Routinizing

It's funny how habits make work easy

There’s something interesting about how having to do a thing kind of takes the work out of it. I’ve written about that in a kind of high-concept, abstract way: that suburbia turns urban living into more of a mental lift, that junk food makes healthy eating more difficult, that reliable contraception makes having kids a conscious decision. Even if you want the thing that can be opted out of, you have to affirmatively choose it in a way you didn’t used to, which introduces an element of friction. It may be good that we have these choices, but they impose a certain amount of mental work.

But I find that “choices impose work” isn’t just true in this big-picture way. It’s also true of turning things into habits—routinizing things and making each instance of the thing an example of applying a habit, rather than its own project for which you need to summon fresh willpower or apply critical thinking each time. I guess this is pretty adjacent to time management and good organization, but I think of “routinizing” as its own specific process.

For example, at some point I got tired of the silly little “should we or shouldn’t we?” dance every night over running the dishwasher. So I made a rule: if the dishwasher is about half full or more, run it. If it’s obviously less than half full, leave it. And like that, a perennial, annoying expenditure of mental energy vanished.

I find that any task that begins to take up too much space in my head—whether I don’t really want to do it, or feel guilty not doing it, or whatever—is much easier once I impose a routine on it. Vacuuming and mopping the house is a big job. Some little piece of my brain is aware that I should do it, at any given moment, like a background process running on your computer. I decided—ambitiously, maybe—to do it once a week. Now, if it isn’t the day and hour for vacuuming and mopping, it’s not a thing I’m supposed to be doing. It’s easy to mistake being disorganized for being busy.

The cool thing is, it doesn’t just make it easier because you don’t have to think about it except when it’s time to do it. It also lowers the stakes. If you houseclean every week, you can miss a spot. If you go out and weed the garden for five minutes a day, you can skip a weed because it’ll go the next day. The antidote to perfectionism is regularity.

It’s funny to me, sort of learning still how to take care of a house. Or a car. Or one day, you know, a child. If you grew up in a basically clean, functional home, your life didn’t convey to you how much effort went into just holding things constant.

That to me, by the way, is the core of conservatism, properly understood: an appreciation for the immense effort that goes into maintaining, from the home to the family to the city to civilization itself.