Embracing your routine

Who doesn’t like vacations? If you take away the raging workaholics, I guess the answer is no one.

I also love to take vacations and invest time on what’s maybe the essence of life: having new experiences, traveling, getting to know beautiful places and enjoying peaceful, uninterrupted time with family and friends.

The importance of a happy routine

Being on vacation is cheating a bit — it’s easy to have great time when your biggest worries are usually when or where to eat a great meal.

I like to use vacation time to reflect on my routine. There is no better time to make sure that my routine is generally happy and as fulfilling as it can be. The vacation itself is a great time to reflect from a position that grants a better perspective on your day-to-day life. But the most critical time when I love to use this tool is on the very last day of the vacation, on the trip back home. At that point in time, your “internal routine thermometer” is at its most accurate. Of course, we all hate it when the vacation is over. But the key question I like to ask myself is, “How do I feel about my routine? How do I feel about returning to it?”. You can’t fake it at this point. If you’re routine sucks and you’re just about to return to it after a brief getaway, you’ll feel it and be very unhappy about your unfortunate future. You feel it in your stomach. I know, because I had times when I felt that way, and with time I knew that something had to change.

Don’t worry, be happy

Thankfully, in recent years, the answer to the question for me was always: “I had a great time and would have loved for more of that, but I also love my day-to-day and my non-vacation life and am happy to return to it”. When you come to think of it, most of us spend about 70 percent of our time in a routine. It would be insane to “suffer” through the majority of your time just to survive and make it to the weekend, or just hang in there until you reach that long-a-waited ski trip or summer vacation. If that is your life — you need to start thinking about how to change it!

In my role as a manager at work, I have a list of expectations from the people I lead, which I try to share as part of our first 1:1 meeting. The last item on the list, and the one that I stress as the most important for me, is “Don’t worry, be happy”. This is my way of saying: “Love your routine”.

I can’t be held responsible for all of life’s aspects, but work is usually the center of one’s routine and usually the biggest investment of our routine time. So I tell the people I lead, “If you’re not happy to come to work — I want to know about it”.
As I see it, we are privileged to work in the intriguing tech industry, where every day can provide an interesting and complex new problem to solve. Also, you are given the opportunity to impact thousands, if not millions, of people with your work while evolving as a professional and as a person. When you add that this industry generally provides great working environments and compensation from a very early stage, the question should be, “Why shouldn’t you be happy to do that?”

Metrics for routine happiness
I try to apply the “internal routine thermometer,” which is basically one “simple” question: “Am I happy with my routine” — on critical key points of reflection:

• Mornings
  Every morning when I’m about to leave for work — am I happy with going?
• Evenings
  When I’m about to finish my day — am I generally happy with how my day went and my desire to start the day after?
• Weekends
  When I served in the military (as most young Israelis do), all my friends had what can loosely be translated as “Sunday bummers”. Meaning that everyone was bummed on Sunday’s, after the weekend at home, because they had to go back to the military. For a long period of time, I didn’t share that feeling, and usually felt quite OK to come back, because I actually liked the work I had the privilege of doing — being part of a software team. There were times when this changed, though, and that led me to start using Saturday evening as a “routine thermometer” just before the start of a new week.
• Yearly events
  Birthdays, anniversaries and, New Year provide you with a great perspective of the time that passed and an insight into how satisfied you are with it.
• Vacations
  The best way to evaluate something is looking at it from the outside, so again, I think vacations — and particularly the end of vacations — are the best point in time to evaluate your routine. As you’re about to return to it, check yourself — and if you are at peace, it probably means you’re at peace with your day-to-day. And if that’s the case when you’re heading back from a great vacation — your routine is probably great as well.

Routine has a negative vibe to it. And it is indeed hard, repetitive, with the risk of being boring — I get that. The hardest part is that it’s usually filled with problems to solve, kids to raise, commute to take, traffic, obligations, work, getting better, learning, and the list goes on. Perspective matters, and I think Louis C.K. says it much better than I’ll ever be able to:
“Everything is amazing and nobody is happy”.

So keep track of your day-to-day happiness using your own “routine thermometer”. Just don’t forget to put things in perspective — and
don’t worry, be happy.