Creature of Habit

I'm not sure at what point in our current era the word routine took on the negative connotations now attached to it. Maybe it came with the advent of industrialization and the notion of the factory worker doing the exact same thing 800 times a day. Perhaps it was during the 1970s when the boomers believed every single person had a unique genius to uncover and doing something routine was seen as soul-harming. Maybe it was when Tonya Harding announced she had a new routine for the Olympics. Who knows?

All I know is that I will freely admit I like my working conditions to be as routine as possible. As someone who writes both creatively and journalistically, I often have to step out of my comfort zone, take some chances, upset patterns. Typically, such experiences involve the research or reporting phase of a project. I embrace these moments. But when it comes to periods when I need to hunker down and put words on paper, disruption is not advisable, at least not for me. That's something of a myth or misconception about writers and creative people; namely, that we lead lives of wild unpredictability, spontaneity and unshackled imaginative flights of fancy. That the only way we can free up our imagination is to treat every day like a piñata we've got to bash open to see what spills out.

Uh, no.

The truth, at least for me and most of the creative people I know, is that routine and orderliness and regularity are vital to the creative process. "Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition," wrote the poet W.H. Auden.

Another myth is that creative people speak through their muses. Trust me, if I sat around waiting for my muse to arrive, I'd write a couple of paragraphs a year. There are many writers who need strictly imposed self-discipline in order to create. Graham Greene wrote 1,000 words a day and then stopped, whether that took him an hour or 10 hours. Charles Dickens' son said of his father that, "no city clerk was ever more methodical or orderly than he." Mark Twain used to count words. Stephen King does six pages a day, no more, no less. Alice Munro worked precisely from 8 to 11 every morning of every day.

The point is that routine is central to creativity. And because the only things creative people have to offer the world (and to make a living) are what they can squeeze out of their hearts and minds, we tend to get a little obsessed with our routines - though that routine might not always look the part. Most people, for example, would not think that a routine means working from 8:45 to 9:45, doing five minutes of yoga, making a coffee, filling the water in the bird bath, working from 10:20 to 11, playing a couple of games of online backgammon, chatting with an editor for 15 minutes, checking email, eating lunch … and then requiring a rest to recover from it all. Hey, nobody said it was easy.

It's important to note here that much of my routine revolves around the fact that I work at home. I have a small office in our basement, with the emphasis on small - most closets would be insulted to be associated with my office. But it's where I work, it is habit and the house is, for most of the daytime hours during the week, empty and quiet. The only sounds that normally emanate from the house, other than the ones I produce, are when the dog goes bonkers when the mail carrier swings by around 3 p.m. (Oh, I forgot - that's part of my routine, too, checking the mail every day for the letter informing me that I've been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. After that moment passes, I typically soothe the disappointment with a cup of tea and a cookie.) And if I feel on any given day that my routine requires some disruption - which I am given to understand is all the rage in corporate circles - I'll shake things up and work at the kitchen table.

Now that you know all this about my routine, I can segue to the actual point I want to make. In the late spring, my wife, Cathy, was presented with the chance to take the summer off. A good break was well-deserved and well-earned.

But there was the small matter of my routine.

I first knew trouble was brewing when it came to the brewing. For 20-odd years I have got up and made coffee the same way, my way, the right way, every weekday. But one day I got up and the smell of coffee was coming from the kitchen. That was immediately outside my routine. Feeling unsettled, I went downstairs. Cathy was sitting at the kitchen table and the newspaper was spread all over it. There was nowhere to put the sports section.

"Good morning," I said. "Umm, I usually sit in that seat when I have breakfast …"

"First come, first served. I've been up for an hour. I've already walked the dog and watered my planters."

With a pinched expression, I said, "Oh." I went about making my toast. "So, what are you up to today?"

She proceeded to list off a ridiculously long roster of activities.

"I said today, not this week."

"I'm action-oriented," she said. "Not everyone likes to sit around all day, you know."

She quickly finished off her breakfast and - this was still before 8 a.m. - launched into cleaning the kitchen windows as I sat at the table trying to have a peaceful coffee. That day, and in fact the next few weeks, saw her burst into spasms of activity that involved painting the garage door, painting the window trim, washing the front windows, reseeding part of the lawn, planting various perennials and annuals, cleaning out cupboards, organizing kayak trips, visiting friends and walking the poor dog to within an inch of its life. The common denominator in most of these activities was that they involved making a hellacious racket all over the house.

One hot June day, she strolled unannounced into my tiny office. I happened to be doing some online research on the upcoming U.S. Open Championship. I have written about golf in the past, so I consider this a legitimate use of my time. (Do you believe me?) Cathy burst into my office, saw the Golf Channel on my screen and said, "Oh, working hard? Or hardly working?" She laughed at her own joke and plopped herself down in the little reading chair behind my desk chair. "Oh, it's so nice and cool down here. It's boiling outside. I was just cleaning the driveway and then I was weeding the vegetable garden. Man, oh, man."

I turned around and gazed at her. "You do know that I'm working?"

"Working?! Good one." She took her sandals off and put one of her bare feet up on the armrest of my desk chair. "Don't mind me. Just keep 'working.' I'll just sit here for a while. I won't bother you. Anyway, can't you concentrate with someone around? That's not very impressive."

What could I do? I turned around and started working.

A couple of days later I was hard at work, actual work, around mid-morning, when I got an email from Cathy. It was marked URGENT! "Come upstairs!" she'd written. I hurriedly saved the document I was working on and bolted upstairs. She was sitting at her desk.

"What is it?!"

"I am totally stuck. I just don't know whether I should ride my bike to Square One coffee shop or whether I should drive there and then go for a walk with my mum afterwards. What do you think I should do?"

During her time off, I received numerous texts and emails like this. So often, in fact, that I succumbed to Stockholm Syndrome - I began sympathizing with the difficulty of such dilemmas and devoted quite a bit of time to helping her resolve them. I also became conditioned to respond promptly to urgent texts and emails saying, "Come upstairs, QUICK, there's something wrong with the printer/computer/phone/dryer/dishwasher/fridge/toaster/ kettle/toilet/sink/vacuum …"

The truth is, my wife's supportive and funny presence has upset the delicate rhythm of my workday, in the same way that a Tasmanian devil might disrupt the routine of a three-toed sloth. But don't criticize the sloth. As I said to Cathy at one point, quite profoundly, I thought: "Oranges are orange and lemons are yellow."

She considered that. "Is that what you spent all morning coming up with down there?"

In the end, Cathy being home hasn't particularly negated my productivity, since (I can hear her saying), it sure didn't look like I accomplished much on any given day anyway. Truly, it has been great having her around the house. It makes the day brighter and more interesting, which is what's supposed to happen when you get to spend more time with the person you married.

But I have to be honest. If she retires while I'm still writing for a living, you might see me scouting around for an office outside the home.

After all, sometimes you've got to shake things up to get into a routine.