The power of structure and habits

Last week I tore my Achilles tendon—besides being surprisingly painful, I was quite surprised by how debilitating and how lengthy such an injury is. Injuries and sickness never come at a good time—I had projects and goals, like a planned marathon, business trips, and family plans. All these plans are postponed for the next six months/year, and I’m slowly coming to terms with me not achieving my goals and aspirations in the foreseeable future.

But this is not why I’m writing this blog post. Accepting your circumstances and carving a way forward is an important topic and one we have touched upon many times before in previous articles. What I want to talk about today are the structure and habits that govern our day-to-day life. The thing about habits is that they’re almost invisible to you—most of them are on autopilot. You have your routines and you’re surrounded by environmental triggers. Just like Pavlov’s dogs, we’re conditioned by our past experiences, expectations, and our surroundings—if your phone says “ding” you start to get a curious itch…       

I’m in many ways a creature of habit; I start every morning the same way, and I’m a big believer in “stacking” good habits on top of each other. It’s like a domino effect—all you need to do is to knock the first domino and the rest of the good habits will follow. In this way, you don’t need consciously to think about your daily tasks, they kind of happen by themselves. I’ve always known this to be the case, but now, when I can’t perform my morning routine, has it occurred to me how important your daily habits are.

My last couple of mornings has been a complete mess—mostly because I must consciously think about everything I do—now that I can’t walk without crutches. It’s like learning a new skill or an instrument—it’s hard, time-consuming, and not that efficient.      

We’ve been talking a lot on this blog about the power of simplicity, discipline, and setting the bar low, and I’ve witnessed firsthand this last week how hard that can be. So, let me reiterate what we’ve been saying so many times before—but this time from a humbler place.

To quote James Clear the author of Atomic Habits:

You don’t need better goals, you need better systems

You need to start with your “why”. Who do I want to be, and how can your daily routines support your “why”? Assess your ambitions and try to design your routines and environment to facilitate who you what to be. Set the bar low, and contemplate “who do I want to be?” and “what can I do, at this point, that I’m willing to do?”  

I don’t have the answers to these questions myself, but I’m working diligently to answer them and slowly creating a new set of habits and routines that fit with my current capabilities – e.g., I can still make my bed and I can still make coffee for me and my wife in the morning, so that’s where I’ll start, and this will be my starting point for my new set of routines.   

Until next time

Lennart