routine B/C/D

get to Times Square-42nd Street and transfer onto the A

sunday night i look blankly at a blank yellow page on a legal notepad that i choose to write on because my moleskin notebook only has lines on every other page but then again so does a legal pad *takes a breath* and then i look at my calendar.

its just blank. i might as well be staring into oblivion. i like my calendar pages lookin like confetti left over from a celebratory message sent on an iPhone that hasn’t updated properly yet

we all have “A plans” or a plan, that is to say those of us who like to plan generally have an idea of how a day is supposed to go. when you departure from said plan, you feel off/uncomfortable/inconsolable/unfortunate/aggrieved/aggravated so on, and so forth.

“A” plans are great. they’re how you wish your day would go. in some ways, the feeling of having an A plan execute has got to at some length be similar to that of a man from the 1950’s who has married his sweetheart upon returning from war to work a monotonous but stable middle management gig til 5 and come home to a lovely wife whose cheek you kiss before you dig into meat loaf — sounds good sans the ptsd i suppose.

but much like war, life can quite often not go the way we planned. as an example, this essay was supposed to be launched at 9 am. its now launching at 9 pm. guess what else? i’m also writing it at 8:30 pm. things don’t always go as planned.

so what do you do? do you let it all go to shit? does the house of cards collapse on itself?

this sort of cycle is something i’m all too familiar with. i have a fantastic week that i’m raving to all my friends about, and then, somehow, by next week i feel like i’m kinda sorta in a rut again. these days, the dog days, the rut days are something that i used to not look forward to. i felt like failure for having these days.

but then i realized these are my “B” days, sometimes my “C” days, and possibly even by “D” days. what I mean is: in planning your routine you’re always going to have to account for some variance anyhow. whether it be the fact that you didn’t get the chance to routinely write down your mission for the day, 3 gratitudes, or your to-do lists and the such.

creating “playbooks” for your off days, i’ve found, has been the key to my sanity. its less about enforcing structure 1:1 but rather distilling your day down to the essentials. it’s recognizing that your brain might go blank and that you maybe on autopilot, and that it’s going to happen so your duty, your goal, your sole mission is to lightly nudge the trajectory of where you’re headed.

as an example, i’ve been making it a point to hit the gym consistently 5x a week. i started initially a 3x week. whether i’m on my A, B, C, or D days, i’ve conditioned myself to go on “autopilot” to the gym. when i’m at the gym, i sorta go on “autopilot” on the treadmill for 30 minutes at 12% incline at 3 miles per hour (yes the insta baddie workout).

i assure you, i’m on autopilot every step of the way. however, in this version of my routine, i’m making sure that auto-piloting is going in my favor.

honestly, i’m not sure if this idea is coming across as refined as i’d like it to be. like i said, i was a little off with my routine this week (idk if I mentioned it earlier, but I’m doing it now I suppose) so I didn’t give this as much attention as I’d like. I’ll likely return to rewrite this. Til then, I hope this has been helpful and at least help you revisit the idea that you need a singular “plan” to tackle your day. maybe you just need playbooks?

till next time,

Haroon