The fact that you have a daily anything is the thing I’m having trouble with. Since moving away from home 13 years ago, the things I used to do daily because family forced me to no longer happened, including things like brushing teeth or showering.
I use checklists for so much. They’re on my phone, and I go through them before e.g. leaving the house, turning the car on or off, taking a shower, doing laundry, cleaning things, throwing out the garbage, etc. For the car, for example, I do point and speak (or touch and speak) for every item in the checklist. I wasn’t able to get the consistent place for things, though.
When my SO and I closed the distance was the most consistent. It wasn’t automatic, but it was 3 weeks of her reminding me to do things with her. She had to leave because COVID, though.
I expect the chain to break. I rotate through different tools because they rarely last more than a couple of weeks, and I start phasing in the next one before the previous one failed. I still haven’t had anything continue successfully for much longer than that, including the things the tools are supposed to help with.
I’ll bet you sleep periodically, right? That would be a good place to start hanging routines! Even if you don’t have a regular bedtime or (more importantly) wake up time, the mere fact of going to bed or getting up can trigger checklists of their own that include hygiene and such. It also helps to understand (and remind yourself periodically) why you think your habits are of value. Maybe you could title your checklist “Bedtime Routine that helps me to X” or something?
Sounds like you’ve got a good chunk of a system going that just wants some polish. (Hint: that’s an ongoing process. No system is ever really “done” unless you magically stop learning and growing.) As for thing-placement issues, Adam Savage offers a rule for that: When you ask yourself “where should this be?”, the answer is the same as pretending you need the thing now and figuring out the first place you would look for it. The hard part for me has been remembering that I actually want to put stuff back where it belongs on future occasions. Sounds cheesy, but I’ve found it helpful to thank each object—out loud, by name—as I’m putting it away. Kind of makes the act of tidying up feel like I’m taking care of the tools that take care of my needs.
COVID has been hard on people in a lot of ways, particularly when it comes to routines. I’m sorry to hear that it’s un-grounded part of your self-management system: that really sucks. While it’s beneficial to export mind to the environment, it’s important to remember that everything is temporary on some timescale. Most of the time we don’t have to think about that much, but it’s good to have at least sketches of backup plans for when things dissolve out from under us. The trick is not getting caught up in an anxious thought spiral at the same time! Takes practice, I’m afraid.
From what you’ve said, a couple of weeks at a time is an accomplishment! The circumstances you’ve described are extremely difficult, and you can be proud of even intermittent success. Ideally, I’m hearing that you’d like to find systems that build something stable for you. That’s a great goal! I’m also hearing that you’ve had a great deal of difficulty adapting to the rapidly changing circumstances that have been 2020. These are challenges that are even more difficult to overcome alone. It’s really unfortunate that you’ve been struggling through that largely on your own. This sort of thing can set us back years in our habits and practices. It also sounds like you’ve had some luck building more solid systems in the past, which is encouraging! I’m afraid it’s going to be trial and error all the way down, but given the history you’ve described I’m confident that you have the capacity to make the changes you want to see in your life. My hope is that you keep reaching out when you need fresh ideas: you may have to live by yourself for now, but you certainly don’t have to do this work alone!
That’s good! More generally, it’s important to apply the “right effort” to things: not inventing big projects where they don’t need to be, and putting the work in where it’s needed. Sounds like maybe you’ve got that bit, at least in part! I’ve struggled on this point immensely, and I’m glad it doesn’t seem to be as much a difficulty for you!
You’ve said in other comments that medication hasn’t been useful for you. I wonder if you have a regular psychologist? If you can find the right doctor (which is certainly not easier than normal right now), there are non-pharmaceutical therapies that have the potential to make all of this substantially easier. Maybe you haven’t had much luck on that front—I haven’t seen you mention it so far—but like other systems I’d encourage you to discard what doesn’t work and try again until you find what does, if you are able to do so.
I’ve tried introducing routines around that, but (at least with me) it works really badly.
