To say I’m a structured individual is honest but would also be a potential misunderstanding. Yes, if it’s a Monday, I can tell you exactly where I will be at 6:45 PM. Same thing for every other work day. On the weekends, it is more of a crap shoot, but in general, I live a structured life. Now, I do this for a clear and concise reason; I’ve got too much shit on my plate and I gotta gobble it all down. In order to be a successful writer, I believe I should be working roughly forty hours a week on some sort of writing activity. When you calculate the amount of time available in a week, you quickly learn that two full time jobs is extremely difficult to manage (throw in the fact that my occupation requires me to work about fifty hours a week, and the timeline gets tighter).
For example, if we assume 7 hours of sleep a night, with an hour to get ready and fall asleep, you have a 16 hour day. Now, rip out 8 hours for work, tear off 20-40 minutes for the commute (round up to an hour for easy math), don’t forget cooking time, work out time, or cleaning the apartment/dishes, and now remove 40 hours for your other fulltime job, carry the one, and you end up with 8 hours of time to do something else. In order to justify reading in my schedule, I count it against my 40 hours a week of writing (I am researching the competition?). So, maintaining a highly structured life is a necessity.
Now, it is important to understand that I structure my world but I don’t let the structure dictate my life. I allow social obligations to override my plan.
I wrote the following three paragraphs months ago. Since then, I’ve changed my ritual again – I do less journaling but I’ve maximized my time for fiction writing (who cares about their own life anyway) and re-added morning reading to my schedule (part of my previous previous morning ritual). So if you want to know my old schedule, take a gander below.
I have an expensive morning ritual. I wake up, drink a water, shower, take my lunch and laptop down to the car, and then stop on my way into work and have an espresso. Now, I have a few things I do without caring about the ramifications – this is one of them. It is costly since I do it every day, but I do it because it grounds myself. It forces me to get out of bed when I don’t want to. I’ve used it to trick myself into thinking I have to be at a meeting (but really I am grabbing an espresso, journaling, and then driving to work).
Personally, I find it weird that our society treats coffee like a necessity. I believe if you are spending the money to drink an expensive coffee, you should sit your ass down and enjoy it at the café. Have a conversation with the baristas, see how their day is going (and truly give a shit), and then maybe read a short article/journal. Ever since I started this ritual, I began to slide out of my slump, I began working out again, and wrote a shit load of short stories while editing my old manuscripts with a new vigor.
As such, enjoy your rituals and use them to maintain your drive. Mine is actually cheap compared to other people’s habits. The only issue, watch out for feelings. Interacting with someone weekly and bonding with them on a personal level could compromise the safe place you’ve built – but I am not talking from experience or anything because my pigheadness will never let me stop writing even if the person I like is standing a foot from me as I write this post.