278 Ritual, Routine And Practice – What’s The Difference?

In This Episode…

During a conversation with a colleague this morning, we discussed the difference between ritual, routine and practice.

I thought it worthy enough to share in today’s episode.

Episode Show Notes…

Routine, Practice & Ritual – What’s The Difference

I had an excellent conversation with my good friend and occasional collaborator Pete Clark today whilst we were working on our next project together. We were looking at the best way to instil new behaviours and got onto the subject of the difference between Routine, Practice & Ritual.

Now Pete is a well read and very experienced kind of guy when it comes to people development so this was a really interesting conversation.

He asked me what my thoughts were on the the difference between the three words.

So I told him. Listen to the episode to get the full explanation, but here’s a summary.

Routine – the more dogmatic, scheduled activities that require willpower and discipline to get done.
Practice – a principled approach to an activity or lifestyle choice.
Ritual – what you get when you give your activities meaning, significance and purpose.

Getting On Top Of E Mail

A few weeks ago I decided I needed to get on top of email. And so I did. I managed to reduce it massively. Since then I’ve pretty much remained on top of it.

I’ve been officially checking it twice a day and then dipping into it when I have to for the task I am doing.

However I notice I am still reading emails and then not doing anything about them. Imagine a 5 year old on Christmas morning opening up a present, looking inside the box, doing nothing with the contents and then moving on to the next present to unwrap and repeating the process.

Well that pretty much sums up how I occasionally approach my e mail

Sometimes I am not even conscious I am doing it.

It’s one of those things I’ve just noticed I am doing after the fact.

It is one of those things I need to get on top of and change because it (IMHO) is not consistent with the behaviour of a peak performer.

It’s Not More Information I Need…

I’ve been buying more books today. Amazon have had another one of their daily deals today where they sell some good non-fiction kindle books for 99pence each. I always have a look because there are some great books that get reduced to a fraction of their usual price.

Today was no exception.

I invested in a book on behaviours, one on procrastination, another on statistics, one on the day of the life of an ancient Egyptian, another one on selling, a classic I already have in paperback but thought I’d upgrade to the 2020 version and one on discipline.

I explain the purchases as essential professional research. Technically it is. But I think the bright shiny object syndrome also kicked in.

Because actually I don’t really need anymore information for me to improve my productivity.

I don’t need to know anymore to move forward.

What I really need to do is do more with what I do know.

Now there is an irony here and let me explain why.

I am taking a sales training course with sales and motivational guru Gavin Ingham. We’ve come to the end of the training and he made a point today about applying what we’ve learnt.

He then quoted me by saying “knowing and not doing is not knowing” as he made the point he was ceasing the content flow but upping the application element of the training.