The Power of Flexible Schedules

I’m a massive fan of routines.

They can be boring as fuck. They can feel as mundane and horrid as an Amy Schumer comedy show. A solid ass routine can literally suck the soul and enjoyment out of your dopamine-drenched life.

Only for you to start falling in love with the progress you’re making.

Let’s be honest, you know that the “boring ass routine” lifestyle is pretty much a stage we all gotta go through.

EVERY significant figure in human history (see Elon Musk, Leonardo da Vinci, and Einstein) follows(ed) a routine. It’s pretty clear humans are creatures of habits, and routines are essentially nothing else but habits stacked on top of each other.

But.

There’s heavy debate on how strict your personal day-to-day routine should be, especially for maximum progress and performance.

You’ve tried having ZERO strictness before (no routine). You know that didn’t check out for maximal personal growth results.

The alternative though?

Tacting every minute to the T, trying to obsessively make use of every single second, minute, and hour of the day “optimally” is not only a sheer impossible task, but it’s also quite useless.

Trust me. I’ve tried it.

Your routine simply won’t look the same every single day of the year (and even the most hustle-minded individuals will agree it’s pretty much pointless to attempt forcing that to happen).

No routine is bad.

The strictest, most mundane daily routine is bad.

So what’s actually good?

After experimenting for over 2 years with this stuff, making infinite changes to my daily routine, trying out every single strategy in the holy productivity bibles from the likes of Ali Abdaal, James Clear, and Cal Newport, I can confidently say:

It Depends.

“Very helpful, thanks dickhead.”

I’m sorry I don’t have a clear answer to this age-old question that has haunted humanity for thousands of years, but I can share my own opinion on this.

“It depends” because your routine should quite obviously be optimized towards what you want. Towards your ideal day. Towards your goals.

And what I’ve more or less realized over the last months:

No routine will be in place for long.

It’s going to constantly change, and it’s absolutely fine to make changes to your daily routine every few weeks, maybe even more frequently.

Not only that, it’s just ridiculous to try and make every day look exactly the same. There are certain days your routine is going to look completely different from others (for everybody with a 9-5 or school, weekends are the perfect example of this).

But, as always, we can put certain systems in place to structure your day.

One of which I call:

Dynamic Schedules

It’s a concept I came up with only recently.

Since I’ve experimented with countless changes in my daily schedule (including measuring how I perform), waking up at 4.00, 4.30, or 5.00, having no morning routine, a 10-minute or 30-minute one, shifting gym times to the most different times, and so on-

I have a BOATLOAD of data that I tracked for different routines and for different types of days.

Let me give you a few examples:

I know my ideal routine for pumping out 12-hour workdays on a big, important project.

I know my ideal routine for creating a month's worth of Twitter content in just a single day.

I know my ideal routine for me to hit the gym, get 4 hours of deep work done, and do some necessary shallow work, if I want to take the entire afternoon off.

Simply through experimenting for months.

And now, I can quite literally just look back at all the days I had previously, think about which day currently fits my schedule best, and execute.

Knowing how to get shit done in pretty much every scenario just feels good.

It’s pretty much like picking a different attack strategy in a video game depending on the enemy’s defensive base:

It’s flexibility. It’s dynamic.

The important thing is selecting your strategy of attack for the day and sticking to it ruthlessly while executing.

And by performing different routines multiple times, you get the hang of how to stick to your different schedules perfectly.

TLDR: Don’t have one daily routine. Have multiple. It’s way cooler.

Thanks for reading.

See you soon,

Henri.

PS. If you’re struggling to find your personal optimal routine, reply to this email and I’ll help ya out.