Most of the time, it’s less going to bed and more like suddenly waking up a few minutes/hours after. If I was wearing regular clothes, that’s what I’ll wake up in. When I get up it’s usually because of a message notification, so that tends to be the first thing I look at. I do have routines set up on my Google Home for going to sleep (turns off the lights and starts background noise) and waking up (turns on the light and reads the news), but they go unused more often than not. I also made it tell me to prepare to sleep (close curtains, brush teeth, drink water etc) at 23:30, and tell me to stretch and/or meditate at 23:40 before turning the lights off at 24:00, but that also fails much more often than not.
(The 23:40 one can sometime spur me to close the curtains but the bathroom is like 15 m away with two rooms in between, so the teeth get forgotten), so I tried adding another one at 23:50 for the stretching, but it didn’t work either.)
Also! Sometimes I manage to do some low effort things right before sleeping (e.g., sending a good night message to my SO). Sometimes I have full conversations with her while sleeping and then I wake up and reread it and it’s coherent. But even then it’s a toss-up if I actually end up sleeping. Sometimes I’ve stayed up until the sun came up, or I’ve gone to sleep and then start looking up answers to things, or start doing things. I fail badly if I try and sleep on my own, even without lights or devices. (Also no coffee etc, because caffeine doesn’t work on me.)
For the placing things part, I’d probably look for it around me on my bed or on the floor. That’s where most of the things I actually use are. I’m pretty good at finding things in the last-used order. I’ll try the otsukare trick for objects if I remember.
Except I do have to think all that much. There’s almost no automatic/instinctive component. It’s not just remembering/starting to do the thing in the first place, but it’s the right order of things. Without the checklist, I often forget to put toothpaste on my toothbrush, or forget to rinse it at the end. So I can do enough to survive/live okay, but there still aren’t any automatic routines or habits, which is why I made this post.
That being said, I do plan a lot. What happens if this fails or that fails, or different things got delayed etc. I’m waiting for a visa for my fourth job in 2.5 years, and I was financially ready for my first job loss within six months, and have been ready ever since. I’m now on month four of what should have taken a month or two, and I’ll have been un(der)paid for 5 or 6 months before my first full paycheque.
Or what happens if a pandemic happens? Bought my first ever car with cash (and then took out a retroactive loan because I like having the buffer) and masks etc and started stockpiling food in Jan and Feb last year because COVID was coming and it was going to be bad and everyone was ignoring it. I wrote up a huge report on 4 Feb on whether it’d be safe for me to go get her, and for her to come etc. She was considering postponing a couple of months, but I told her that we’d almost certainly not be able to see each other this year if she delayed to April.
I also had plans of what to do in case my SO decided to go back because she didn’t like the country etc. One thing I didn’t plan for/expect was for things to close down, so we didn’t even have the time to get her application going. If we had, she’d be able to properly immigrate whenever. At least I managed to reuse part of the “what if she doesn’t like the country” prep.
It’s a huge accomplishment! I’m happy about it, especially when it works. The second onboarding is usually much faster than the first (it takes about a week), but the third and fourth etc take about as long and I haven’t seen any reduction. It also lasts longer. Though if I ever miss it, there goes a month or three of not having any system until something inspires me to find something else. The problem with these kinds of things is that the novelty wears off very quickly, and there is no motivation without the novelty. I’d love to make something like that automatic.
The point of systems and habits is to make it intrinsic, because strong habits are inelastic with respect to intention. Most people “have to” brush their teeth before going to bed, “have to” eat at a set time (or when they get hungry), and “have to” grab for the seatbelt as soon as they sit down in the car. Many “have to” make their bed in the morning, or write in their journal, etc.
For digital stuff I do make conversion scripts between formats from time to time. But a lot of it is on my whiteboard, or on physical paper which gets thrown out etc. 2019 was the first time I had a physical journal which I used mainly as a set of lists of stuff that were more temporary. I got another one for 2020 but almost nothing happened so it’s still mostly empty.
