It’s easy to get in a routine. Right now I’m in my normal commute: get up, head to the park and ride, and take a bus to Seattle. But routines can get routine.
A friend sent me an email today asking why I was having trouble maintaining a commitment to a project – it’s a 100 blog post challenge – and I realized that the reason was that the idea was not yet a daily task. But the sum of doing interesting and meaningful work is not just daily tasks – it’s creating actual value that you share with others.
So my routine has gotten too routine – in fact writing is the perfect way to introduce more thinking into my mornings and not just more task completion. Doing is necessary but not sufficient to create real value.
Routines are necessary too. Without them you wouldn’t reliably get from one place to another in a timely manner. And they are also a trap – complete the routine for too long without questioning it and it becomes a self-reinforcing loop that doesn’t take in enough information to expand and grow and change. Thanks, Mr. Spinks, for the reminder.
Information Maven 
Leave a Reply