As someone who loves chasing the dopamine hit that comes with change — in mind, scenery, in anything — I often surprise myself by re-realizing how beneficial routine can be.

Routine drives rhythm, rhythm drives flow, and with flow comes more ease.

Over time I’ve learned it’s less about the specific order of items, and more about gathering a helpful set of practices that harness (or hack your way toward) flow. If half the battle of having a rhythm is finding it, the other half is keeping it.

I’ve learned that finding and having rhythm drives so much else in my life, form workday productivity to general contentment. Over the years I’ve struggled with how tightly to control my grip on routine. Having spent too much time in obsessive tendencies, creating self sustaining support structures has been an important personal shift.

Finding rhythm starts with the simple checklist

A basic daily checklist replaced an intricately color coded Google Calendar. Like a series of Russian Nesting Dolls or the levels in a video game, a checklist completed takes you to the next collection, based on the priorities of the day.

The goal is not to feel like I’m retracing my steps from neurotic new parenthood, obsessively tracking and timing (my own) feedings, naps, and tummy time, only to constantly feel a step behind.

Looking at the full selection of tasks to complete pushes me to disconnect from the moment, either pulled into overwhelm or over action, inevitably to be spit out the other side.

Sometimes the work is the basic self-care checklist, there’s no way around those days, but the checklist gets us through, simple step, by simple step.

The checklist is the path to the work, as pavlovian as it sounds.

It’s a few simple things, it takes no more than 15-20 min (if I’m half-assing the movement part), but forces me to take an intentional pause between waking up and rolling into whatever the morning brings.

The reminder to brush my teeth isn’t just for dental hygiene. It’s a moment to reflect on the day ahead, maybe to stretch and do some easy squats to get my blood moving.

It isn’t necessarily the blending of my morning smoothie, but it’s the reminder that takes me to the kitchen where I spend 45-seconds of blending to quickly prep breakfast, pull things down from high shelves, or slightly loosen the stuck milk cap in anticipation of half-asleep kids sitting down to breakfast.

Just the dance of schedules and sleep and fitting in moments of time requires intention. Simple triggers with stacked habits help to let the rhythm of routine fill the day with ease. It’s like an IFTTT for real life.

Keeping rhythm is mostly about having the memory of a goldfish

To say that the days flow smoothly on average would be laughable. From one thing to the next, there are countless interruptions, distractions, and sneaky elves trying to trick you into getting off course.

Life has a funny way of catching up with you. A full schedule is easily lured into ruin by a simple sinus infection, teacher inservice day, or the butterfly effects of someone on your team facing any number of life events. So, then what?

One helpful trick is to have a 5 minute reset, or maybe a 30 second reset. You do you.

Instead of letting the awareness of missing the mark fester into further distraction or disconnection, I am working on simply letting it go, returning to the thing, for whatever time or space is left in that work session. Aiming to not let the potential of this new ‘thing’ detract from the value and impact of whatever is already in process — particularly when that means getting it over the finish line.

Sometimes I’ll make a note of the source of the noise and it’s simple — like “I wonder if I could find some black silk track pants?” while other times it’s an ah-ha moment for another project or something similarly compelling. When that breakthrough moment occurs, I find a notepad nearby (never go to open a browser window) and stream of conscious write down notes. Occasionally I’ll ask Siri to remind me of this later, but most of the time, it’s filed into my daily notes and after a few deep breaths I return to the task at hand.

The beauty of the daily checklist is quite simply just that. It resets daily.

It’s a starting point and a mental trigger designed to help me stay present, grounded, and connected to what I’m doing and what I’m working toward.

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