Routines
Welcome to the routine graveyard (population: all of us)
Updated August 2026 · 5 min read
Short version
- Routines fail from design flaws, not character flaws.
- The four killers: too big, too rigid, too boring, too invisible.
- Post-mortem the last routine before building the next one.
Everyone has a graveyard
The 5am club phase, the elaborate morning checklist, the planner that died in February — behind every ADHD adult is a small cemetery of systems that were going to be The One.
You did not fail those routines; they failed you. Almost every one was built on advice written for a different kind of brain.
Each new system arrives with a rush of hope and two genuinely good weeks. Then the novelty burns off, the design flaws show, and the routine quietly stops happening.
The four killers
Dead routines almost always trace back to one of these:
- Too big: twelve steps that only a perfect morning could survive. Fix: cut to three steps maximum.
- Too rigid: one missed day meant total collapse. Fix: build a low-battery version and count it fully.
- Too boring: the novelty wore off and nothing was left. Fix: let the details rotate while the skeleton stays.
- Too invisible: nothing in your environment reminded you it existed. Fix: move the cue into your physical path.
Notice what is missing from that list: laziness. Routines die of engineering problems, and engineering problems have fixes.
Run the post-mortem
Before starting anything new, pick one dead routine and ask which killer got it. This takes two minutes and saves you from rebuilding the same trap with a new name.
Build the survivor
A routine that lasts answers all four killers up front:
- Small enough to run on your worst day.
- Flexible enough to survive a weird week.
- Interesting enough that day thirty is not agony.
- Visible enough that you physically trip over the cue.
Start embarrassingly small and let it earn its upgrades. The graveyard is full of ambitious routines; the survivors all started tiny.
Do this now
