Routine

“ Actions that begin as proper voluntary actions—on the spur of pleasure and pain—often pass into a mechanical routine, and are persisted in even when they thwart our pleasures. Any one placed for a number of years in a position of danger, and habituated to troublesome precautions, is almost sure to keep up the same routine, after the occasion has ceased ”

“ What psychologists have laboriously treated under the caption of association of ideas has little to do with ideas and everything to do with the influence of habit upon recollection and perception. A habit, a routine habit, when interfered with generates uneasiness, sets up a protest in favor of restoration and a sense of need of some expiatory act, or else it goes off in casual reminiscence. ”

“ Both sorts of effort may be of either the routine or the innovative type. In neither workmanship nor acquisition can one fix upon routine as the "normal" type, hoping to derive or to explain away the inevitable residue of "outstanding cases." ”

“ The benefits of routine are obvious: any life which exists for the regular performance of specific duties, above all any life which is carried on in a community, must depend very largely upon fixed hours and carefully organised occupations. ”

“ Your mind is free for other thoughts while you perform the task easily and perfectly. Your method of doing the work has finally become a habit which saves the effort of conscious attention. The details of your routine work are directed by the subconscious. The habit will be energy and time saving in proportion to the accuracy of your first conscious efforts spent on the new undertaking. Thus, useful habit is the result of active effort.
We can acquire habits of thinking and habits of feeling as well as habits of doing. ”

“ My answer is that the force of habit must be conserved and still further strengthened, but that analysis, too, becomes necessary at this stage. And why? Because habits are always specialized. A person governed by habits falls into a certain routine, and moves along easily and safely as long as the conditions repeat [Pg 178] themselves to which his habits are adjusted. But when confronted by a totally new set of conditions, he is often quite lost and helpless. ”

“ We need some imaginative stimulus, some not impossible ideal such as may shape vague hope, and transform it into effective desire, to carry us year after year, without disgust, through the routine-work which is so large a part of life. ”

“ Impulses and interests that are not manifested in the regular course of serviceable activity or in recreation demand and secure a special manifestation. And it is interesting to note that there are two opposite forms. Some phenomena are characteristic of persons engaged in a routine monotonous life of toil attended with fatigue and hardship. And others are found in persons who are intellectual and executive, men whose activities are anything but monotonous, but are narrowed through over-specialization. ”

“ Discipline, habit, and character, appear to be activity crystallized in seeking adaptation to our environments. What is the truth that stands out in relief? Clearly, that character, habit, and discipline, are the reflex upon ourselves of activity, moral, mental, or physical. Whence it seems to follow that useless or vicious activity will appear as useless or vicious character and discipline. ”

“ The knowledge you have acquired during long years of study, Habits of study. has called into daily exercise your perseverance, your watchfulness, and self-control. These habits must have excluded a host of follies and vices. In the morning of life, when the blandishments of passion take the reason prisoner, these habits, I persuade myself, have sustained and invigorated your mind, have imparted a freshness and a healthful tone to its enjoyments and fitted it for the more arduous purposes of your work in the world. ”

“ We would now direct your attention to habit—one of the most obvious and important elements in the formation of character. Its influence is felt in every sphere of your activity, its power extends to every faculty of your nature, and affects your personal, social, civil, and religious thought, feeling, and conduct. The nature of habit may be considered in two lights: first, an ease and excellence in doing a thing from having done it frequently ”

“ You must seek opportunities to practice. You must realize that your life is in the making, that you are making it, that it is to a large extent composed of habits. These habits you are building. They are built only by practice. Get practice. When practicing, fulfill the psychological conditions. Work under the most favorable circumstances as to length of periods, intervals, etc.
(3) Allow no exceptions. You should fully realize the great influence of exceptions. When you start in to form a habit, allow nothing to turn you from your course. ”

“ That is to say, in a general way, the most ancient and ingrained of the habits which govern the individual's life—those habits that touch his existence as an organism—are the most persistent and imperative. ”

“ Is it, then, that the unfolding of a human being in body and mind is so comparatively simple a process that any one may superintend and regulate it with no preparation whatever? If not--if the process is, with one exception, more complex than any in Nature, and the task of ministering to it one of the surpassing difficulty--is it not madness to make no provision for such a task!? ”

“ But Habit may be a Lever.--But habit, to be the lever to lift the child, must work contrary to nature, or at any rate, independently of her.
Directly we begin to look out for the working of habit on these lines, examples crowd upon us: there are the children trained in careful habits, who never soil their clothes; those trained in reticent habits, who never speak of what is done at home, and answer indiscreet questions with 'I don't know' ”

“ I want to help YOU to form the habit of thinking over each day's activities in the quiet, [Pg 13] relaxed, uncolored, unprejudiced, secluded environment of your home. When the day's work is over, spend fifteen or twenty minutes each evening in seclusion, and with closed eyes, size yourself up. Think over your daily round and the work you are doing. Are you getting the best out of yourself? Or are you plodding along aimlessly, scattering your energy in a haphazard, hit-or-miss fashion that benefits nobody? Are you growing, or are you standing still? ”

“ See, then, ye members of the Christian home, to the habits you are forming. Form the habit of "doing all thing’s decently and in order." Let the work and duties of each day be done according to method. ”

“ Their memories set, their opinions set, their methods of expression set, their delights recur and recur, they convert initiative into mechanical habit day by day. Let them taste any pleasure and each time they taste it they deepen a need. At last their habits become imperative needs. With such a disposition, external circumstances and suggestions, I venture to believe, may make a man either into an habitual church-goer or an habitual drunkard, an habitual toiler or an habitual rake. ”

