The best routines are the ones that are not too fragile and also not insignificant. By fragile I mean hard to follow or maintain; running a marathon every day, for example. Let’s say you did run a marathon one day and tried to run another one the next day completely exhausted, so you stop halfway. Still determined to keep the morning routine going, you try running another marathon the day after, only to pull your hamstring and be injured for a week.
On the other hand, a routine should not be totally insignificant. An example for this would be re-organizing your closet every single morning as a means to start the day off on a positive note. By completing a recurring activity every day, you should be either training your discipline, checking off necessary things to be done, or working on something little by little.
Most people already have some routines, such as a morning or nighttime one where they either get ready for the day ahead or get ready to sleep. You might have some you don’t even know about, such as your post-workout stretching routine. If you’re a writer, you probably have a routine or process when it comes to brainstorming, writing, and editing.
The point I am trying to make is that there might be some routines that are actually wasting your time instead of helping you in the way you think it does. One thing about me is that I thought I could only write in certain environments. More specifically, all these conditions needed to be perfect in order for me to actually start the writing process: water bottle filled up, all notifications checked off, no tabs open, the right music playing, and my desk perfectly organized. I quickly realized that having a pre-writing routine was halting my progress, since my goal from the start was to simply write quality stuff.
Revising my writing routine helped me to find something that worked in making me more productive, but I would have been stuck on the same counterproductive routine I had previously if I didn’t get serious about it.