I have found a lot of learnings for myself, from the habit and skill of creating process …
Routine is key for overcoming “the hump”! When we are just doing whatever feels right in the moment, it’s so easy to let a few days slip, and then a few more - before you know it, you’re no longer even close to accomplishing the goal you set out to do. I’ve started to notice that the people who actually accomplish their goals don’t “follow their passions” they keep to their daily process/routine in line with their goals.
In a lot of settings we underplay or overlook the power of creating a routine process around the things that we do. But the reality is that, this is how large organizations scale their work to span hundreds and thousands of people, in addition to just making yourself more efficient as you get better at it..
Here are some of the learning’s I’ve found while trying to incorporate this mindset into my life.
Avoiding “routine” instead of process: Rince & Revise
- it’s easy to fall into the trap of creating a process, and then just doing it .. wAAAY past a point where it’s actually usefulness. good process requires constant evaluations, and revisiting. I think the lean/agile methodology has found a very key part in making successful processes. I’ve seen this happen to myself, where I decide that I’m going to do something daily/weekly and keep doing it past a point of usefulness. When I was starting to learn spanish, I set a goal to practice duolingo for 5-10min every day. It was hard to get into this routine, but after a few weeks of trying to find the right time and trying to create the habit, I was now consistently practicing on Duolingo! After about six months of doing this routine, it became a part of my day that I looked forward to! I had completed all the levels on the Spanish track, and I was moving just continuing to practice the words over and over.
However, my Spanish wasn’t getting as good as I had expected! I had set the goal of finishing the entire duolingo thinking that I would be fluent once I did! I could barely construct a sentence in spanish, let alone understand what a native spanish speaker was saying. Where did my process go wrong? I had set a goal, and created a routine to achieve it. I realized is that you have to constantly review your progress towards your goals in a critical manner and see if your process makes any sense any more. Otherwise you’re just doing the routine for the sake of routine. When I finally did get around to reviewing my routine, I realized the value of Duolingo had reached deminising retuns. That 5-10min of practice was just no longer what I needed. I had to revise the habit to do something else that got me closer to my goal. I needed to practice actually listening to natural Spanish sentences and practice speaking full sentences using the many words that I now knew. This realization helped me to move to the next routine of having a 30min conversation in slow Spanish (or listening to 30min of slow Spanish) every day until I reached my next milestone.
I constantly see this happen in work environments, where teams are established, and everyone agrees on some norm for how to function. As time goes on, the team evolves, the project evolves, but the process is not updated! Maybe you used to have everyone give 15min updates each morning when there were 3 people. Now you have 10 people, with 4 difference projects and making them stand through 150min of updates each morning just isn’t the most effective or useful use of everyones time. But once routines and norms are established, they are hard to change. And the best teams are the ones that can make those changes quickly enough to evolve and grow.