Letter 76: Shirking routine

How much of what you do routinely matters?

There was nothing easier than to stop writing Stoic Designer regularly. The routine of approaching this as something I do never quite slipped into habit, and although sometime a joy - it’s always been a chore. The shutdown surrounding the pandemic provided me with an excellent excuse to just quit.

Mostly, this has been for good.

How much of what you do matters to you - really?

Routine is the work to abstact your decision making to a to-do list to reduce the aggregate decision fatigue and interaction cost inherent to tasks that just need to get done regardless, but by moving these tasks from conscious choice to a running list, you forget to scrutinize their priority.

All in all, this has been a useful time for introspection, but now it’s time to wrest control from the events of the world and begin again the work of living deliberately. We have shirked routine and perhaps that has made more clear about what mattered - or, perhaps, it has simply made more obvious the time and energy wasted having shirked it.

Craft virtuously.