A daily routine built on good habits and disciplines separates the most successful among us from everyone else. A routine is exceptionally powerful.

Your routine could be traveling to a different country every month. It could be being routinely un-routine. The point is not what the routine consists of, but how steady and safe your subconscious mind is made through repetitive motions and expected outcomes.

When you don’t have much time, a routine helps you make the little time you have count. When you have all the time in the world, a routine helps you make sure you don’t waste it.

As children, routine gives us a feeling of safety. As adults, it gives us a feeling of purpose.

When you don’t have much time, a routine helps you make the little time you have count. When you have all the time in the world, a routine helps you make sure you don’t waste it. I’ve written while holding down a day job, written full-time from home, and written while caring for small children. The secret to writing under all those conditions was having a schedule and sticking to it.

The word routine suggests the humdrum and the inconsequential; however, unlike the routines of workplace and office, those of home are not inconsequential for they're dictated by the cyclical requirements of biological life.

Routine is one of the most powerful tools for removing obstacles. Without routine, the pull of nonessential distractions will overpower us. But if we create a routine that enshrines the essentials, we will begin to execute them on autopilot.

I take to patrolling the corridors between the hours of three and four in the morning. I visit the secret room often in order that I might keep my journal up to date. Routine is important, I think. A good routine diverts the mind from morbid imaginings. Sometimes I am sure I hear hysterical laughter from a cell I know to be empty.

I tape over the mirror in my study. The laughter ceases.

And I return to my ritual perambulations. My movements through the house have become as formalized as ballet and I feel that I have become an essential part of some incomprehensible biological process. The house is an organism, hungry for madness. It is the maze that dreams. And I am lost.

Establishing and keeping a routine can be even more important than having a lot of time.

As children, routine gives us a feeling of safety. As adults, it gives us a feeling of purpose.
Interestingly enough, those two feelings are more similar than you’d think (at least, their origin is the same). It’s the same thing as the fear of the unknown: As children, we don’t know which way is left, let alone why we’re alive or whether or not a particular activity we’ve never done before is going to be scary or harmful. When we’re adults engaging with routine-ness, we can comfort ourselves with the simple idea of “I know how to do this, I’ve done it before.

The point is not what the routine consists of, but how steady and safe your subconscious mind is made through repetitive motions and expected outcomes.

Custom gives the same stability to the group that heredity and instinct give to the species, and habit to the individual. It is the routine that keeps men sane; for if there were no grooves along which thought and action might move with unconscious ease, the mind would be perpetually hesitant, and would soon take refuge in lunacy.

Routine was what kept the darkness at bay, when anything did.

Routine, done for long enough and done sincerely enough, becomes more than routine. It becomes ritual — it becomes sanctified and holy.