When I was in highschool, a teacher was lecturing us on time management and asked if any of us made timetables to manage our time. I had just started making timetables and in my excitement I raised my hand without thinking about whether or not I wanted to share my routine with the entire class. Sure enough, she called me up to the front of the class and made me write my entire timetable on the blackboard and explain it to the class.

My routine at the time had all the elements of a routine of someone who’s obsessed with productivity and success. Waking up at 5 am, meditating, exercising, studying different subjects etc. It also had time for watching TV and relaxing but mostly it was about being productive in my non-school hours.

After school, a few girls were snickering and giggling near me till one of them asked me, “If you have such a good daily routine, why aren’t you the best at everything?“

In my naivety, I didn’t realize that it was a rhetorical question and they were making fun of me. I answered honestly. It was my ideal routine and although I tried to follow it strictly everyday, most days I fell short. This answer didn’t impress the girls and they continued laughing.

It was years later that I remembered this incident and realized that they were laughing at my expense. But what hurt more and continues to hurt to this day is that I’ve continued to make timetables that I don’t follow.

Sometimes my timetables are loose and there’s room for flexibility and sometimes I have tasks scheduled all the way down to 15 minute intervals. Neither approach works. I understood many years ago that making detailed timetables is just a way for me to delay the actual doing of stuff. I spend an entire day making a timetable. Next day I follow it about 80% and feel good. The day after that it’s down to 50% and then in a few days I stop following it and feel like a loser. Then I go back to the drawing board because it seems to me that the reason I failed to stick to the timetable was because it wasn’t a good timetable. Then I repeat the cycle with another timetable.

Even though I understand this, I tend to forget. To my highly logical brain, timetables seem very attractive. If you want to achieve some goals, set time everyday to work on those goals. But the problem is that if you have a set time and you don’t do the work you’re supposed to do, for any reason, then you feel bad. On top of that, the next time period has begun so now you don’t know whether to stick to the routine or try to do the first thing you missed. It’s also inflexible and if something unexpected happens that tosses your routine out of whack then you get angry at others and at life and at yourself, because you know that you weren’t following the timetable even when there was no unexpected thing demanding your attention.

But more fundamentally, making timetables is just not right because we are not machines. Behind the idea of making timetables is our modern capitalist culture’s propaganda that our worth is somehow related to our productivity. It’s much better to just have a task list for the day and maybe a general routine for the day so that you know that you have to get fitness in, in the morning and there’s time for reading at night etc.

In the last post I talked about my philosophy and how I’m applying it to my life. At first, I had gone back to making timetables for everything. It took me a couple of failed weeks to remember that I had already learned the lesson about not using timetables. Now I have a list of few things I try to get done everyday. Some fitness, some writing, some drawing, some music etc.

I find that making a plan for the day in the morning works better for me than making a plan the previous night. This way, if I wake up late, my plan is not ruined and I don’t feel negative first thing after waking up.

The next problem I’m facing is that sometimes I wake up in the morning and like most people, I start using my phone. I start watching YouTube videos and then I get stuck in the visual content quicksand of attention and most of the morning is lost before I can make a plan for the rest of the day.

To deal with this, I’ve decide to track a new habit. I want to avoid using my phone in the morning till after I’ve made a plan for the day, and if possible, till after I’ve already worked out.

This is how I’m implementing my philosophy in my life and improving my routine. One good habit I’m really enjoying is writing these blog posts every night. These are almost like a way to journal for me. I was hesitant to do this because I only wanted to post well written stuff on my blog. But then I realized that blogging is a different style of writing. It’s more spontaneous. It’s a web-log after all. I’m logging my day and hoping that I can learn from it, and perhaps you, the reader can also learn something from it.