Personally, I have a love-hate relationship with routines. I love planning them. Executing them… can be a challenge, to say the least. For me, it’s the good old perfectionism demons at work. Whenever I try to plan out a routine, it’s usually at least 30 steps long, requires that I be able to switch tasks instantly in order to meet the time requirements I’ve set for myself, and usually if I even manage to do it once, I find that my 7:30am task doesn’t get done until noon, and then eventually the whole thing collapses like a parade balloon being put into storage.

This was especially true after the Covid lockdown started and I had to work from home. Any semblance of a morning or evening routine vanished in the chaos of just trying to stay sane and take care of my family.

No shade to people who try to be That Girl – but frankly, it’s unrealistic at best for the vast majority of us.

You know who kept to his routine like clockwork, though? My son.

Any parenting book will tell you that children thrive on structure. They fight it tooth and nail, but when you can get them into a proper circadian rhythm, everything is better. Or at least not worse. A tired kid is a wired kid, and that’s a recipe for disaster.

Think about it. Why are kids able to stay on their routines? Not just because of the nagging, but also because they are simple. It’s a beginner’s routine, mapped out and guided by a caregiver, sometimes with a sign posted in their room and the bathroom and the living room so they don’t forget. Daniel Tiger even has a song!

How is it that kids get baths every night, brush their teeth twice a day, get dressed in the morning and change into pajamas every night, but I, a full-grown adult, can’t accomplish any of that list on my worst days? They even get to read books before bed! They’ve got this whole thing down!

I realized that it’s time to create myself a baseline routine. Something a literal four-year-old could understand and repeat back to you. With a few caveats, of course. Here’s what I suggest:

Choose 5 Things Per Day Part

Make five things you want to do when you get up, five things you don’t want to forget during the day, and five things you want to do at night. Make sure it includes the most important, baseline needs of your health:

• Sleep
• Hydration
• Fuel (Food that gives you energy vs sapping it)
• Medication
• Hygiene (oral care, showers, clean clothes)
• Physical activity, at any level you can safely and consistently manage

Here’s my example routine.

I’m using Google Keep so that I can check things off as I go, then uncheck everything for the next day. There might be better tools out there (I’m investigating), but for now it works, and it’s free.

Simple, right? But somehow, it becomes really difficult when you work from home or get out of bed and start caring for your family right away. Also, your mileage may vary. Maybe you don’t need to take medicine in the morning, but you do need to take your dog for a walk. Awesome! Swap it out. Not really into the idea of working out and showering after? No sweat! (pun intended, don’t hate me.) Take a shower in the morning if you like, and take a 10 minute walk during your lunchtime break – or don’t work out at all, if you have a job on your feet and you’re already physically drained every day. Do whatever works for you.

Realistically, there’s more to my daily routine than that, of course. I’m not listing anything I do as a parent or as an employee or as a friend. I’m not listing chores or errands or writing this blog post or checking the weather before I send my son to school. I’m not listing any of the hundreds of things my perfectionism brain wants me to list, and I’m certainly not assigning times to any of this. It would be great to stop screen time exactly 60 minutes before I plan to go to sleep. It would be wonderful to get 30 minutes of reading or Duolingo done every day. But that’s not the point.

Simple means doable. Simple means less procrastination. And if perfectionism-brain says “but that’s not enough!” remind yourself to breathe. It’s a baseline, and once you’ve mastered it, you can add more. In upcoming posts, I’ll also help you with task initiation strategies so that you can “make yourself” actively perform the tasks on your list until they become routine.

Keep in mind that once you have crafted a very simple routine that you like, it might still be disrupted – by illness, vacation, changes in your family’s schedule. That’s okay too. This is not meant to be a burden. Like the routines we walk our children through, it’s meant to guide. To give us the ability to move through our days with clear heads and functional bodies, so that we can tackle the huge task of living our lives and chasing our dreams.