I’m an advocate of routines — highly individualized routines. A good routine ensures you do what’s best for you, without a lot of time or trouble.

For example, routines for getting up and going to bed protect your time for sleep. When you’re sleepy — in the morning or in the evening — it’s hard to be a top-notch thinker. It’s easy to get distracted. But if you get distracted by a text that comes in at night, you can stay up an extra hour. Or if you are in a daze when you wake up, you then need to rush the other essential morning activities before you can get to work or move on.

Similarly, routines for chores can make those processes faster and easier and even more enjoyable. I like to give my cats variety in their food, so I buy a variety of flavors of canned cat food. I used to spend a lot of time organizing the cans. Now I order it in bulk, and once a month I set up three trays with the cans organized in the ideal order for giving the cats a wonderful treat. It takes only about 10 minutes, and I take a lot of pleasure in it throughout the month.

I advocate routines for creative work, too. I learned a writing routine from Jerry Mundis, author of Break Writer’s Block Now that I used for years, involving setting up a desk in a particular way, doing affirmations and celebrations, and “unhooking the baggage train.” Now the routine is simpler, and focuses more on refreshing the context of what I wrote in the last session. But I still have a routine that enables me to jump into creative thinking work quickly and efficiently.

The problem with routines

The problem with routines is that you get used to life functioning very smoothly. Then when you get sick or go on vacation or travel for work, some of the routines break. This adds complexity to everything. Suddenly you are behind on writing, out of organized cat food, and your sleep schedule is off. It seems like all of the routines need to be put back in place all at once. But that is the problem.

First, routines build on one another. For example, my current daily thought work routine relies on my weekly planning routine. And my biweekly bill-paying routine relies on my daily email-processing routine. I was sick essentially all of last week with the winter bug that’s been going around, and now I’m behind on everything. It’s very common to have almost all of your routines fall apart at the same time, which can feel like a disaster. It’s not a disaster, but it doesn’t feel as good as normal life when you are on top of everything.

Second, routines are built up one at a time, because they take extra attention to create and put in place. Once in place, they take much less attention to maintain. But if you haven’t been following the routines, they literally go out of mind. It can take extra effort to even remember that you have a routine that would be good to follow! And if it’s a newish routine, it takes several focused repetitions to re-cement it as a regular activity.

This means that if many routines are off, they all need special attention, i.e., extra effort. But you have about the same amount of effort available today as you had yesterday!

The solution: a strategy for ramping up

My solution to this is to have a strategy for ramping up. This is also likely very individualized, because it needs to focus first on what makes the biggest difference in getting back into a productive, happy groove.

Mine starts with a sleep ramp up. My top priority is getting sleep back on a normal schedule, because I’ve found that that’s the key for me. My first priority is to get up on time and focus on doing something physical and energizing after my morning ablutions and cat-feeding routine. Those are highly automatized, so if I can get out of bed with a physical goal in mind, they go smoothly. What do I do? I take a 15-minute walk. That gets me into a state where I am fully functional. I also implement the evening wind-down routine on time, no matter what.

Once sleep is back to normal, then I can put back in the basics for my regular daily routines, which include daily thought work, intellectual work, tidying and email, then everything else. I ramp these up in that order. Why? Because thought work helps me focus effectively on the day. Intellectual work is my greatest joy. Getting the office tidy and eliminating the overload of emails clear my head to do everything else.

Once the daily basics are back up, I add back in weekly processes — like planning the week (including exercise) and setting goals for business work. And once the weekly planning is back, I restart my daily planning that relies on my weekly plan.

I’m not saying that this is what everyone should do. One of the themes of my work is that you need to figure out exactly what works for you — because it changes as your career evolves, as your body changes, as your family situation changes, and as the world changes around you. No one is in the same situation with the same priorities, so what matters most for me likely does not matter most for you.

A strategy for ramping up your routines is a very concrete way to avoid overload when you get back to work from being away. How did I figure it out? I noticed I got stuck after I went away, and I have a lot of general tactics for getting unstuck. I applied them to my situation. Maybe you’d like to join me at the next Thinking Tactics for Getting Unstuck class, which will be live in Boston, Massachusetts on July 1.