The comfort of routine

Reference

Routine has a bad reputation. We associate it with dullness, with lives narrowed down to a set of repeated motions. But a well-chosen routine does something valuable: it removes a hundred small decisions from the day, freeing attention for the things that actually deserve it. The point is not to live identically every day, but to make the ordinary parts automatic, so that when something interesting or difficult arrives, you meet it with a rested mind rather than one already exhausted by trivial choices.

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