How Do I Respond To Being Out of My Routine?

In This Episode

One of the best things about summer is the chance to have some vacation time.  It’s a chance to break up the monotony of your day-to-day and add some different type of chaos and excitement to your world.  But one of the drawbacks is that vacations can get you out of your routine.  Disrupting routines isn’t necessarily a good or bad thing by itself, but it can often be difficult to get those routines reset. 

During the show we shared several personal stories as well as those of our clients who have had trouble getting back into things after returning from time away from the business.  We can hear your groaning of saying, “let me get away from my business for a bit so I can experience this resetting of routines you’re talking about!” 

Here are a couple of things to consider as you look to get your routine mojo back:

• Prepare & Prioritize: not all routines are created equally.  We all have routines in our personal life as well as our professional life.  When vacation hits, it typically throws all of those routines to the wind.  One of the best things to do before you go on any vacation is to prioritize which of your routines you want to maintain during vacation.  On the personal front you may look forward to taking a week off from going to the gym…or maybe that’s one of the routines you want to keep up during vacation.  Perhaps you can’t wait to walk away from all your emails and deal with whatever happens when you get back…or you might be the kind of person who dreads returning from vacation to thousands of emails where it takes you a week to catch up.  So spend a little prep time before heading out on that vacation to get your game plan together for which routines you want to keep on vacation.
• Purge: give yourself permission to get rid of some of the routines you had.  If the COVID-19 pandemic taught us anything it should be that it’s OK to change or get rid of some “routines”.  We all have stories of things we’ve done or folks we know did when the pandemic first hit or soon thereafter.  Adam talked about how he basically stopped going on Facebook in late 2020 as things got more toxic online and he saw it being more of a negative vs. a positive in his life.  Are there things you gave up during the pandemic?  Is there still a sense of relief for giving it up or are you secretly wishing you could get back on schedule?
• Embrace The New: what better place to try something new than on vacation?  Maybe you want to change your sleeping pattern or what time you wake up.  You’ve got at least 7 days to try out getting up when the sun comes out or when that alarm goes off for the first time.  Maintain an openness to trying new things while on vacation.  You might surprise yourself at how easy some of these new things are or they just might reinforce for you why you had certain routines in the first place!

Whatever your case might be, don’t let the “lack of routine blues” create a vacation hangover for you where it takes you so long to get back up to speed that it nullifies all the benefits of getting away in the first place.  Routines are like shoes.  The old ones are broken in and pretty comfortable, while the new ones can feel a bit awkward at first but after a little while they become the old reliables!

People, Companies and Resources We Mentioned in the Show

• Extended DISC (https://www.extendeddisc.org)
• Facebook (www.fac