Developing Personal Rhythms

Everything in nature has a rhythm. Sunrise, sunset. Seasons. Moons. (I watch the squirrel outside my home dash off every morning and return to the tree in the evening. Usually complaining at me if I am in the chair swing.)

The thing about rhythms is that they actually seem to be good for us.

One of the challenges of the digital world is that everything is 24/7 creating work environments that make it easy to live in reactive mode. Which can leave us responding to requests and challenges, rather than proactively creating.

Rhythms can help with this.

I once helped a friend by participating in her research project which looked at life in 30 minute increments. My big epiphany was that if you start logging what you do every 30 minutes of every day, you find that most every day is exactly the same. It doesn't feel the same because the conversations are so different, but the type of activities that you engage in on a daily basis are actually shockingly homogenous.
Most of us drive to work at the same time each day. Answer e-mail at the same time. Eat at the same times (and often the same types of food). Brush our teeth at the same times. Watch TV...yada, yada.  The point of  the project was that if we really want to experience change in our life, it starts with changing what we do with the 30 minute blocks.

Maybe today is the day we start looking at the rhythms in our life. Which of the blocks do we need to change to take us out of reactive mode? Because to live our dreams, most of us have to create.

It is up to us to find the time for it.