Every morning and every evening, I brush my teeth¹. Being honest with myself, this is the only daily routine that I truly, consistenly follow each and every single day of my life. Whenever I read about highly successful CEOs who get up at 3:12am every morning to do 108 minutes of vipassana meditation, followed by an hour of swimming at triathletic performance levels, topped with a thorough runthrough of the major news channels from all five continents, and garnished with a regionally sourced, vegan breakfast in the loving company of their seven teenage children and caring husband², I feel like a sleazy sluggard.

In contrast to my personal experience, popular performance literature has no doubts about the value of routines: Consciously chosen (micro-) habits³ as well as deliberate practice⁴ make effective, efficient, and successful people. In different contexts, contemplatives of all flavours have always valued and practiced routines, from rosaries and liturgies of hours to malas, mantra recitations, or elaborate monastic ceremonies⁵. And all major endeavours of mankind – the good ones such as feeding people year over year, and the bad ones such as waging wars – rely heavily on routines. Routines automate repetitive activities. This creates predictability for individuals and for groups. At the same time, routines free up mental space and emotional energy which can then be spent on more creative endeavours.

Unfortunately, routines have taken several major beatings over the course of the last century. Firstly, psychologically and personally, with Sigmund Freud’s “Zwangsneurose” proliferating into a multiverse of obsessive-compulsive disorders, we have all developed a healthy skepticism towards repetitive behaviours in general. Who knows whether me brushing my teeth every morning is not, in reality, an unconscious neurotic reflection of a severe childhood trauma? Maybe I should go and talk to my therapist about whether I ate too many Chupa Chups lollipops – or not enough of them? Secondly, in our professional settings, we have grown fond of the idea of agility, too often to the point of trashing stable processes and reliable structures in favour of flimsy, fleeting, firefighting on-the-spot fixing. Functioning procedures are at high risk of being seen as boring, old-school, and outdated – although, at the receiving end, we all like it a lot when things just work out. And thirdly, with the various global crises coalescing, many of our communities and societies have lost their reference points for what is “normal”: Should I go to the office today? Or should I work from home? Should I build a house? Or should I emigrate to a more peaceful country? Should I keep my X-formerly-called-Twitter account? Or should I move to Clubhouse, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, or wherever people are meeting each other right now? Will I live? Or will I die?

Routines are the bottom line of normality. Without routines, our lives turn into a neverending stream of novelties, rushing us from one excitement to the next, from one panic attack to another, from reorganisation to restructuring to reframing, and from VUCA to BANI to RUPT to TUNA⁶. Whether we simply go too easy on routines or whether we treat them as a virtuous add-on to be inserted on the fringes of our daily lives: Lives without in-built routines become unbearably laborious, because every situation has to be negiotated from scratch. When everything is new and different all the time, requiring new and different approaches at every turn, there remains nothing but exception after exception – from rules that are no longer known to anyone at all.

Therefore, my first wish for 2024 is: May there be more routine and less exception.

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1. This is the first of six posts in a micro-series on wishes for the year that is about to start. The posts are neither scientific nor fictional, so anything written here could be completely wrong or absolutely real. The photos illustrating the posts are taken at the coast of the Baltic Sea, in or near the small village of Ahrenshoop where I happen to spend a short winter vacation. They have nothing whatsoever to do with the content of the posts. ↩︎
2. For inspiring stories about great human beings’ daily routines, check out “Daily Rituals” by Mason Currey (2013). ↩︎
3. See, for example, “Atomic Habits” by James Clear (2018). ↩︎
4. See “Peak” by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool (2016). ↩︎
5. There’s a fine line here between routine and ritual which would be worth exploring, but not today. ↩︎
6. A nice, short overview of these acronyms by Waltraud Glaeser can be found here: https://www.vuca-world.org/vuca-bani-rupt-tuna/ [retrieved Dec 29th, 2023]. ↩︎