I don’t have a centralized repo of all my “important things” list, because these go into whatever tool I was using at the time. I don’t like that at some level, but at the same time they change so often that even if I tried converting everything every time, and was perfectly productive, I don’t expect I’d be done before the tool needs to change again. So for the most part, I kind of expect everything I do to be ephemeral. I think I’ll pay for Google Photos in a few years once I’m over my storage limit, though, because I take lots of pictures, and they’re often a nice chronicle (along with the Google Maps timeline; did I go somewhere yesterday/last week?).
If I ever become important enough to warrant someone digging around in my history, they’ll have plenty of information about me in so many different places (including this post—hi!) that I don’t know where they all are, and that’s fine.
I have a counselor for ASD. I’m happy pretty much all the time, and he’s not sure how to help me with the social side anyway (especially with COVID; first session was in December or Jan last year, even though I’d applied in June of 2018; huge waiting list) so most of the practical side of what we work on is ADHD related. He’s the one who suggested using two systems simultaneously while the first one is dying, and quite a few of the apps. I managed to make a successful transition three times this year (which gave me about 3 weeks rather than two each time).
We do talk about things like emotions etc quite often because, well, I’m happy all the time and he finds it strange. One thing he pointed out was in August when the government unilaterally cancelled my work visa because of an error on their side. I had a session with him a few hours after I got the news, and I told him about that, and he said it was my usual ukiuki. The only time he’s seen me not happy (but not even sad) was when I told him that my SO had to leave.
(Bonus fact, I have hundreds more words for emotions in Japanese compared to English, where I basically group things into happy and sad.)
It’s a government funded program, so it’s less than 6€ per hour (and sometimes we do half an hour and that gives us another half hour at another date). Ends up being around 20-ish euro every few months. I still have another year or so of that before I no longer get access to it.
Unfortunately, I haven’t found anyone who specialist in ADHD, which I feel causes the most problems day-to-day. But the last time I checked was pre-pandemic, so hopefully there might be some with expanded areas of operation. I listen to podcasts a lot, though, so I get some ideas from there.
For ASD, things like fashion or body language or music or facial expressions or tone of voice etc are all lost to me and they’re skills I want to try and learn. For some things, I can learn the heuristics (e.g., colour wheel), but it’s basically knowing the teacher’s answers rather than understanding them. Does this outfit look good or bad? The book says that it’s bad and it should be fixed by doing XYZ, but it looks fine to me. The minor chord is supposed to be sad. Except everything feels happy to me. Turns out people get it from context (e.g., watching sad scenes in movies) but I don’t realize someone is sad unless they say it out loud, and don’t realize a situation is sad or creepy or dramatic or whatever either, so “yay, movie == fun/happy!” I’m taking courses (e.g., on the University of Bayes), but the explanations usually don’t make sense either.
Most people “have to” brush their teeth before going to bed, “have to” eat at a set time (or when they get hungry), and “have to” grab for the seatbelt as soon as they sit down in the car. Many “have to” make their bed in the morning, or write in their journal, etc.
This is something I’ve never experienced, nor has it ever occurred to me that it might be the case. To use the tooth brushing example: for me, that happens every night only because it’s part of the “Getting ready for bed” mental checklist. I’d like to share that checklist along with some annotations. It takes between 30 and 45 minutes from start to finish. This checklist began life some 20 years ago and has been carefully sculpted over that time to accommodate my own changing needs, as well as those of my partner and our relationship.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting you need to adopt this checklist or anything like it; rather I want to share a very mature and complex habit of mine that accomplishes many varied goals, and the performance of which now feels very continuous and normal to me. After this long, each item has been coordinated to flow neatly into the next, and each moves me closer to the goal of being asleep in bed by a certain time. Of course, I can’t always control that time, but I try to keep it within an hour of standard for health reasons. This checklist is one part of a larger but somewhat looser script that actually starts at dinner time and ends when my alarm goes off in the morning.
