Out of Habit

Reading Time: 7 minutes

The last eight months or so has seen a lot of upheaval for me. It came at a time when a big project came to an end, which was fortunate. But I moved states and moved my lodging twice. I started to live with my wife again after a few years living in different locations because of immigration and work. This summer, our college-aged kids are back and the house is feeling very full. And, of course, I’m in the house with the dog again and taking him for walks. It has meant adapting my habits to a whole lot of change.

I’m a creature of habit. I was aware of this in a general sense but it’s when you go through a lot of upheaval that this sort of self-truth can become apparent. This is particularly true when a habit is broken. I noticed this first when I got downtown to the law school and found I’d left my building pass at home.

It Was RIGHT THERE

Where, I wasn’t sure. For nearly 3 years, I had a one-door exit from my living unit. It is easy to create a pattern—final morning ablutions, grab wallet, put on glasses, keys, building pass, put on the backpack, open the door—in such a confined space. I tend to put all of the items that go on my face or in my pocket together at the end of the day. In that way, even if I get up in the morning and am tired or distracted, I’m likely to find all of them if I find any of them.

Now I was in a building with two exits. Where are my boots? Do I use the door we use for dog walks, where feet need to be dried and toweled? Or do I use the more convenient front door? And where do my objets du bureau live so that I don’t forget them?

Not surprisingly, forgetting something made me immediately commit to a pattern. Live and learn. So far, no more items left behind or causing a mad hunt in the morning as I get ready for my walk to the train station. Anything I unpack from my backpack goes right back into it. My backpack lives in the same place every day when I drop it after getting home. It can seem a pretty boring way to live but the routine means I can think about and focus on other things. Like blog posts!

What has been interesting to me is how quickly new habits can be formed. Even with so many more people about, it has been easy to just make a decision and start doing something new or different. I expect this is because I’m in a new space and so I am not breaking a habit to create a new one. The muscle memory that might have been retained has been lost because things can’t go in the same place, because the place has changed.

This has not been just about physical items and patterns. I’ve also had to re-synchronize my time to being in the same space as other people. Over the past few years when I lived on my own, I really could control my schedule selfishly. The biggest challenge was being in a different time zone, hours behind the other people in my family or even many work colleagues.

There are times I wish I was more like the dog. He has adapted to a change in countries, houses, time zones, even food, with hardly a quiver. Dog bed? Check. Food dishes and water? Check. Bit of green space to investigate? Check. My people (and, more importantly, their hands to pet me)? Check.

I expect it was a bit more like when I was back in college, and late nights or early nights could occur without really impacting, definitely not inconveniencing, someone else. Now, staying up late or, more likely since I’m a lark, getting up early may wake someone. Inevitably it wakes the dog, who comes to see what I’m up to, especially if it’s out of my normal pattern.

I am finally finding my groove though, after 2 months in the house and with other people around. It helps to be back on a work week-weekend schedule that had been severely disrupted as, almost every weekend, I was traveling back to Canada or moving a family member to their next home.

Boots On The Ground

It is not just at home. It’s taken me a bit of time to get the rhythm of the law school. While we often have large meetings on Fridays, it’s usually because Fridays are largely clear days. If you work in the building on Fridays, you can be the one of the only people on your floor.

Habits are one of the reasons that I am not a fan of hybrid work for myself although I am a huge advocate for hybrid and remote work wherever possible. I like the regularity of the schedule: get up at this time, get out the door at that. Catch this train, and so on. While it is nice to get that time back, it can still be a bit of an upheaval. On days when I work from home, I can give in to my full lark-ness, getting up earlier and starting to write hours before I would have walked through the door of my office. This can put me out of sync with other people in the organization. And of course there are other distractions, like the dog who checks up on me whenever I get on a virtual call.

I have started to try to carve out certain parts of the work week for new tasks or work that I’m adapting to. Paying invoices for example or reviewing contracts. When that work is split across the week, it can fracture other time that I could use more constructively. It allows me to avoid frittering away my time by just responding, prairie-dog style, to every new thing that comes across the transom.

