This morning my youngest started at the childminder for a full day. I thought I would feel angst and guilt but surprisingly no tears from my side for once! I’ve been looking forward to all the new things I’ll be able to do again, like thinking a single thought from start to finish without being interrupted. Bliss.
As I sit down to write, I recall this weekends fun antics. Mostly conversations/mini arguments about how childcare/work/family are supposed to all work together.
We were focused on the front end and back end of the day and calculating with military precision what time everything needs to happen by, in order to make the morning/evening work ok. I’m lucky that I have a partner to work all of this out with, but how do single parents work and look after their families, getting kids fed and to school/bed on time? It’s mind-boggling to me.
Everybody needs a routine, but it can get hard when that routine has to change, or if the routine relies on someone else to help make it a reality. One thing I have learnt over the years is that change is the only constant, so being able to move swiftly from one routine to the next is essential for modern living.
A concept that makes starting new routines easier for me is ‘habit stacking’. This strategy, developed by James Clear in his book "Atomic Habits", is a way of building new habits by stacking them onto existing ones. The concept involves linking a new habit you want to form to a habit that is already well-established in your daily routine. This linkage acts as a trigger or cue for the new habit, leveraging the consistency and automaticity of the existing habit to help establish the new one.
For example, if you already have a habit of drinking a cup of coffee every morning and you want to start reading more, you could create a habit stack by deciding to read a page of a book each time you drink your morning coffee. The existing habit (drinking coffee) naturally cues the new habit (reading), which can help the new behaviour become more automatic and easier to adopt into your daily life. This method is effective because it builds on the existing patterns of behaviour rather than trying to start from scratch, making habit formation more manageable and likely to stick.
One that works particularly well for me is to listen to audiobooks whilst I’m cooking (admittedly this is a lot harder when you have two children clinging onto your leg saying ‘mummy, mummy, mummy, over and over again’, but I make it work.
I’m not going to lie… I find it much easier to create new routines (and habits!) when it’s just me figuring out how I’m going to do something. It gets more challenging when you have to collaborate with a partner to decide what the new routine is and how to make it happen.
In my experience, this gets easier if you:
Are clear about the overall objective and refer back to it often;
Trust that the other person will take on their side of the routine and complete it satisfactorily;
Reassess the routine to see if it’s working and if it isn’t then change it.
But, just because you’ve created a routine doesn’t mean that you should keep following it if it’s not working. It reminds me of the quote:
"If you don't like where you are, move. You're not a tree." – Jim Rohn
Have you experimented with habit stacking? What new routines would you like to put in place?
Today’s image courtesy of DALL-E: Prompt: Create an image of a person habit stacking two different habits together