“ Habits as Expressions of Growth.—We have already noted that plasticity is the capacity to retain and carry over from prior experience factors which modify subsequent activities. This signifies the capacity to acquire habits, or develop definite dispositions. We have now to consider the salient features of habits. In the first place, a habit is a form of executive skill, of efficiency in doing. A habit means an ability to use natural conditions as means to ends. It is an active control of the environment through control of the organs of action. ”

“ If we get into the habit of doing our work thoroughly and regularly, according to some definite system, we encourage the habits of contentment, calmness, efficiency, and happiness. If we do our work spasmodically, irregularly, without system, if we gossip between times, we are eternally trying to catch up, so we encourage the habits of procrastination, discontent, inefficiency, fault-finding, and failure. We must be master or victim of our habits. ”

“ Definite habits, social, moral, religious, intellectual, professional, etc., will be necessary for efficiency. We should know what these various habits are, and should then set about the work of establishing them with system and determination, just as we would the building of a house. ”

“ This law of habit we may reasonably regard as exemplified in the life of every individual [Pg 75] in the long line of genealogical ascent that connects us with our humblest ancestors, in so far as every permanent advance in the scale of life implies a basis of habit embodied in a structure which has been perfected by practice. ”

“ Parents and Teachers must lay down Lines of Habit.--All this is nothing new; we have always known that 'use is second nature,' and that 'man is a bundle of habits.' It was not the fact, but the application of the fact, and the physiology of habit, that were new and exceedingly valuable ideas to me, and I hope they may be of some use to the reader. ”

“ What has to be attended to is the discipline of habits, that of steady preoccupation, a concentration of attention leading to future thoroughness. Then the habit of neatness, that of sociability, the early sympathy toward a sufferer, a good, square, friendly acquaintance with Mother Nature's objective department. ”

“ Now the way of life that I preach is a habit to be acquired gradually by long and steady repetition. It is the practice of living for the day only, and for the day's work, Life in day-tight compartments. ”

“ Before discussing the practical methods which are at once their starting-point and their result, we will consider in turn the series of exercises that must be performed each day in order to keep oneself in the condition of physical well-being which allows of the accomplishment of moral reform. ”

“ Our volitional habits depend, then, first, on what the stock of ideas is which we have; and, second, on the habitual coupling of the several ideas with action or inaction respectively. How is it when an alternative is presented to you for choice, and you are uncertain what you ought to do? ”

“ Accustom yourself, each evening, to arrange in your own mind the meals for the next day, and also the extra work to be done by others, and what you will do yourself. This habit promotes order and system, and gives quietness and ease to the movement of the whole family machinery. ”

“ Voluntary actions may, by constant repetition, become quasi-reflex in character. The intellectual phase is abbreviated away. Habits are once voluntary and deliberated actions becoming mechanical in this way, and slipping out of the sphere of mind. ”

“ Begin Well.—It is a great point for young men to begin well; for it is the beginning of life that that system of conduct is adopted which soon assumes the force of habit. Begin well, and the habit of doing well will become quite easy, as easy as the habit of doing badly. Pitch upon that course of life which is the most excellent, and habit will render it the most delightful. ”

“ The exercises may be very simple—dropping for a time an intensely interesting book at the most thrilling page of the story; jumping out of bed at the first moment of waking; walking home when one is perfectly able to do so, but when the temptation is to take a car; talking to some disagreeable person and trying to make the conversation pleasant. These daily exercises in moral discipline will have a wondrous tonic effect on man’s whole moral nature. ”

“ The only way for such persons, is, to begin with a little at a time. Let them select some three or four things, and resolutely attempt to conquer at these points. In time, a habit will be formed, of doing a few things at regular periods, and in a systematic way. ”

“ Fourth, it is without question true that in so far as the habits fixed are "school habits" or "Sunday habits," or any other special type of habits, formed only in connection with special situations, to that extent we have no reason to expect moral conduct in the broader life situations. The habits formed are those that will be put into practice, and they are the only ones we are sure of. ”

“ For thirty years my business has lain in my study. The practice of early rising was, I am confident, the grand preservative of health, through many years of hard work—the hours gained being given, not to book or pen, but to activity. ”

“ Order, or regularity, is an essential for success in human affairs—moral, mental, or physical; but especially in the latter. The successful conduct of large business organizations is only possible by regularity in the performance of every detail of duty. ”

“ A habit also marks an intellectual disposition. Where there is a habit, there is acquaintance with the materials and equipment to which action is applied. There is a definite way of understanding the situations in which the habit operates. Modes of thought, of observation and reflection, enter as forms of skill and of desire into the habits that make a man an engineer, an architect, a physician, or a merchant. ”

“ If regularity in the hours for meals be strictly observed, and the quantity and character of the meals carefully considered, the system will rapidly acquire the habit of expecting sustenance at those hours, and regularity, like virtue, will be its own reward. ”

“ These traits of a bad habit are precisely the things which are most instructive about all habits and about ourselves. They teach us that all habits are affections, that all have projectile power, and that a predisposition formed by a number of specific acts is an immensely more intimate and fundamental part of ourselves than are vague, general, conscious choices. All habits are demands for certain kinds of activity; and they constitute the self. ”

“ By definite instruction and advice with regard to exercise, position, training, habit, pain, occupation of mind and diversion of mind, patients may be profoundly influenced, and gradually made to take on an entirely new attitude of mind towards themselves. ”

“ Conversely, a general or a local sense of well-being will seem to demand expression in action. A little abandon at such moments will suggest exercises that are both pleasant and profitable to the body and interesting and enjoyable to the mind. ”