the daily routine

“Most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services.”
― Marcel Proust

An enormous amount of your time is managed by the habits you have.  Habits can replace cognitive thinking with programmed patterns.   Driving to work can become a habit and so much so that act of driving to work becomes a non-experience.  Have you ever lost sense of driving to work?   Most people have.

If a habit like driving can be programmed into the mind, how many other daily activities have been replaced by a habit.  How you interact and greet other people can become a habit, the same phrase used over and over again.    Work could turn into a habit as well, routine, ordered and structured.

Have you noticed what things have been become routine at work?   What about other areas of your life?

If you decide your habits are not helping you grow or do things in a new way then it might be time to evaluate your habits and determine how they are impacting your life.

– Monitor your day.
– See what things are routine.
– Determine what things should be routine and what things should be changed.
– Start something new.  Do something different.  Be bold.
– Test the ideas.  Are you doing something better than you did before?

There are many things you can do to break a routine.  Take a different way to work.  Eat at different time.  Take a class rather than watching TV.

Interrupt the “normal” way of life.  It isn’t always easy.  Making changes allows you to grow and growth is good.

work as practice

“I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each, it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one’s being, a satisfaction of spirit. One becomes, in some area, an athlete of God. Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.”
― Martha Graham

How well do you do you work?   Do you do it as well as you’d like to do it?  Are you given the chance to really practice your skills or are you just doing the work without practice.

If you watched the “NCAA Basketball Championship” then you noticed that the winning team was only able to their results through hours and hours of practice.  A winning team needs a lot of practice, lots of working together, working on understanding how others communicate and to learn the strengths and abilities of the other team members.

How much time do you spend learning about the other people on your team?  What are their weaknesses?  What are their strengths?   How would your team function if you could maximize the strengths of each of the team members?

In your role, what would you like to be more practiced in?   What would help you perform at a higher level?   How would you establish a program to help you improve your work and get more practice?