Everything every day

It’s not going to take long for him to get sick of croquet. (UBC Library Digitization Centre)

A great deal of information is available to help you get started with a project or activity.

There’s a lot less information to tell you when to stop.

What happens when you’re no longer trying to overcome inertia to get started? What happens when you’ve got a different kind of inertia — that of the object in motion staying in motion?

At a certain point, your daily yoga practice, daily meditation practice, daily writing practice, daily music practice, daily drawing practice, daily journaling practice, daily foreign language practice, and daily reading practice will make it impossible to fit in anything else.

I believe that streaks are overrated. I believe that we go through seasons of engagement with certain activities — we drop them and pick them up again later.

Choosing not to sustain a habit indefinitely is not a moral failing or a sign of weakness. It is simply acknowledgement that we can’t do everything every day.

A couple of years ago, I experienced a major shift when I went from working in the classroom every day to working on my own time. When I started taking this new schedule seriously, I was committed to correcting some old habits and reducing the chaos in my life. To that end, I started scheduling some recurring daily tasks: bookkeeping, going over lesson plans, editing, responding to email and text messages, writing every morning, checking in with clients each morning and afternoon, and so on.

The work paid off. I was staying more organized and on top of things, and I found satisfaction in checking a few easy, routine items off my list each day.

Eventually, however, I reached a turning point. I had so many recurring tasks that I was committed to hours of work each day before I even booked a single meeting. At that point, I shifted some things around. Bookkeeping could happen three times a week, I could batch my blog posts into two days instead of writing every day, and so on.

These changes freed up not just time, but energy. Instead of doing a bunch of little things every day, I had room to think about a few big things. I was able to pursue a few projects I had been wanting to do but hadn’t found the focus for.

I wasn’t afraid that my bookkeeping or blogging would fall apart. I wasn’t worried that I would lose momentum and stop replying to messages. I knew that I could trust the habits I had built. They didn’t need to occur every day to be valid.

I’ve found that I look forward to writing more when I don’t do it every day. I look forward to being on camera when I don’t shoot video every day.

And in the meantime, I’m enjoying other activities that I would not have time for if I did all of my activities every day.

When one of our projects or activities is “in season,” we can go all in. I played as much tennis as I could when I was in Atlanta this past winter and spring. It’s a tennis player’s paradise. There, I could take lessons, participate in leagues, attend evening clinics under the lights, and arrange informal matches in the many pristine neighborhood clubs with dozens of willing partners.

While I was taking advantage of the wonderful tennis opportunities, some of my other projects were on hold. That was by design. I knew that once I was back in Maine, I’d be lucky to play even once a week on our cracked, weed-infested courts. For better or worse, there would be plenty of time to do things that weren’t tennis.

On the other hand, if you’ve been hanging onto a particular daily activity or ritual, have you ever asked yourself what would happen if you were to let it go?

Maybe you would lose your groove and never do it again and that would have a profound negative effect on your life.

But maybe you would find some mental and temporal space freed up to do other things.

Maybe you’d feel lighter and less stressed.

We don’t have to do everything every day. We can choose from a number of different options. Our commitment can be regular but less frequent, or cyclical, or simply as needed.

Just because we begin something doesn’t mean we have to continue with it forever. With any activity, there is a dance we can do to fit it into our lives in a way that allows it to serve us rather than the other way around. We can experiment and see what feels good. And then, we can change it around again any time.