Militant About Your Routines, Not Your Routine
Build one routine per recurring situation, then run them so novelty never derails you.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 74%
Attributed to a Ryan Holiday piece, the distinction is between being militant about your routine (one fixed sequence) and being militant about your routines (plural). You face a finite, repeating set of situations, so build a dedicated routine for each. The key move is contingency: don't only design the perfect day, design the hungover day too, with rules like a set wake-up time and no sleeping past midday. Because you've pre-decided how each situation goes, novelty is removed — and novelty is what derails people, especially when everything at university is new. The compounding rule is that the first time a new situation occurs, you decide its routine there and then, so it's never a fresh, destabilising event again.
Origin
Chris references a Ryan Holiday piece: 'you don't need to be militant about your routine, you just need to be militant about your routines' — apply set routines to each recurring situation, including hangovers.
Core principles
- 01You face a finite number of recurring situations.
- 02Design a routine for each, not one rigid routine for all.
- 03Novelty derails you; a pre-built response removes the novelty.
- 04The first time a situation happens, decide how it'll always go.
How to run it
- 1
Enumerate your recurring situations
List the consistent situations you actually face — a normal working day, a hungover day, an exam morning. You have a finite number of them.
- 2
Design a routine for each
Build a specific routine per situation rather than one rigid template. The routine for a normal day and a hungover day can differ, but both are pre-decided.
Pro tip For a hungover day: keep the wake-up time, and don't let yourself sleep past midday.
- 3
Run the matching routine on autopilot
When a situation arises, execute its routine without renegotiating. Because it's pre-built, the situation carries no novelty and can't destabilise your day.
Watch out If a situation is new and you have no routine, it will knock you off course the first time.
- 4
Lock a routine the first time a new situation appears
The first time you hit a genuinely new situation, decide how it will always go. From then on it's a known routine, not a fresh shock.
In the wild
Instead of a single ideal routine that collapses whenever they drank the night before, the guests describe having a contingency routine for hangovers: still get up at the set time, and refuse to sleep in past midday. The hungover day has its own script, so a big night out doesn't write off the following day entirely — the situation is planned for rather than improvised.
→ Off-days stay productive because the exception was pre-designed.
Common mistakes
Building one rigid routine
A single fixed routine has no answer for the hungover or disrupted day, so any deviation collapses the whole system and the day is lost.
Improvising every new situation
Meeting each novel situation fresh lets novelty derail you repeatedly. Deciding its routine on first contact removes that vulnerability for good.
Is it for you?
Best for
People whose days vary predictably and who lose whole days when the ideal routine can't run.
Not ideal for
Highly unpredictable schedules where situations rarely repeat enough to pre-script a routine.
From the transcript
“you don't need to be militant about your routine you just need to be militant about your routines”
“you've got numbers of routines rather than one single routine”
“have a routine for when you're hungover don't allow yourself to sleep in after midday”
From the episode
How To Survive University - #034