Building New Routines for Fall

A look into my daily routine this fall, a few life-enhancing recommendations, and lessons learned.

Welcome to Making Time. Each week, I share thoughts and ideas for making more time for yourself by building creative energy and establishing rituals and practices. This year, I’m also attempting The 2024 Slowdown, which you can do with me. If you’d like to follow along, you can subscribe for free.

Lately, I’ve been failing pretty miserably at something.

For years, I’ve wanted to learn enough about textile design to create some interesting fabrics, just for fun. I’m fascinated by textile design, I have read multiple books on it, and I like to draw, so this seems like it shouldn’t be a problem.

But for me, it is. Finding time to work on this has been hard, and I’ve built up a fair amount of internal resistance at this point. Just thinking about it makes me feel tired and overburdened now.

To help give myself a little support, I even signed up for David Cain’s One Big Win program, an 8 week framework to help you finally complete a project you’ve been meaning to do. Sounds perfect, right?

Well, we’re getting close to 8 weeks in and I pretty much failed. I could come up with all sorts of reasons – travel, Covid, playing catch up at work, etc. – and they are all true. But really, it comes down to one thing:

I didn’t have a routine in place.

There wasn’t a specific time in my day or week for me to work on this, so I always found a reason to do something less taxing or more pressing, like folding laundry, grooming the dogs, or cleaning out my email.

It’s easy to skip over things that make your life better, even things that you enjoy, if they present any sort of difficulty or friction. It’s the same for me with exercise, meditation, journaling, or any other life-enhancing activity I do that would be easier to skip. If I don’t do it as a matter of routine, I don’t do it.

Yet, because goals and life change, those routines need a periodic refresh. I find that the start of fall is an ideal time to take stock, look at my day, and add, remove, and scramble things around.

Since some of you asked what my new fall routine looks like, I thought I’d share. This may be more detail than you care for, but then again it may help. I’ve also included a few recommendations along the way of little life-enhancers that I use daily.

Morning

In brief:

• 6am-ish wakeup

• Quiet time for reading and coffee (30-60 minutes)

• Meditation and structured journaling

• Lift weights (60 minutes)

• Plan my day out

What this looks like:

It’s dark when I get up, usually sometime between 6:00 and 6:15. I start coffee, don a headlamp, and take the dogs out.

Next, I have some quiet time to sip coffee and read. I light some candles and curl up with a book on the sofa for a little while. I typically read nonfiction in the mornings and fiction in the evenings.

Around 7:00, I head upstairs with the dogs trailing behind for the most important part of my morning. Here, facing a window, I have what I call my “meditation station.” Its just a little bench with a few little things on it, like a candle, a little buddha, some incense, a book.

In front of it I have a few floor cushions. I have trouble sitting cross legged for too long, so I place my meditation cushion on top of a couple floor cushions to protect my knees and sit in hero pose.

Gordy and Lucy often join in.

My usual routine once I’m seated is this: read a short passage or poem from a book, meditate for 10-20 minutes, then finish with some structured journaling.

When I mentioned this recently, I got some questions about what my journaling process looks like, so I plan to write more about that later this month because I absolutely love it. This is also when I make my daily list of treats.

Once I’m finished, I either shower or change into workout clothes, depending on the day of the week.

I’ve been lifting heavy weights for many years (maybe 8 or 9?), and it’s still my favorite form of exercise although I don’t pursue strength as aggressively as I used to. When we moved out to the country, Kenn built a gym in our garage where I squat, bench, deadlift, and do a few other things. Mostly, I try to maintain strength and not get injured these days.

This is one big change I’ve made this fall. I’ve always been an evening workout person, but squeezing my workouts into the morning has freed up so much time, and I find that I dawdle less when I have a bit of urgency to be ready for work.

I then shower, get dressed, and sit down to start my workday around 9:00. I start my workday by planning my day out in a customized planner I created for myself in Notion. I use it not just for tasks, but to plan little treats and joyous things throughout my day, and to write down what went well at the end of the day.

