I’ve decided I’m calling them “practices” as opposed to “routines” because I’m an enneagram 4 and can’t wrap my head around doing anything routine, because routine = ordinary = boring.  I’m calling them practices, rather than disciplines because discipline = yuck.  I’m calling them practices rather than habits, because I grew up with a mom who yo-yo dieted and tried to quit smoking for 35 years, so to me, a habit is something you need to break, not make.

A practice is something a professional has, and I want to be a professional.  A doctor has a practice.  A lawyer has a practice.

There’s also a connection to spiritual formation, and I’m a spiritually-oriented person.  Monks have practices.

But the bottom line, under the verbal window-dressing I have to do to slip these particular changes past my personality and temperament, is the fact that I’m spending too much time and energy thinking about things that I shouldn’t have to think about.

I’m resistant to the idea that anything I do is automatic.  I’m a custom sort of gal.

But what I’ve realized is that  making simple things that I should be doing daily or weekly or monthly things I have to think a lot about is preventing me from having the requisite free brain space to think about bigger things.  More exciting things. Things that … really should be custom work.  Those things aren’t getting done now.  And they need to be getting done.

img courtesy susiet on sxc

I’m resistant to making certain tasks more routine, scheduled and automatic because to me, it feels like a restriction to my freedom.  It’s not.  There is a glorious freedom in not having to make a hundred decisions.  Those hundred decisions are the real restraints, tying up my time and my brainspace.

The point of developing practices is to cut those bindings.  Because I have big plans for 2010, and I can’t see those plans realized if I’m bound and gagged.

I’m currently a somewhat lapsed devotee of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) system for personal productivity and organization, FlyLady‘s household management system, David K. Reynold‘s Constructive Living therapy, Dr. Willard Harley’s Marriage Builders program, and Sacred Space/Pray-As-You-Go‘s daily prayer practice.

What do all these things have in common? They each touch on big, massive, shudder-when-you-think-about-it Major Life Goals.

• Getting your schedule under control and making sure you get what’s most important to you accomplished.
• Creating an uncluttered, nurturing, non-chaotic home environment for your family.
• Managing your neurotic emotions and living consciously and gratefully in the present.
• Protecting and enriching your lifelong romantic partnership.
• Developing a rich, reflective inner spiritual life centered in the presence of God.

Whoa.  Big stuff, there, right?  It makes my head hurt just thinking about any one of them, much less all of them.  But the thing is, I want all of them.

Except each of these different systems, different programs or frameworks, focus on the small stuff. They don’t focus on the elephant you’ve got to devour.  They focus on the next bite.  What’s my Next Action?  How much clutter can I clear in a 15 minute burst of activity?  What needs doing, despite what I’m feeling?   What is the most effective thing I can do each day to demonstrate love to my spouse?  What’s happened in the last 24 hours, and where do I feel God’s presence or absence?

These are manageable things. I can think about each of these questions without feeling a headache or a vague sense of panic and overwhelm.  I can attack any (and maybe all) of those questions in the course of a single day, with all the energy and enthusiasm I have available for that day.

Ultimately, it comes down to practices. A “practice” is something we do because we’re not perfect–but we’d like to be better.   Usually, it’s something we have to do daily, or at most weekly, because if we don’t, we get “out of practice.”  We lose what we’ve learned, to an extent.   But the nice thing is, most practices are like riding a bike–we may get rusty, but if we mastered it once, we can generally pick it up again.

With a little more practice.

img courtesy torli