Know life’s routines—food, exercise, sleep, study, work, whatever. Know them in yourself, know them in others, keep them, change them, always respect them in others. If changing your routine proves a difficult necessity, tell yourself that changing your routine might be part of the routine. Still, changing and managing routine remains an individual task. The most important thing in having a routine is to know that one has a routine and to then respect it.
If you get fat, miss your exercise, lose needed nutrition, skip a Sabbath rest, lose sleep, oversleep, don’t read your daily Bible, fail in your commitment to positive entertainment, or don’t add the daily brick to your road—you will have many more problems than you thought you saved yourself. Staying true to necessary steps of your routine is one part in keeping your personal integrity and staying true to your values.
You can’t always keep normal routines. In travel and holidays, routines can get upset, which will test your resolve. So, you must be prepared to return to your routines after those disturbances. Moreover, you must structure your routines in such a way that you can keep them going to some extent, even during irregular times. Itinerant speakers and highly productive people have very sporadic schedules, but their routines must stay maintained to some extent in their travels. The key is to be low-budget and scalable.
Resourceful routines endure. You do not need to buy super expensive food to eat healthily or to get minimum nutrition supplements. Convert some junk food money to Calcium or change “beer to sleep” time into exercise time. Learn to do push-ups on your bed, and include multiple skills in your exercise repertoire, including street dance and martial arts. Buy the cheaper, smaller computer first, if computing is part of your routine, then you can take it with you. Sometimes your only place to work or exercise is at the airport and your only place to buy food is a gas station. Some shoulder freezes at the train station will draw YouTube likes and a chili dog with sour kraut, extra ketchup, and double mustard might compensate for a day without vitamin tablets.