The Tartt Take

Recently, I noticed I’ve developed a new routine during the day. This routine allows me to get a lot of stuff I need to do and want to do completed in my waking hours, makes my days feel longer, and gives me a good feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction by the time I go to bed. In this post, I’ll go over my routine and a few other things I’ve observed about it since I developed it.

When I wake up, I spend about twenty minutes sitting up in bed and surfing around on my Kindle while the grogginess gradually dissipates. I’ve also been listening to a chapter of The Power of Now as of late while I do this. Then I do my morning routine and start eating breakfast. After that, I try to get something productive done while my food settles. Some possibilities include practicing Spanish, reading an excerpt from Tools of Titans, or working on a blog post. About forty five minutes after I finish eating, I’ll do some type of physical activity. Depending on the day, it could be going to the gym or practicing with my unicycle; if it’s a gym day, I’ll unicycle after I return from the gym. I’ll then take a cold shower, stretch for a bit, and spend at least a few minutes before lunch either working on something productive or enjoyable. Once I finish eating lunch, I head to work, do whatever I’ve got to do there, and then go home and finish up whatever I didn’t get done earlier in the day. Then I eat dinner (although some nights I skip it if I’m sufficiently tired or don’t feel hungry), do my nighttime routine, maybe throw in a few sets of chinups, stretch some more, and call it a night.

This is how I spend most of my days, with the exception of days in which I go dancing at night or don’t have to go to work. I’ve found this to be a great routine for getting a lot of stuff done in a short amount of time. However, it’s not just a matter of getting stuff done as quickly as possible or doing things just to stay busy. With several of these tasks, the order in which they’re done makes a difference, and I focus on things that are important to me instead of simply filling my day with minutiae. I prefer to practice with my unicycle during the day, which means that I have to get it done before I go to work. Further, since I tend to get hot and sweaty through even moderate physical activity (especially in warm, sunny weather), I make sure to finish unicycling before I shower. On days where I go to the gym, I unicycle after my workout, so I have to get them both done early enough to shower. I like to stretch after I shower in the morning and I usually do a bit of stretching at night as well. Because these physical activities take up a great deal of time in the morning, they normally end up pushing several lighter activities into the evening, such as finishing a blog post or practicing Spanish. By the time evening rolls around and I get home from work, I’m ready to jump back into finishing up whatever I didn’t get done that morning.

While I’ve followed this routine for a while now, I didn’t intentionally develop it. It gradually came about through a combination of many things that I was already doing, a few new things, and a few things that I started doing again. I think having a couple of days off around Christmas to work on this helped things fall into place. Since then, I’ve settled into the routine and found a way to order my activities that lets me get stuff done quickly and enjoy what I’m doing without rushing or getting burnt out. I suppose it was only a matter of time until I developed a good daytime routine to complement my morning and nighttime routines. I’ll be interested to see how this routine changes over time and what it does for me in the long run. At this point, I think it’ll do me a lot of good and I’m excited to see where it’ll take me.