily work.  A quote that I came across that stuck with me is “We are what we repeatedly do.  Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit” (39).  This quote is by Aristotle and I really love it.  It reminds me that in order to get your tasks done, you need to work at it repeatedly and really hone in on your creative practice.  “Cultivating a daily practice is a necessary prerequisite to achieving great things” (Godin 41).

The hardest part about getting a daily routine right is that some people have broken strategies.  There are a lot of talented folks who are not succeeding the way that they want to because of this.  Seth Godin thinks that “the strategy is to have a practice, and what it means to have a practice is to regularly and reliably do the work in a habitual way” (42).

“There are many ways you can signify to yourself that you are doing your practice.  For example, some people wear a white lab coat or a particular pair of glasses, or always work in a specific place—in doing these things, they are professionalizing their art” (42).  This goes along with my strategy, which is to wake up at a reasonably early hour (for me this means sometime before noon—sooooo 11:45am, because if I wake up after noon then my day is done...  I have officially let my laziness take over the possibility of getting anything productive done that day and I most likely won’t even move from bed), I must get a coffee, and go to the library or the IDD lab.  I need to be in a quiet setting, where I can dedicate my focus to my work and not conversations with friends or where I can avoid people watching every time a human being walks by a window that I might be sitting at in the caf or student center, for example.  I also like the big screens in the library or IDD lab where I can view all of my work in a more organized and visible way, as opposed to on my 13” Mac laptop screen.  My strategy jump-starts my creativity by establishing this routine as my “associative triggers.”

The key takeaways from this chapter on how to build a rock-solid routine are to put great work before everything else, jump-start your creativity by establishing “associative triggers—such as listening to the same music or arranging your desk in a certain way—that tell your mind it’s time to get down to work,” feel the frequency by committing to working on your project at consistent intervals—“ideally every day—to build creative muscle and momentum over time,” pulse and pause by working hard and then renewing your energy by taking breaks in between working bursts, get lonely, and to not wait for moods by showing up, whether you feel inspired or not (Glei 65).