I am a software developer. I write code.
Therefore, I deal in abstractions.
Abstractions are just models of something more complex, that we can use to hide all of the complexity in it.
So, a map is an abstraction of the real world. By hiding unimportant details of the landscape, it helps you navigate in a car, on a bike, or on foot.
Most software is written in a thin layer of abstraction on top of many other layers, and often below others.
As a developer, if I had to deal with the details of machine instructions for a particular chip, I could never create something as complex as Cue. It’s built on top of many layers of abstractions that, miraculously, just work.
Abstractions hide things that are unimportant (given a particular task) and expose and highlight the things that are important.
In the same way, the first explorers of America had no maps, so they didn’t have the abstractions we have for creating routes from place to place. And it took much longer to find those routes than it does for me to enter an address into my phone.
Because guess what: a phone or GPS device is just an abstraction over a map.
One that lets me ignore even more details to really focus on what’s important.
Routines Are Abstractions
Routines are abstractions that you can use when planning your life. Each day, you’ll have some typical routines. Things like brushing your teeth, then putting on your pajamas, then turning out the lights, then setting your alarm, then getting in bed.
If you want, you can call that your bedtime routine, or just “going to bed”. Of course, yours may look different than that.
When you’re planning your tomorrow, you could, if you wanted to, just add “Bedtime routine” at the end of your plan.
As long as it’s well defined in your mind, it has the same effect as adding each individual task.
Because you’ll still do all those things. They’re already abstracted out when you think “I’m going to go to bed now.”
Many Routines Are Already Abstracted
I already used the example of going to bed. Almost nobody would list out the steps for that in their daily plan.
There are plenty of others: making dinner, eating breakfast, showering (showering is never just taking a shower, but usually includes a bunch of other things: brushing your teeth, putting on makeup, getting dressed, putting away your clothes, making your bed).
At some level, every action you take is an abstraction.
Build Routines Before Abstracting
Sometimes, you want a routine in your life but haven’t done the work to make it habitual. In this case, trying to use an abstraction when planning isn’t going to work.
Sure, you could write down “Morning routine” when you plan. And when you’re doing that, you may even be thinking that it means you’ll have a cup of coffee, write in your journal, meditate, and then make breakfast.
But until you’ve done it, and done it a lot, your abstraction is hiding the important details, rather than the unimportant ones.
A routine has to be completely automatic before you can fully trust yourself to use the abstraction in place of the steps.
Abstract, or Routinize, More Complex Things
Growing up is all about routinizing things that were at first really complex and difficult.
When you are little you learn how to put on your shoes. It’s hard. It takes time. You have to watch others do it many times. And then try yourself many times.
And as soon as it gets natural, your parents spring shoelaces on you. Now you have to learn to tie your shoes. Ugh.
And now, as an adult, you would never include tying your shoelaces in any daily plan.
Putting your shoes on started as a routine with two actions, one for each foot). Then you added tying your shoes. Then it became subsumed into getting dressed.
You probably spent much of your teen years obsessed over getting this routine right.
Now, as an adult, that became a small step in your “showering” or “getting ready” routine.
Which you’ll probably leave out of your daily plan anyway, though I would recommend including it.
Break the Routines
But don’t stop there.
Find other parts of your life to continue abstracting into routines. As you do, you’ll gain more freedom and be able to think about your plans and your life at a higher level.
Of course, sometimes you need to go the other direction. You need to break your routines down.
Most decent musicians have had to do this at some point in their learning. They realize they built up a bad habit, possibly because they didn’t know better, or had an inadequate teacher. Now they need to go back and redevelop a skill, but do it right.
They’re breaking up a routine and working on putting the pieces back together more correctly.
You’ll need to do this with the routines of your daily life at times.
I continue to refine my morning routine into something that really provides a great start to the day. Because of that, it’s always been listed as separate steps in my daily plans. Maybe I’ll never really settle into a single step, because it’s fundamentally a different type of routine.
But the key is that I’m working to move it to a higher level of abstraction.
So that I can operate at a higher level.
You can too. Take some time to think about the routines in your life. Some may need a shakeup. Some may be ripe for leveraging when you plan your day.