The More I Welcome The Interruption, The More I Get Done

The stronger the safeguards I put in place, the less diverse I become.

Until recently, I never thought my good habits could be a bad thing.

Seriously, how can good be bad? Especially the streamlined routines I employ frequently. The ones running like apps in the background on my phone, keeping everything nice and efficient.

Patterns like wearing small deviations of the same outfit, meditating in the same spot and at the same time every morning, and never skipping a workout, help me do life. These tasks, these good habits, aren’t things I do anymore; they are me. And I do everything in my power to protect them.

And that’s the problem.

The more I do to preserve the routines I love, the harder it is to handle any interruption. What’s more, the stronger the safeguards I put in place, the less diverse I become. The less I learn.

Seneca said, “If you would not have a man flinch when the crisis comes, train him before it comes.” So I started consciously interrupting myself, planing for the times invasions occur. Not giving up the routine I love, the one that makes me feel fulfilled, but altering it, allowing my brain to flex its muscles differently. And the results have been remarkable. If for nothing else than inoculation against anger, and the ability to accept that which is out of my control.

Interruption One: Read a Poem

I’m a writer and a reader. I like my fiction SyFy and my reality practical. And I’m totally cool with the corners of both.

But beyond Frost’s, ‘The Road Less Taken,’ and Blake’s,’ The Tiger,’ I’ve never gotten into poetry. And that’s precisely why I’ve started reading it.

Poems promote a different kind of sentence structure, forcing my mind away from its typical meal. They help me think more like Pulp Fiction and less like Die Hard, two excellent films starring Bruce Willis that come off wildly different. What I mean is, I’m still reading; I’m just not reading what I usually would.

Does it make me rush out and start writing haikus? Nope. But I have started noticing things in my work and the writing of others. Boring, repetitive, unoriginal things I don’t think I’d have noticed without the poetic interruption.

Interruption Two: Cook Something New

I started small, trying a new herb here, a foreign spice there, eventually working my way to some exotic vegetable I’d never heard of. Once that was out of the way, I went all in and followed my first adult recipe (meatballs).

Now, this may seem like no big deal, but to someone who eats the same meal 21 times a week, following a recipe and trying something new is enormous. It’s like discovering food for the first time. Not because I don’t enjoy what I eat every single day — I do — but because I took the time to create something that was less word salad and more actual salad.

It takes time, sometimes it tastes like sadness, and sometimes it’s the best ever — just like my writing.

Interruption Three: Clean-up

I enjoy an organized life. An efficient living space. A general atmosphere of accomplishment that travels with me like a cloud of awesome wherever I go.

I also don’t like to clean. It’s too broad a task for me, too difficult to digest. So I rig the game once a week and pick one thing to clean-up.

It could be the shower, it could be my monthly subscriptions, it could be my Evernote filing system. Whatever it is, I clean up that one thing, and I do it really, really well. It gives me a small piece of my earth to focus on. An abnormal task with a clearly defined start and finish that doesn’t make me feel like a Hamster lost on a wheel.

Putting my day on auto-pilot free’s cognitive ability that I dedicate elsewhere. That’s what Jocko means when he says, “discipline equals freedom.”

But if I’m not careful, I’ll go too far and make a routine of everything, to the point where even the slightest intrusion annoys me. However, consciously choosing my interruptions gives me the will to better handle the disturbances that aren’t in my control. More, choosing to walk away from the more significant problems I’m working on lets my brain unconsciously try and solve them while I’m out. It sounds wrong, but it’s not; the more I welcome the interruptions, the more I get done.