Routine Hacking and Emotional Triggers

When my life goes astray, my first port of call is always walking through my morning routines and figuring out where to make changes. Inevitably, I can track a minor thing that’s throwing my whole day off, which usually sees a flurry of experimentation as I find a work-around.

Back in January, mornings were a struggle, and I slowly worked through the stuff that’s changed to find solutions. At first, I blamed the issues on new medication that left me groggy and prone to dozing off in the mornings (aided, in part, by the addition of a daily Wordle). Going to bed earlier and shifting the Wordle check-in until after 8 AM has helped, but it didn’t quite get me back into a writing frame of mind.

So I started tracking where else my day was going astray and quickly realized a common point: sitting down to work on my desktop right after I drink my coffee.

The desktop in question is new, and basically a beast of a computer compared to my other devices. A massive upgrade, given I’ve primarily worked off laptops for a few years. I love writing on a desktop, and miss having a space where work can take place… but in January, with the unofficial lockdown that accompanied Australia’s Omicron wave of COVID, it’s also became the primary workspace for my day job at Brisbane Writers Festival.

Working on a festival program is stressful, especially when you’re not in synch with the person who has the most oversight. Factor in the last few months, which featured key staff departures, two months of frustrating my partner with work-from-home routines, and then a flood, and my stress levels were off the charts.

All this happened just as we were sheduled to go back into the office, post-Omicron, but the premises flooded along with the rest of Brisbane, earning us another week of work-from-home just as I was looking forward to getting out of the house. And with that, my morning routine has basically become wake up, make coffee, sit on the kitchen floor and weep at the futility of it all, after which I had no genuine desire to write.

So I started working off this theory: the desktop is an emotionally laden hotspot, where all my anger and resentment towards the job and its myriad difficulties overwhelm me. Given that I have nightmares about programming and schedules in the late stages of an event, it’s also hard to fight the feeling that I should work twenty-four seven in order to make the stress go away. In short, it’s an emotional trigger, and every single one of those emotions is an obstacle to getting writing work done.

The best way to sidestep all those emotions is to take the desktop out of the equation, so I adopted a double-barreled approach. First, I moved my pen-and-paper Journal to the space my keyboard occupies and tucked a writing notebook in behind it. They became the first thing I went to after waking up, and I got to spend spent the first hour of the day working with tools not-yet-contaminated by day-job anger. 

For the first time in 2022, I started the day focused.

This change was backed-up with a second choice: pulling the USB Wi-Fi from my computer, so I physically couldn’t log into work after I turned it on. A subtle change, but it edged my brain back from the desktop=work equation it was running and meant I could get a little writing done at the keyboard before connecting to the internet and its myriad distractions. Plus, the nice thing about starting focused: it’s easier to break the automated routine of mail-Facebook-Twitter-check book sales that’s become my habit at the start of the day.

Physically disabling the internet is always a good starting point if you’ve got urgent brainwork that doesn’t require it. I only wish I had a career where I didn’t need to be online as much through the bulk of my day.

But the lesson here: if your day isn’t running smoothly, trace your morning routine and look for the emotional surge that derails you from your intentions. We tend not to wake up in a high emotional state unless there’s an early trigger, and if you can figure it out, there’s always a simple work-around.