Routine, Routine, Routine

April 03, 2020  •  Leave a Comment

Hey Everyone! I hope everyone is doing well and is healthy.  In my last blog I told you to look for that silver lining in being home because of the coronavirus, but I didn't tell you about one of the most important ways to do this.  It's Routine!  Now that we are home from work or school, we don't have to get up and take showers and do this or do that to get ready for work or school, and we just lay around wasting time.  I have two examples that I will tell you about that will hopefully encourage you to make a routine and stick to it.

During the first Gulf war "Desert Shield and Desert Storm,"  I was deployed to the desert very early on just a few days after the invasion of Kuwait.  When we arrived everything was chaotic and unorganized.  Our routine had been interrupted.  And in a big way!  Nowhere to sleep, eating MRE's, and trying to set up operations in a foreign land  in the middle of nowhere.  While doing our jobs fueling jets, we did away with our paperwork, safety checks, and a lot of other routines.  Guess what happened?  We started having accidents.  People were doing dumb stuff that they normally wouldn't do back here in the States at our base.  I don't know if it was that there were no rules or what was in the back of our minds or what, but we were making mistakes that we normally wouldn't make.  So our boss put his foot down and said operations would be just like at home.  We had to go through all of the motions, safety checks, and paperwork that we would have to do in the States even though it wasn't needed in a war time situation.  Guess what happened?  Suddenly no more accidents, no more mistakes.  We became very efficient.  Other sections on base started doing the same, and before long the whole base was working like well-oiled machinery just as we had been in the States.   So what is the lesson?  Try to keep the routine that you may have had before all of this Coronavirus stuff.  It will help you stay focused and be more productive.  Set hours to get up and go to bed just as you would if you had to go to work in the morning.  Take a shower and get dressed in the morning just as you would if you were going to work.  You don't have to dress in your dress clothes, but get out of those PJ's.  Make a list of things to do or things that you want to do, and everyday at home you can work on those during working hours.  After your daily working hours, then you can relax and get into those PJ's.

My second example was when I got laid off a couple of years ago.  When I was first let go, I freaked out!  I had never been without a job before.  I have worked since I was 15 and now I had nothing.  I went into emergency mode and started doing resumes and emailing and all of the stuff you do when you're out of work.  But after a week or so of pure panic and working on my problem all of my waking hours, I found that I could do the job hunting in a hour or two a day and then what?  I remembered the story above and set myself some goals and routine things that I wanted to do.  So I set wake-up times and go-to-bed times.  I got up, showered, got dressed, and did my hour or so of job hunting.  I made a list of things to do.  I decided to teach myself Photoshop, so I set aside so many hours a day to do that.  I also set aside time to do some hiking at my local State Park, and my dog and I would take a hike.  I had to live as cheaply as I could (no money coming in) and look for ways to be productive.  This was a five-month ordeal that worked out great.  I did finally get a job without too much of a pay cut.  I learned more about Photoshop (still lots to learn), enough that in a few weeks I'll be giving a talk to my Camera Club on Composite Photography, and we'll be social distancing with an online meeting.  So my big advice is to set a routine and stick to it.  Set goals and write them down and don't forget exercise.

As I'm watching the news, most of it is not good.  So turn this Coronavirus bad news around and use the time that it has given you to the fullest by setting routines and goals.  There are lots of things that you can do at home.  So stay safe, and when this is over get out and shoot!


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