Early in my career, I recall hearing a seasoned entrepreneur on the other side of the I made it curve describe what he valued most — flexibility. Many years of hard work had paid off, and he finally had the ability to choose what he did (or didn’t do), along with when and where he worked.

I was enthralled. At the time, flexibility seemed like the ultimate aspiration; the freedom to choose what I worked on and when. No one looking over your shoulder. No one dictating deadlines. It all sounded so inspiring.

But like many things in life, flexibility works best only in moderation.

Yes, the benefits associated with flexibility are important: The ability to shift your schedule to help your top client. Have lunch with a friend when they’re in town for only a short time. Attend a mid-afternoon school recital.

In today’s workplace, savvy companies are recognizing the benefits of giving individuals the flexibility to decide whether to work in the office or virtually. Flexibility grants teams and individuals the autonomy to determine what works best to meet the needs of their combined business and personal needs.

But flexibility doesn’t help us with when we do our work.

In fact, flexibility often invites procrastination. Nothing stalls progress more than having an endless amount of time to complete a task. Ironically, our clearest days can sometimes be our least productive. Why do this now when my afternoon is wide open?

When we have too much of any resource, including our time, we are not as careful about how we use it. When we use a deadline to drive our productivity, we clearly define what we’ll do and when we’ll do it.

In practice, structure is what gives us the balance and freedom we crave.

If you don’t have enough time for your core priorities, the solution is to add more structure to your days.

Sure, an occasional wide-open day, like those we experience when we’re on vacation, can be beautifully renewing. But on a daily basis, too much flexibility often leaves us struggling to find enough time to get it all done.

I don’t need to remind you your time is constantly under attack. The free time you seek to focus on your core priorities will never magically appear. Building a solid structure you can use to protect your time and energy is one of the best investments you can make to prioritize what matters most.

I call that structure your Proactive Routine. A Proactive Routine is a tool you can use to create boundaries around your top three core priorities, so they receive your concentrated, consistent, and focused attention. And in this world of distraction, attention is your most valuable resource if you want to achieve optimal results.

Imagine starting every day with a complicated puzzle. Your quest is to find a home for every piece before moving onto other things. Would you feel drained before even starting your day? This is what happens when we try to mix an abundance of tasks with unbridled flexibility.

Our daily tasks and activities are a bit like puzzle pieces. Fitting our tasks into limited time slots gets harder and harder the more tasks we need to complete. Having to do this each and every day is infinitely more challenging and creates a constantly shifting schedule, one that needs to be carefully reconstructed each day.

Flexibility requires you to make the same timing decisions — when to work on a project, when to meet with a colleague, when to exercise — again and again. The more decisions you must make, the more effort you expend. Plus, you are more likely to make suboptimal decisions as decision fatigue sets in. The result is you spend more time sorting and less time doing. This leads to work overload, delayed results, procrastination, and complication.

In contrast, a structured routine built around your core priorities simplifies your days. Routines automate the daily struggle of finding time for what you value most.

Think about your living space. Just as having well-defined “homes” for your belongings simplifies life, the same is true for your time. Routines help you create homes in your schedule for different types of work and block time for what matters most before other tasks get in the way. This is how you make the most of your time.

The power of routine

One of the best ways I can demonstrate the power of routine is when it comes to one of my own priorities: writing. Writing has been one of my core priorities for about two decades, but it sits among other priorities, ones that can easily overtake my time if I let them. For many years, I was flexible about when I wrote. By relegating this essential task to my free time, it simply wasn’t getting done. I’d be in bed beside a sleeping child working on my laptop and struggling to keep my eyes open. Other days, I simply ran out of time altogether. I knew I wasn’t investing enough time to achieve my writing goals. I was too busy trying to overcome the urgent deadlines, shifting priorities, and overscheduling.

I finally acknowledged the underlying issue preventing me from writing: my flexible approach.

For years, my writing coach, Daphne Gray-Grant, encouraged me to devote a small amount of time at the start of my day to writing, regardless of what else I needed to do that day. “Start with your most important task, not your most urgent task.”

When I built a morning writing routine, I brought fresh morning energy to this important task and became much more consistent. I didn’t stumble upon found time; I protected time. Once I fortified my schedule, I started to see results.

As for the other time-sensitive tasks? I managed to fit them into the rest of the day. We always seem to find time for urgent tasks. Ironically, it is the less time-sensitive tasks we struggle to find time for.

This is not a science. I’m not suggesting you adopt an unyielding schedule; one you stick to with unwavering rigidity. This simply won’t work (and will annoy everyone around you). Rather, the secret is to strike the right balance between flexibility and consistency, adding structure to your days and knowing when you’re willing to flex.

Ultimately, using a structure like a Proactive Routine, provides the guarantee you will be able to fortify your schedule and protect time for what you value most. And that is worth giving up some flexibility.

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