Routine.

Routine. Such a simple, yet elegant concept. Our lives can be made better for it, or be destroyed by it. Years pass under its care. As I begin settling into a new routine, I realize just how much influence it really does have on your life. And how much influence we have over it.

For Praxis this week, we developed our personal finance skills. Using my observations about my money, I created a spreadsheet to see where it all goes. Up to this point in my life I have never purchased a substantial amount of grocieries or other commodities for myself or payed rent. For that reason, factoring it into the budget was a new experience to say the least. Overall, this personal finance exercise was perfectly timed in my moving out experience, and was very insightful to what the next couple of months look like saving wise.

My income has also increased over the past two weeks. I picked up another cleaning job and I was asked to step into the church secretary job last week as well. I have zero experience in being a secretary, and my training was very short, but yesterday I managed (within five hours) to complete a majority of the work, which included creating an updated version of the bulletin, printing and folding said bulletin, collecting mail, and sweating while trying to figure out how to work on a ten year old desktop dell that didn't seem to understand how copy paste works.

Youth group also started this week, the lessons that is. I’m using Sean Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens to help teach our group of 6th-10th graders about personal responsibility and having an excellent life. This weeks lesson was about habits and paradigms. We talked about how everyone has a lens through which they view the world, for better or worse, and how habits “make or break” you.

Speaking of habits, in Atomic Habits by James Clear, I relearned the method of habit stacking, and found a couple of different habits to build with it. Habit stacking is when you complete an existing habit and use it as a cue for a habit you would like to build. For me that is washing the dishes, and its a bit backwards from the original idea, but it holds the same. I use the same sink to wash dishes and for my nightly routine. I already have a habit, my routine, but by using that habit to cue doing the dishes, I get the dishes done, and a clean sink for my night routine. The habits fold into each other. This habit is effective and keeps my dishes from piling up.

As I get more into this new routine, I am happy to say my life didn't devolve into chaos as I was worried it might. While I do have to be twice as proactive about keeping track of my time, which was something my mom helped me with a lot, (thanks mom), it has helped me see what’s actually important, and what I can do. The freedom has allowed me to pick up new exciting opportunities, and choose my routine. I doubt I’ll ever have a strict routine, my schedule is all over the place. But at the end of the day, the simple repetition of washing my dishes before bed brings me enough calm to sleep through the night, knowing I have accomplished something.