Around this time of the year, many put their new year’s resolutions and goals on the back-burner, trying to make it through the last stretches of winter. Most of the United States experience an hour change and Spring Forward, which doesn’t help the fact.
You end up feeling bad for not having great morning and evening routines, and then worse after realizing this one hour affected you so much.
But this happens not only around daylight savings. It happens at various times in your life. It’s like a seasonal allergy, only directed towards your routines and habits.
I don’t know about you but when you’re in a schedule funk, it’s hard to get out of it. You try to convince yourself of things that used to work before. But no matter how hard you try; nothing seems to work!
And before you know it, you’re staying up too late, snoozing your alarm, and rushing out the door without having time to pause and breathe. That’s how it’s been these last several weeks for me, and oddly enough, it helped me realize 2 things:
1. That it’s okay: when seasons in your life change, so can your routines.
2. It’s time to reassess and recreate your routines.
The thing is, sometimes life gets thrown at you. Other times, you get thrown at it. But you must learn to adjust to your new season, stick to the process, and let yourself change with change.
I’m a sucker for routines, but when new seasons roll in, we must update our routines just like you do with your wardrobe. You don’t wear a sweater when the weather calls for t-shirts and shorts!
When you get in a schedule-funk, you will try to fight the change.
You won’t always realize why it’s not working out right away, but once you do, it’ll be up to you to reassess and recreate. If you keep trying to do what you did before, you’ll only get frustrated with yourself, which is a waste of your energy and focus.
In the rest of this post, I want to talk about how to reassess and recreate your routine to help you get out of a schedule funk. If our seasons can change, our routines should change too.
Reassess Your Routine
Design is far more powerful than willpower. You must be intentional. You need to set yourself up to be successful. If you fail to plan, then you plan to fail.
Benjamin Hardy
If you’ve heard any motivational speakers talk about resolutions and goals, you know that it’s important to track to your progress. You must check in with yourself and measure your daily and weekly activities to see if you’ve made progress. As you do this, you’ll naturally start reassessing and looking for ways to improve, streamline, and update your actions items, if not the goal itself.
For example, if you’re going to the gym and your goal is to lose 15 pounds in one month, you’ll know whether you’re on track or if you need to intensify your workout when you’re two weeks in. The key is to track your progress and reassess your plan as you go.
Similarly, when you experience a funk in your schedule and can’t click back into your routine, you need to reassess your plans, goals, and intentionality.
Let’s take mornings, for example:
Mornings are hard, but they don’t have to be. You can often pinpoint why you’re having a hard time waking up. Going to sleep late, caffeine addictions, unhealthy eating habits, age, too much or not enough exercise, and increased stress are just a few reasons. It has nothing to do with being a “morning person” as many like to argue.
That could be a good excuse if you’re truly unwilling to find a more accurate reason. But mornings have gotten stereotyped, and it’s as if you must be a “morning person” to like mornings, wake up early, or be successful.
None of this is true.
If it were, then according to January, I was a morning person; but according to March, I’m not.
Do you see how silly stereotyping a morning is?
Since a routine is a series of interconnected habits, it will take some time, trial and error, and patience because the truth is, you’ve leveled up in life.
Reassessing your routine could be as simple as adjusting the order of your habits. It could be changing it up completely or just a few things. The key is to start small and understand that it’s a process.
It’s amazing how one hour can affect us so much, but when you want to click back into routine quickly, you’ve got to reassess and check in with yourself regularly. Your reassessment is you thinking about and deciding on what’s important to you now.
Ask yourself first what it is about your ‘schedule funk’ that you don’t like. What did you like in your routine in your previous season? What habits did you specifically enjoy within your routine? What correlates to your resolutions, goals, and dreams now?
Let yourself experience the discomfort as you reassess and think about these things. Nobody grows in the comfort zone. That you’re experiencing a funk in the first place proves that growth is happening in your life. But it’s up to you to make room for that growth.
Like the quote above, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.
Recreate Your Routine
If you are going to achieve excellence in big things, you develop the habit in little matters. Excellence is not an exception; it is a prevailing attitude.
Colin Powell
We’re constantly developing and growing, so we should get used to the fact that we change, right? But oddly enough, we don’t always like it. We try to fight the change, which only sets us back and frustrates us.
Your reassessment will intertwine with the recreation of your routine. This isn’t a step-one-two process, but an explanation of how to adjust to your growth and your new season, how to stick to the process, and to let yourself change with change.
This means that what you were intentional about before needs to be redirected. Intentionality is doing things on purpose. To take it further, it’s doing things on purpose with purpose for your purpose. That’s a lot of purpose!
But it’s the age-old question that every person asks at various seasons of their lives: what is my purpose?
Just like our wardrobes, routines, goals, and seasons change, so does our purpose. Not in an extreme way, but just enough to put you in funk. (See what I did there?)
When you get in a schedule-funk, it proves that you’re growing. That what you did previously worked for you. And now that it doesn’t, it’s time to adjust, reassess, and recreate. It’s why you feel off.
Leonardo DiCaprio said, every next level of life will demand a different you. So chances are, your schedule funk is because of a leveling up in life that you didn’t realize. If it took spring forward to help you realize that, then grab a paddle because we’re in the same boat!
To recreate your routine, you need to put yourself back on the starting line. Except this isn’t a repeat of what you already went through, it’s a new starting line. New colors and patterns and all.
Your adjustment is to the newness of your season. Because what got you here won’t get you there.
Benjamin Hardy says it like this: You need to get definitive again — like you were when you first caught fire. You’ll need to get back to the beginner’s mind. You’ll need to want it bad enough to get extremely consistent again. No more lack of consistency. Now is the time to be more consistent than ever before.
Conclusion: What Will It Take?
What will it take for you to get definitive again?
What will it take for you to reassess and recreate a routine that matches what you’ve leveled up to?
What will it take for you to get out of your schedule funk?
The canvas needs a new picture, and you’re holding the paintbrush.
Reassess the colors, the amounts, and your techniques.
And recreate.
For more reads about mornings, check out this link!
tanyaremkiv 
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