On occasion, I have skipped this entire process, falling asleep in whatever situation the evening leaves me in. I don’t recall ever being disturbed by this happening, but I do notice that I tend to feel a bit gross and groggy the next morning. Specifically, I deliberately notice that so that I remember that feeling if I ever get the idea that “I can skip it, just this once”. That way I have something to hold against the urge to make what I already know are poor choices for me.
Getting ready for bed
This list begins as soon as I notice it is after 20:30, and ends when I am in bed with the lights out.
Verbally prod partner into action. This promotes a more regular bedtime.
Locate cat and take her upstairs to the bathroom. Hold cat patiently while partner brushes cat’s teeth and fur. We keep the cat’s brush and toothbrush in the bathroom mostly because that’s where the next part of the checklist will need to be performed, and also because that’s where our toothbrushes live anyway.
Brush teeth using tools set on the sink for that purpose: If I don’t keep all the steps of tooth brushing visible, I usually forget to do it. e.g. When I run out of floss, it can be a week before I remember to get out a new spool if I don’t do so immediately.
Toothbrush
Floss
Gum Stimulator
Toilet and wash
Check that small child is sleeping peacefully. No longer strictly necessary (he’s five years old now and unlikely to forget to breathe or something), but it makes me happy to watch him sleep for a few seconds each night.
Move to bedroom and get dressed for bed. I have chosen to wear clothes during the day that are impractical and/or uncomfortable to sleep in. The goal here is to make sure I change my shirt and underwear every day.
Sit for 5-10 minutes of meditation. I use the Ten Percent Happier app for guided meditations in this time slot. The app can remind me if I forget, and there is a daily featured meditation if I’m not feeling up to choosing. The reason for this step is complicated, but can be summarised as “meditation is ridiculously beneficial to my cognitive functioning”.
Read aloud to partner for a few minutes. This is for the benefit of the relationship, and helps my partner unwind before bed.
Hair maintenance. My partner brushes and braids my hair before bed. This has combined relationship and hygiene benefits such as giving me a reason to wash the hair occasionally.
Make the bed suitable for sleeping in. I’ve heard some people do this in the morning! LOL
The fact that you have a daily anything is the thing I’m having trouble with. Since moving away from home 13 years ago, the things I used to do daily because family forced me to no longer happened, including things like brushing teeth or showering.
I use checklists for so much. They’re on my phone, and I go through them before e.g. leaving the house, turning the car on or off, taking a shower, doing laundry, cleaning things, throwing out the garbage, etc. For the car, for example, I do point and speak (or touch and speak) for every item in the checklist. I wasn’t able to get the consistent place for things, though.
When my SO and I closed the distance was the most consistent. It wasn’t automatic, but it was 3 weeks of her reminding me to do things with her. She had to leave because COVID, though.
I expect the chain to break. I rotate through different tools because they rarely last more than a couple of weeks, and I start phasing in the next one before the previous one failed. I still haven’t had anything continue successfully for much longer than that, including the things the tools are supposed to help with.
I already do that.
I’ll bet you sleep periodically, right? That would be a good place to start hanging routines! Even if you don’t have a regular bedtime or (more importantly) wake up time, the mere fact of going to bed or getting up can trigger checklists of their own that include hygiene and such. It also helps to understand (and remind yourself periodically) why you think your habits are of value. Maybe you could title your checklist “Bedtime Routine that helps me to X” or something?
Sounds like you’ve got a good chunk of a system going that just wants some polish. (Hint: that’s an ongoing process. No system is ever really “done” unless you magically stop learning and growing.) As for thing-placement issues, Adam Savage offers a rule for that: When you ask yourself “where should this be?”, the answer is the same as pretending you need the thing now and figuring out the first place you would look for it. The hard part for me has been remembering that I actually want to put stuff back where it belongs on future occasions. Sounds cheesy, but I’ve found it helpful to thank each object—out loud, by name—as I’m putting it away. Kind of makes the act of tidying up feel like I’m taking care of the tools that take care of my needs.
