Do routines help or hinder your productivity?

Why do so many people have a negative view of routines? I believe they are essential for our mental well-being, prioritisation, and habit-building. 🧠 Routines help us take charge of our mental wellbeing Going through the most challenging period of my life, a high school psychologist helped me climb out of the pit I was in. She told me to take 1 minute each day to rate how I felt and write down what I had done. Over time, it made me understand what differentiated good from bad days. It gave me a tool to take ownership of my own well-being and became the foundation of my approach to routines today. ❗Routines help us prioritise Many of life's biggest decisions come from how we allocate our time. When we leave every day to chance, it's hard to prioritise what we say is important to us. With a clear routine, we can easily shift time from one area of our life (like work or exercise) to another (like spending time with our kids or reading). Routines provide a framework for prioritising the things we care about. I regularly review my routines and ask myself if I'm happy with the trade-offs I'm making. Do I spend enough time with my family? Do I make time to learn? If not, I adjust my routines. 🛠 Routines help us build habits Habit stacking is a proven way to make habit-building easier, and routines provide multiple "triggers" for stacking new habits. Start your routine with a daily walk? Tag a minute of reflection onto it. End your day reading a book? Add a minute of gratefulness. Those are just 2 of my own examples. In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear says, "You don't rise to the level of your ambitions. You fall to the level of your systems." I couldn't agree more. What do you think? Do you see the value in routines?