A few years ago at dinner out the night before Thanksgiving or something Leslie asked me if I was highly routinized. I hadn't thought about it that much, but I am incredibly routinized.
Take for instance, my pancake routine. Regular readers will of course know that Sunday is pancake day in our house, as it has been for decades. When I get up what I do is pretty much set in stone: pour joice drink and drink from it, make coffee, toast nuts, heat up syrup, mix wet ingredients (milk, egg plus supplement [pumpkin or sweet potato) in bowl, add dry ingredients (premixed in the cabinet in 4-week batches to get around the problem of Graham getting up later -- since he was put in charge of the dry ingredient mix years ago) and mix, put pan on stove to preheat, go out in driveway to get paper. There is more refinement than this around the size and type of measuring cups and the order in which they are used, but I'll spare you.
Having a routine frees up mental resources to focus on other things. It's really not unlike what Marx said should happen with employees working on production lines: as they get integrated into processes, their minds could wander and ponder class consciousness, the revolution, and so on. Likewise, to the extent I can liberate myself from little concerns (where are my keys, what is for lunch, when will I exercise, what will I watch on TV) my brain is freed to work on bigger picture stuff.
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