COVID has been hard on people in a lot of ways, particularly when it comes to routines. I’m sorry to hear that it’s un-grounded part of your self-management system: that really sucks. While it’s beneficial to export mind to the environment, it’s important to remember that everything is temporary on some timescale. Most of the time we don’t have to think about that much, but it’s good to have at least sketches of backup plans for when things dissolve out from under us. The trick is not getting caught up in an anxious thought spiral at the same time! Takes practice, I’m afraid.
From what you’ve said, a couple of weeks at a time is an accomplishment! The circumstances you’ve described are extremely difficult, and you can be proud of even intermittent success. Ideally, I’m hearing that you’d like to find systems that build something stable for you. That’s a great goal! I’m also hearing that you’ve had a great deal of difficulty adapting to the rapidly changing circumstances that have been 2020. These are challenges that are even more difficult to overcome alone. It’s really unfortunate that you’ve been struggling through that largely on your own. This sort of thing can set us back years in our habits and practices. It also sounds like you’ve had some luck building more solid systems in the past, which is encouraging! I’m afraid it’s going to be trial and error all the way down, but given the history you’ve described I’m confident that you have the capacity to make the changes you want to see in your life. My hope is that you keep reaching out when you need fresh ideas: you may have to live by yourself for now, but you certainly don’t have to do this work alone!
That’s good! More generally, it’s important to apply the “right effort” to things: not inventing big projects where they don’t need to be, and putting the work in where it’s needed. Sounds like maybe you’ve got that bit, at least in part! I’ve struggled on this point immensely, and I’m glad it doesn’t seem to be as much a difficulty for you!
You’ve said in other comments that medication hasn’t been useful for you. I wonder if you have a regular psychologist? If you can find the right doctor (which is certainly not easier than normal right now), there are non-pharmaceutical therapies that have the potential to make all of this substantially easier. Maybe you haven’t had much luck on that front—I haven’t seen you mention it so far—but like other systems I’d encourage you to discard what doesn’t work and try again until you find what does, if you are able to do so.
I’ve tried introducing routines around that, but (at least with me) it works really badly.
Most of the time, it’s less going to bed and more like suddenly waking up a few minutes/hours after. If I was wearing regular clothes, that’s what I’ll wake up in. When I get up it’s usually because of a message notification, so that tends to be the first thing I look at. I do have routines set up on my Google Home for going to sleep (turns off the lights and starts background noise) and waking up (turns on the light and reads the news), but they go unused more often than not. I also made it tell me to prepare to sleep (close curtains, brush teeth, drink water etc) at 23:30, and tell me to stretch and/or meditate at 23:40 before turning the lights off at 24:00, but that also fails much more often than not.
(The 23:40 one can sometime spur me to close the curtains but the bathroom is like 15 m away with two rooms in between, so the teeth get forgotten), so I tried adding another one at 23:50 for the stretching, but it didn’t work either.)
Also! Sometimes I manage to do some low effort things right before sleeping (e.g., sending a good night message to my SO). Sometimes I have full conversations with her while sleeping and then I wake up and reread it and it’s coherent. But even then it’s a toss-up if I actually end up sleeping. Sometimes I’ve stayed up until the sun came up, or I’ve gone to sleep and then start looking up answers to things, or start doing things. I fail badly if I try and sleep on my own, even without lights or devices. (Also no coffee etc, because caffeine doesn’t work on me.)
For the placing things part, I’d probably look for it around me on my bed or on the floor. That’s where most of the things I actually use are. I’m pretty good at finding things in the last-used order. I’ll try the otsukare trick for objects if I remember.
Except I do have to think all that much. There’s almost no automatic/instinctive component. It’s not just remembering/starting to do the thing in the first place, but it’s the right order of things. Without the checklist, I often forget to put toothpaste on my toothbrush, or forget to rinse it at the end. So I can do enough to survive/live okay, but there still aren’t any automatic routines or habits, which is why I made this post.