This has been particularly true when there is a large project. I’ve been looking at records retention policies and schedules for law schools, for example. It’s an administrative project that requires time to focus, so that I am working methodically through the research and not skipping or retreading any steps. In the end, I’ve blocked time off my calendar to ensure that I work on it. Since it is not really something that is regular, it falls short of forming a habit.

One project I was really struggling with was the book I’m writing and that has a due date at the end of August. Looking back now, I think some of that was writer’s block. It is a huge project and I was not sure where to start. As often is the case, the place to start may not be the actual start. One morning I finally woke up with some ideas of a couple of starting sentences and, ever since then, I’ve been off to the races.

I don’t think it can be over-emphasized the value of blocking off one’s calendar. I think this may be particularly true in meeting-heavy organizations. If your calendar is blocked, you must be busy (in a meeting). But you don’t have to be (in a meeting). There are a lot of good time management tips in this Fast Company piece by Alli Kushner on “Loud Living” but I particularly like that she suggests “tag your calendar transparently.” In particular, “[i]t [will signal] that all time—not just meetings—is valuable, and that caregiving or creative work deserve just as much space as Zoom calls.”

I was surprised that this was such a challenge. A colleague once advocated for my blog posts to come out earlier in the week, as it gave them a better chance of having time to read them. It was a kind compliment and it has led me to, largely, putting aside time for blogging on the weekend. I still often write weeks in advance (this is being written in a different month from when it will appear). But I skip weekends and I’m as likely to write Sunday afternoon as I do first thing on Saturday while the dog recovers from our morning walk. There’s a bit habit but the scope or variance is a lot looser.

It helped, though, that one of my work colleagues reached out to a group of the not-yet-tenured faculty. They suggested that a shared writing time would help them move their own writing project forward. After a bit of coordination, the group settled on a day and time and we have now met two weeks in a row. It’s not the same people every time, although I’ve been there both and plan to keep going. It’s not quite a writing accountability group but I think it has the same effect: when you know colleagues may show up and see (or not see) you writing, it has a mental impact.

For me, it was just what I needed. For one thing, it helps to have a regular event. That gives me a habit to put on my calendar and plan around. More importantly for, the accountability caused me to dig in harder on my own writing outside of the group. I’ve blocked off my calendar for most of the summer to extend that writing effort out to as many days as possible. It helps that, during the summer, there is space to do faculty-related things that may not be possible when I’m teaching.

My habit right now is to write every morning for a couple of hours. It means that I’ve gone from zero to 20% of my manuscript in just a few weeks. Deciding on the pattern and making it a habit has been the key. I find that, since I was writing that morning, I often go to bed or wake up with new ideas: things that I had overlooked in my outline or ways to rephrase what I’ve just written for clarity or to bridge to the next section of the book. Ideas that would not have occurred if I had my mind set on a competing project.

The other benefit I find from a habit is that I can see that I am able to act in a consistent way. Again, this is helping with writing the book. Now that I have done this regularly for a few weeks, I can start to see how I’m progressing and compare that to my deadlines. No surprise to anyone who knows me, I have a spreadsheet to keep track of increasing word count. Taking a conservative view of my daily productivity, I have been able to calculate how many more days at that pace of writing it will take to finish the manuscript.

Fortunately, that number is currently fewer than the days until the manuscript is due! But I know that there are holidays coming. There’s the AALL Annual Meeting during which I’m unlikely to write at all. It looks like I’ll be teaching a legal research and writing class in the fall, so I will need to prep for that as well. The cushion of days may become a bit thin as we progress. Even more reason to stick to the habit as long as I can now.

In fact, for me, I think the creation and maintenance of habits is part of my personal resilience. It means that, when something has been formed into a habit, it reduces the cognitive load that I carry in order to successfully complete it. That is not to say I’m on auto-pilot, doing things without thought, nor that habits make me impervious to distraction. But they reduce the likelihood of being knocked off kilter or, perhaps, they improve the likelihood that I can maintain normal activities regardless of uncertainty that may or may not arise.

Time passes too. I think that I’m starting to settle into work and my life patterns are now more familiar. Even the dog knows where to find me when he gets curious (or needs attention or food or water or to go outside to bother the squirrels). But I think habits help me bridge fluctuations or change.