Developing An Arsenal Of Routines Will Make You More Productive

Photo by Joanna Nix on Unsplash

“ The professional dedicates himself to mastering technique not because he believes technique as a substitute for inspiration but because he wants to be in possession of the full arsenal of skills when inspiration does come.” — Steven Pressfield

No one can accurately predict exactly where lightning will strike but we can say with good confidence that tall, metallic objects increase their probability of being struck.

The same is true with success and productivity.

No one can fully and accurately predict how success strikes. No one has the clear answer for how to develop unstoppable productivity. But, there are certain characteristics that, if embraced, can make you a more likely conductor for impact.

If you look across paragons of productivity, you’ll find hundreds of different experiences. Most people seem to have arrived at the top from a different path or in a different vehicle.

However, interwoven throughout each step of the journey for the majority of these paragons is the characteristic of repetition. Over the last two decades, we’ve put different phrases around this such as the 10,000 hour rule, the showing up effect, and my personal favorite — the arsenal of routines.

It’s a cool phrase, but how do you actually go about developing an arsenal of routines in your life that make you more likely to find success and productivity?

Like any dream or desire you seek to pursue, you have to start out by seeking to understand what it is you’re actually aiming for. To do that, I’ve gone ahead and broken down the definitions of what an arsenal of routines truly means.

Arsenal: “An array of resources available for a certain purpose”

Routine: “A sequence of actions regularly followed; a fixed program.”

When you put these two things together, here’s what you get. An arsenal of routines is:

An array of specific and purposed resources that are available to be leveraged within the context of a regularly followed or fixed sequence of actions.

Said another way:

Weapons for your work.

If you want to be more productive, the answer isn’t always to look to do more in less time. While that is one form of productivity, it’s not the whole story.

Productivity is maximizing the right tool at the right moment to do the best work possible.

It’s choosing the right weapon for the battle in front of you and preparing the right weapons for the battles on the horizon.

The tools you bring to your work are able to be stockpiled. Whether you are intentional about it or not, you curate a set of habits and routines that help you get through your everyday life. Therefore, the challenge is in carefully selecting which routines you want to keep within your arsenal and which you want to eliminate.

Developing a good arsenal of routines means that you have different routines for different times or opportunities throughout your day.

In the morning, during the first hour that you are awake, your routines may be quick, short, and easily accomplishable. You want to knock over the first dominoes of your day; therefore, setting off a chain reaction of productivity

I like the word “routine” in the phrase “arsenal of routines” because people often associate routines with words like boring, drab, or monotonous. However, routines are the foundation of every waking moment. They are powerful and extremely important when it comes to being productive and successful.

Dr. Stuart Walesh points out that,

“Studies by neurobiologists, cognitive psychologists, and others indicate that from 40 to 95 percent of human behavior — how we think, what we say, and our overall actions — falls into the habit category. If we select a conservative 50 percent, we are on automatic pilot half the time.”

Routines steer and guide more than half of our daily lives. So weaponizing your routines and making them efficient and effective can change your life.

When you create an arsenal of routines, you have to be mindful of what triggers your routines and what results from a completed routine. The trigger and the reward help dictate how beneficial a routine is in your daily life.

The more specific you can make your triggers the stronger your routines will be to break. The more enticing you can make your rewards, the more likely you’ll be to go through with the whole of your routines.

Routines birth consistency. Purposeful consistency leads to sharpened technique and increased proficiency. Expertise leads to increased productivity, both in the quality and quantity of your work. Heightened productivity leads to greater success and more opportunities for luck to find you.

“The professional knows that in toiling beside the front door of technique, he leaves room for genius to enter by the back.” — Steven Pressfield