That being said, I do plan a lot. What happens if this fails or that fails, or different things got delayed etc. I’m waiting for a visa for my fourth job in 2.5 years, and I was financially ready for my first job loss within six months, and have been ready ever since. I’m now on month four of what should have taken a month or two, and I’ll have been un(der)paid for 5 or 6 months before my first full paycheque.
Or what happens if a pandemic happens? Bought my first ever car with cash (and then took out a retroactive loan because I like having the buffer) and masks etc and started stockpiling food in Jan and Feb last year because COVID was coming and it was going to be bad and everyone was ignoring it. I wrote up a huge report on 4 Feb on whether it’d be safe for me to go get her, and for her to come etc. She was considering postponing a couple of months, but I told her that we’d almost certainly not be able to see each other this year if she delayed to April.
I also had plans of what to do in case my SO decided to go back because she didn’t like the country etc. One thing I didn’t plan for/expect was for things to close down, so we didn’t even have the time to get her application going. If we had, she’d be able to properly immigrate whenever. At least I managed to reuse part of the “what if she doesn’t like the country” prep.
It’s a huge accomplishment! I’m happy about it, especially when it works. The second onboarding is usually much faster than the first (it takes about a week), but the third and fourth etc take about as long and I haven’t seen any reduction. It also lasts longer. Though if I ever miss it, there goes a month or three of not having any system until something inspires me to find something else. The problem with these kinds of things is that the novelty wears off very quickly, and there is no motivation without the novelty. I’d love to make something like that automatic.
The point of systems and habits is to make it intrinsic, because strong habits are inelastic with respect to intention. Most people “have to” brush their teeth before going to bed, “have to” eat at a set time (or when they get hungry), and “have to” grab for the seatbelt as soon as they sit down in the car. Many “have to” make their bed in the morning, or write in their journal, etc.
For digital stuff I do make conversion scripts between formats from time to time. But a lot of it is on my whiteboard, or on physical paper which gets thrown out etc. 2019 was the first time I had a physical journal which I used mainly as a set of lists of stuff that were more temporary. I got another one for 2020 but almost nothing happened so it’s still mostly empty.
I don’t have a centralized repo of all my “important things” list, because these go into whatever tool I was using at the time. I don’t like that at some level, but at the same time they change so often that even if I tried converting everything every time, and was perfectly productive, I don’t expect I’d be done before the tool needs to change again. So for the most part, I kind of expect everything I do to be ephemeral. I think I’ll pay for Google Photos in a few years once I’m over my storage limit, though, because I take lots of pictures, and they’re often a nice chronicle (along with the Google Maps timeline; did I go somewhere yesterday/last week?).
If I ever become important enough to warrant someone digging around in my history, they’ll have plenty of information about me in so many different places (including this post—hi!) that I don’t know where they all are, and that’s fine.
I have a counselor for ASD. I’m happy pretty much all the time, and he’s not sure how to help me with the social side anyway (especially with COVID; first session was in December or Jan last year, even though I’d applied in June of 2018; huge waiting list) so most of the practical side of what we work on is ADHD related. He’s the one who suggested using two systems simultaneously while the first one is dying, and quite a few of the apps. I managed to make a successful transition three times this year (which gave me about 3 weeks rather than two each time).
We do talk about things like emotions etc quite often because, well, I’m happy all the time and he finds it strange. One thing he pointed out was in August when the government unilaterally cancelled my work visa because of an error on their side. I had a session with him a few hours after I got the news, and I told him about that, and he said it was my usual ukiuki. The only time he’s seen me not happy (but not even sad) was when I told him that my SO had to leave.
(Bonus fact, I have hundreds more words for emotions in Japanese compared to English, where I basically group things into happy and sad.)
It’s a government funded program, so it’s less than 6€ per hour (and sometimes we do half an hour and that gives us another half hour at another date). Ends up being around 20-ish euro every few months. I still have another year or so of that before I no longer get access to it.
