That Remote Life: An IT Manager’s Perspective / Chapter 1 Part 3

Chapter 1/PART 3: Routine

The backbone of every professional life is routine. It’s how we grow, it’s the lattice in which we weave in the planned and random events of our days, months and years. But routine is also, in many ways, the reason why we are not so agile with our lives.

The comfort that routine provides us is often subconscious and goes unnoticed, but to truly see it’s effect on your life, remove it, and watch how affected you are.

A mother’s wisdom is sometimes never clear, almost cryptic in ways and can seem rudimentary at first, but it’s designed to lay a seed of thought in which you use to come to your own understanding. It is an age-old way of giving advice and understanding without the complication of explaining, because in life some knowledge has to be arrived at and can’t be just given, and often the most valuable knowledge is the former.

Unlike my poor brother, I was lucky enough to never have to study in my room as a child, I was quite able to fail my tests without the effort (jk).

So the only reason why I was in my room when I was young was to simply sleep. I have trained my body and mind my whole life to feel sleepy or want to sleep if in my room long enough. The routine of going to bed had programmed me to feel sleepy.

In my adult life I have trained my mind and body to feel and act in certain ways in certain incidents based off the location I was or the activity I’m doing. The loss of the state of mind that commuting to work and then working through the day was the reason I could not function correctly when I was sitting at home, in front of the computer, where I normally end my days. The effect was startling and without being overly dramatic, it was shining a light on not only the issue I was having but the effect of routine on the rest of my life.

For my mother, it was a funny question to her because it didn’t matter what her location was, or where she worked, or how she dressed or the state of mind she was in, because she was our mother, it was “who” she was. And this is who I am. Thanks MA!

What in my life has the comfort of routine stopped me from doing? What will happen if other routines are taken away from us? Can I live without routine? Even worse, as I was going through this almost cathartic “episode”, I started in a new position as an expected leader. Here I saw the same and in some cases, worse effects in my company, my team, my extended family.