Animesh Kumar {itsAnimesh}

If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.

Let me be straight with you, routine is an enemy. It’s a ghost. It will sneak in unnoticed and steal away what was once creative and turn it into a tradition. Routine is something to be avoided at all costs. Routine is not creative. Routine is a pattern, at best done because it worked, at worst because it’s habit.

But then again… I like the idea of having a life where I know that at this time, I’m working, and at that time, Im not working, letting me thus “not work” guilt free. In fact, some parts of my life are all about routine. I eat the same dinner and breakfast almost every day of the week that I’m home. No joke. But I have a lot of trouble following a prescribed work/play routine consistently. Having fixed schedules makes me avoid two deadly traps.. 1) The i’m-at-work-but-wasting-time-pretending-to-work trap… 2) The i’m-at-home-and-feeling-guilty-about-not-being-at-work effect…

Thus i have a predicament: I hate to follow a schedule… but i don’t want to fall into anyone of the two deadly traps.. Whats a geek got to do?? :(

I ask myself a question that why can’t I follow a fixed schedule?? I can corner all my thoughts on two main reasons… 1) I want to keep on working when I have momentum. 2) I like variety. Let’s discuss each in bit more detail now..

Momentum

I’m a hacker and momentum is key to my work… When I feel that what i’m doing is right and things are flowing in the right direction i want to keep on working.. For idiots like me, this is tricky work.. So what do I do when I have a new idea stikes me at 3am??? I get up and start working on it… If i postpone it till morning I tend to forget a lot of the subtlety in my ideas.. So in times like these I clear my desk, get my laptop out and play with the ideas… :)

This is what i mean by momentum and how important it is to me…

Variety

What’s there to say about variety other than that it kicks ass? Work can get repetitive and boring and variety is the cure for it. Specifically in terms of work schedule variety, I mean: sometimes going in early and leaving early, sometimes working at night, sometimes taking a break in the afternoon and coming back, you get the idea… ;)

But adopting a work schedule with “variety” quickly leads to an “I work whenever the hell I feel like it” schedule, which leads to the two deadly traps I described above…

I don’t have a solution yet but its important i find one soon as my “productive” in the sense of “output” is suffering of it… Lets see what happens… Hopefully i’l have a solution soon…

Cheers.. :)