Unfortunately, I haven’t found anyone who specialist in ADHD, which I feel causes the most problems day-to-day. But the last time I checked was pre-pandemic, so hopefully there might be some with expanded areas of operation. I listen to podcasts a lot, though, so I get some ideas from there.
For ASD, things like fashion or body language or music or facial expressions or tone of voice etc are all lost to me and they’re skills I want to try and learn. For some things, I can learn the heuristics (e.g., colour wheel), but it’s basically knowing the teacher’s answers rather than understanding them. Does this outfit look good or bad? The book says that it’s bad and it should be fixed by doing XYZ, but it looks fine to me. The minor chord is supposed to be sad. Except everything feels happy to me. Turns out people get it from context (e.g., watching sad scenes in movies) but I don’t realize someone is sad unless they say it out loud, and don’t realize a situation is sad or creepy or dramatic or whatever either, so “yay, movie == fun/happy!” I’m taking courses (e.g., on the University of Bayes), but the explanations usually don’t make sense either.
This is something I’ve never experienced, nor has it ever occurred to me that it might be the case. To use the tooth brushing example: for me, that happens every night only because it’s part of the “Getting ready for bed” mental checklist. I’d like to share that checklist along with some annotations. It takes between 30 and 45 minutes from start to finish. This checklist began life some 20 years ago and has been carefully sculpted over that time to accommodate my own changing needs, as well as those of my partner and our relationship.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting you need to adopt this checklist or anything like it; rather I want to share a very mature and complex habit of mine that accomplishes many varied goals, and the performance of which now feels very continuous and normal to me. After this long, each item has been coordinated to flow neatly into the next, and each moves me closer to the goal of being asleep in bed by a certain time. Of course, I can’t always control that time, but I try to keep it within an hour of standard for health reasons. This checklist is one part of a larger but somewhat looser script that actually starts at dinner time and ends when my alarm goes off in the morning.
On occasion, I have skipped this entire process, falling asleep in whatever situation the evening leaves me in. I don’t recall ever being disturbed by this happening, but I do notice that I tend to feel a bit gross and groggy the next morning. Specifically, I deliberately notice that so that I remember that feeling if I ever get the idea that “I can skip it, just this once”. That way I have something to hold against the urge to make what I already know are poor choices for me.
Getting ready for bed
This list begins as soon as I notice it is after 20:30, and ends when I am in bed with the lights out.
Verbally prod partner into action. This promotes a more regular bedtime.
Locate cat and take her upstairs to the bathroom. Hold cat patiently while partner brushes cat’s teeth and fur. We keep the cat’s brush and toothbrush in the bathroom mostly because that’s where the next part of the checklist will need to be performed, and also because that’s where our toothbrushes live anyway.
Brush teeth using tools set on the sink for that purpose: If I don’t keep all the steps of tooth brushing visible, I usually forget to do it. e.g. When I run out of floss, it can be a week before I remember to get out a new spool if I don’t do so immediately.
Toothbrush
Floss
Gum Stimulator
Toilet and wash
Check that small child is sleeping peacefully. No longer strictly necessary (he’s five years old now and unlikely to forget to breathe or something), but it makes me happy to watch him sleep for a few seconds each night.
Move to bedroom and get dressed for bed. I have chosen to wear clothes during the day that are impractical and/or uncomfortable to sleep in. The goal here is to make sure I change my shirt and underwear every day.
Sit for 5-10 minutes of meditation. I use the Ten Percent Happier app for guided meditations in this time slot. The app can remind me if I forget, and there is a daily featured meditation if I’m not feeling up to choosing. The reason for this step is complicated, but can be summarised as “meditation is ridiculously beneficial to my cognitive functioning”.
Read aloud to partner for a few minutes. This is for the benefit of the relationship, and helps my partner unwind before bed.
Hair maintenance. My partner brushes and braids my hair before bed. This has combined relationship and hygiene benefits such as giving me a reason to wash the hair occasionally.
Make the bed suitable for sleeping in. I’ve heard some people do this in the morning! LOL
Lights out and sleep