Routine

When I was in my 20s I didn’t have much of a routine. I felt having a routine blocks me from doing everything I like. And I liked a lot. I would do like 10 sports a week, have many other hobbies and used to code like crazy. I am sure Singapore being a tiny city with very good transport system played a huge role in it.

I would get in a run, play underwater hockey 3 times a week, go kayaking a few times a month, get in at least 2 rock climbing session, get in an Ultimate Frisbee game, sometimes get a wind surfing session, go fixie biking, participate in many ultra marathons per year, go to hackerspaces and build hardware projects, take part in many hackathons, got in at least 30-50 scuba dives, managed a few trips out of Singapore, try out new sports like slack lining, sepak takraw, go fishing and camping and a million other things.

There seemed a lot of time. All this without having a routine or making a schedule or forming a habit. I had the energy and the enthusiam for it all.

But as I get older, not having a routine means I get super lazy. I skip many running sessions and many climbing sessions. In the last 2 months, I have gone climbing only three times. And in the last whole month, I have run roughly 60km (which a few years back used to be my weekly average). I haven’t biked in over 2 months. I haven’t touched my raspberry pi/arduino/esp32 in like the last 6 months. I haven’t attended any hackathon. I have ran only one race in the last 12 months.

It is not like I don’t have the time. I have the time. But work is so taxing, that by the time I get home, my brain is fried and I just end up watching some movie or reading hackernews or consuming something that is not taxing the brain. Basically brainrot consumption and not action.

I think the only fix is to have a routine. Like fix time slots (like school days), where at that time slot I have to do that activity. Saying I will run a 10k everyday doesn’t work. I will wake up late and be like “I will come back from work and do the run in the evening”. Then at work, something will come up, and I end up coming to home at 10pm and then I would be like “let me run tomorrow morning”. Fixing a time, works.

So I am basically going to schedule up things. The me in 20 years old would have hated to know there would come a time, when I would have to pencil my activites on a calendar. But oh… well, the pains of getting older.