The Most Expensive Thing You Own is a Bad Routine
I love routines! I have had morning and evening routines ever since I was a child. Of course the routines have changed at different stages of my life, but for me having a routine is a great way to ease into the day and to end it by easing into sleep. I have a personal interest in knowing other people's routines and if there is something I could be doing different that might make any of my personal routines calmer, easier, and more pleasant, thus improving life. Same goes for work routines. I recently picked up an interesting way of organizing my calendar with visual cues. That way, I can just glance at the dozens of blocks occupying my time and know exactly what I am doing without having to read the names of the meetings.
But routines aren't just morning coffee and calendar blocks. Routines also extend to how you react to certain situations. I am talking about your knee-jerk reactions to events in your personal life, at work, the stock market, and more. And that second kind of routine, the one nobody thinks to audit, is usually the expensive one.
Your Reactions Are a Routine Too
Most people think of a "routine" as something you build on purpose - a morning coffee, a workout schedule, a Sunday meal prep. But your reaction to a bad email, a bad day in the market, a fight with your spouse, or a surprise bill is a routine too. It's just one you never designed. It happens automatically, which is exactly why you've never questioned it.
Here's the tell - if you can predict your own reaction before it even happens, it's not a decision. It's a routine.
The Knee-jerk Tax
A bad reaction-routine doesn't just cost you a bad moment. It costs you real money, real trust, or real time, and it costs you the same way every single time, because that's what a routine does.
The market drops 10% and your routine is to sell. Not because you ran the numbers, but because that's just what you do when things go red. That's not a strategy, it's a reflex, and it's the single most reliable way to turn a paper loss into a permanent one.
You have a rough day at work and your routine is to snap at your kids the second you walk in the door. You didn't decide to do that. It just happens. And it costs you something that's a lot harder to rebuild than a stock position.
An unexpected expense shows up and your routine is a small anxiety spiral followed by an impulse purchase "to feel better." Nobody budgeted for that. It wasn't a plan. It was a pattern running on autopilot.
Why Bad Reaction-routines Are Worse Than Bad Morning Routines
A messy morning routine costs you 20 minutes and a rushed breakfast. That's it. A bad reaction-routine compounds. It's the one that torches a portfolio in a single afternoon, or damages a relationship in a single sentence, or turns one bad day into a bad month.
That's the actual thesis here. The most expensive thing you own isn't a car, or a subscription, or a bad habit around spending. It's a pattern you've never once stopped to look at.
Sometimes You Need a Bad Routine to Learn a Lesson
You can read this entire post, you can watch hundreds of YouTube videos on routines and reactions and still not change your behaviour. If you are that kind of person, then you just need to experience the effects of a bad routine to learn a lesson. You might need more than just one bad routine. Perhaps you need to make many mistakes to learn a lesson. I have mentioned this in another post but never gone into detail what my mistake was.
I was frugal and started saving for retirement, for major life events and building a safety net when I was 19. That was great, but I had a bad routine where I would treat myself every time my income went up. I never stopped saving/investing, but I could have done so much better if I adjusted my savings rate to account for raises. It took me years to break the routine…7 years to be exact. What worked was sitting down and creating a spreadsheet comparing what I had been doing to what I could have been doing. The difference was eye-opening.
Want to read more? Check out my musings on how you need to make mistakes.
Auditing Your Reaction Routines
You already audit your calendar. You already audit your morning. Here's how to audit the routine you've never looked at.
- Name the trigger. Be specific - a market drop, a bad meeting, an argument, an unexpected bill.
- Name your default reaction. Not what you'd like to do, what you actually do.
- Ask whether that reaction is a decision or a reflex. If you could have predicted it in advance, it's a reflex.
- Build one small interrupt. A pause, a rule, a script, the same way you'd build any other routine on purpose.
That last step is the whole game. You don't need to overhaul your personality. You just need one deliberate step between the trigger and the reaction, the same 20-minute-earlier alarm clock logic you already use to make your mornings calmer.
My interrupt with the kids is to simply walk away for a few minutes. I vocalize that when there is chaos and I know I would say something bad. It usually takes me just a few minutes to reset, come back and explain to my kids why their behavior is bad in a calm voice.
Let's Go Back to the Start
I built my morning and evening routines on purpose, over years, because I wanted them calmer, easier, and more pleasant. I did the same thing with my calendar. It never once occurred to me to do the same thing with the way I react to a bad market day or a bad meeting, until I noticed how predictable I'd become.
The routines you build on purpose are the ones that make life better. The ones you never examine are the ones running you. Audit the second kind the same way you audit the first.