Afternoon

In Brief:

• Lunch

• Walk to the creek and back

• A “treat break” in the afternoon

What this looks like:

I fix myself a simple lunch around 1:00. It’s usually leftovers, a quick salad, some pasta, whatever I can piece together.

Then comes what is usually the absolute highlight of my day. After lunch, Kenn and I walk the dogs down the hill to the creek.

The road down is closed to traffic, so it’s usually quiet and peaceful and we rarely encounter anyone else. There’s a view over the canyon that’s been recently logged, so we can now see straight out over the valley to the mountains beyond.

I’ve noticed the leaves slowly starting to turn from green to chartreuse to gold, and the sun has that low, golden quality you see in October.

When we get to the creek, Gordy dives into the water and splashes around enthusiastically while Lucy delicately wades in and watches him act like a maniac, a big smile on her face.

We walk back up the hill, which is my cardio for the day, and I go back to work for the afternoon.

Midway through the afternoon, I try to take a break for one of those daily treats. I even have “treat break” written on my daily schedule.

Evening

In Brief:

• Creative time after work (90-ish minutes)

• Make dinner

• Yoga (sometimes)

• Read

• Write a few lines in my commonplace book before bed

What this looks like:

I end work around 5:30, and this is one part of my new routine I’m particularly excited about.

Since moving my workouts to the morning, I now have a big chunk of time between work and dinner, and I’m labeling this my dedicated creative time.

During this time, I can do any project I want: writing this newsletter, sewing, drawing, finally making those textile designs. It will be different every day, but that time is there for me to create and play.

The rest of the evening is pretty low key: dinner together, maybe some yoga if I feel like it, and reading (fiction) in bed until it’s time to sleep.

Before I go to sleep, I’ll write a few lines in my commonplace book. As I’m reading throughout the day, if I see an interesting idea or quote, I’ll capture it with a photo or screenshot. I then transfer it into my commonplace book, which is a 5 year journal.

This means that, as the years pass, I’ll see these quotes again and again as I fill in the date for the next year and the next. This is the first year I’ve done this, and I’ve somehow managed to keep up with it.

Some recommendations:

• My favorite journal ever is the Leuchtturm 1917 with a hard cover and dot grid paper. I just love it. I’ve filled up tons of them, and buy a different color each time.

• I always attach an adhesive pen holder to my notebook, so I always have a pen on hand.

• For my commonplace book, I use Tamara Shopsin’s 5 year diary, which is a perfect compact size and quite lovely. I think I got the idea from Austin Kleon. Leuchtturm 1917 also makes a 5-year journal.

• I’m currently reading a passage each day from the classic Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff. I know it seems pretty cheesy, but it’s full of simple wisdom you can bring into your everyday life. And Kenn and I have both started saying, “don’t sweat the small tuff” every time the other one starts freaking out about some small annoyance. It instantly brings me down to earth and makes me laugh at myself.

• If you’re into doing yoga at home, I love the Down Dog app.

• I drink a lot of tea and herbal tisanes. My favorite right now is the Mariage Freres Marco Polo.

• I also love chai, and this herbal chai is something I have multiple times per week in the fall. It’s unsweetened powdered tea and spices (no dry milk or sweetener), so you just add a scoop to hot water, then add as much sweetener and milk as you like.

Lessons I’ve learned

• Don’t be afraid to experiment. I thought I’d really struggle with moving my workouts to the morning because I’ve always loved having them transition me away from work in the evening. But I’m finding that I enjoy it more, I dawdle less, and have more time to myself.

• Build in time for pure pleasure. In the past, I’ve severely undervalued the role of pleasure in my life in service of getting more done. Those days are over, and building it into my routine is one of my key tools.

• Create space for the things that you enjoy, but that have a barrier to getting started. If you can make it easy to dive into each day and eliminate decision making, you’re more likely to do them. This is why I carved out some “creative time” each evening. Who knows? Maybe I’ll actually finish that textile project now, sew that quilt I’ve been thinking about, or start drawing again.

Read this next:

If you haven’t read about my Daily List of Treats yet, check that out next. It’s a tiny thing you can do each day, and it’s had an outsized effect on my mood each day.

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