As I mentioned before, I am in a time of new routines, and as a result I broke one of my cardinal rules for managing my ADHD – only make one change at a time.

You see this a lot at the beginning of the year. People will decide to change their eating habits, join a gym, meditate 20 minutes a day and start getting up at 5AM – all in one day. The end result is they get frustrated and overwhelmed, and then feel disempowered because they couldn’t effect change in their lives yet again.

But if they had made a list of the changes they wanted to make, and then added one of those changes a month, say, then at the end of the year they could have had 12 major changes in their life with relatively little friction.

So, I have a pretty hard and fast rule that I only try to add one new habit at a time. And I always try to make it a habit, because habits are things you get for free. And it has worked for me, when I remember to do it. First I changed how I eat, then I added exercise later when eating was no longer stressful.

But this month, I messed up. I joined a gym, so I can exercise indoors and add some weight-bearing exercise to my routine. And I started blogging daily. Both of those have to be done in the morning, if I am going to do them at all. And also, it’s December, the hardest month of the year for me at work. All of those things would be routine changing on their own. Add all three together, and it is chaos.

So I am going to back off the daily blogging until after Christmas and give it some thought. I like daily blogging – I like the idea flow, the discipline, the routine – but the way I am currently blogging, with longer form posts and occasional essays, with photos, is pretty time consuming. Sure, Seth Godin is able to pound out a post a day for over a decade, but he ain’t formatting images, either. His blogging process consists of typing and hitting publish.

I do like the discipline of getting up at 5:30 and going to the gym every morning, though. I am keeping that one for now.

I hope you and your family have a joyous holiday, and I wish you every good thing in the coming year.