The main issue with these kind of routines, in my experience, is that they are very rigid and breaking them is hard.
A lot of things (hard and difficult things that make life worth living) involve breaking routines, be it starting a company/ngo, having kids, doing ground-breaking research or even just traveling (including e.g. difficult hikes to remote places or visiting weird cities, towns and villages half a world away).
So to some extent these kind of routines work if you want to get to an “ok” place and have an overall stable life outside of e.g. health issues, but seem to put you in a bad spot if you want to do anything else.
Of course, not everything here is routine-focused advice, but a lot of it seems to be, so I just wanted to give this perspective on that particular topic.
Hmm, that doesn’t feel like a significant concern to me. I see the point of a routine as making the small, everyday things go well. Eg, in the moment I want to stay up late reading and mess up my sleep, and a routine ensures I don’t. While all of the concerns you’ve raised feel about big, life-altering things. And it seems like it’s both completely fine and easy to break routines to do something big and important, and that it’s also entirely possible to do big and important things with a consistent daily routine? Eg, if your routine has 8 hours of “do work” in it, you can still freely choose what work means while sticking to the routine.
I’d expect the actual bottleneck on your ability to do big, spontaneous things to be more various life commitments, like job, family, friendships, housing, finances etc.
Maybe there’s a psychological barrier to breaking a routine that matters here? Eg keeping to consistent bedtimes makes me warier of spontaneously staying up till 4am because me and my friends want to do something crazy, and that does seem like a cost? My intuition says that kind of thing is fairly minor though, and can be mostly addressed by being willing to deviate from the routine where appropriate
The main issue with these kind of routines, in my experience, is that they are very rigid and breaking them is hard.
A lot of things (hard and difficult things that make life worth living) involve breaking routines, be it starting a company/ngo, having kids, doing ground-breaking research or even just traveling (including e.g. difficult hikes to remote places or visiting weird cities, towns and villages half a world away).
So to some extent these kind of routines work if you want to get to an “ok” place and have an overall stable life outside of e.g. health issues, but seem to put you in a bad spot if you want to do anything else.
Of course, not everything here is routine-focused advice, but a lot of it seems to be, so I just wanted to give this perspective on that particular topic.
descriptions of systems that have evolved over time can sound very complicated when imagined as tracked explicit systems.
Hmm, that doesn’t feel like a significant concern to me. I see the point of a routine as making the small, everyday things go well. Eg, in the moment I want to stay up late reading and mess up my sleep, and a routine ensures I don’t. While all of the concerns you’ve raised feel about big, life-altering things. And it seems like it’s both completely fine and easy to break routines to do something big and important, and that it’s also entirely possible to do big and important things with a consistent daily routine? Eg, if your routine has 8 hours of “do work” in it, you can still freely choose what work means while sticking to the routine.
I’d expect the actual bottleneck on your ability to do big, spontaneous things to be more various life commitments, like job, family, friendships, housing, finances etc.
Maybe there’s a psychological barrier to breaking a routine that matters here? Eg keeping to consistent bedtimes makes me warier of spontaneously staying up till 4am because me and my friends want to do something crazy, and that does seem like a cost? My intuition says that kind of thing is fairly minor though, and can be mostly addressed by being willing to deviate from the routine where appropriate