Intern in the city: Routine, regularity and habit.

Its residents – particularly young professionals – maintain weekly Barry’s classes, carefully managed social calendars and Sunday meal-prepping rituals. At the same time, we’re (somewhat forcefully) incumbent in a culture that stresses anything can happen at anytime.

On Tuesday, you are invited to a free salsa class the following evening. On Friday, someone sends you a link to a one-off $10 Charli XCX concert. By Saturday, your friends are telling you about going to Amber Room to party with the Knicks team.

In effort to ‘make the most’ out of it all, the city without limits begins to wear you down if you find yourself lapsing from a state of constant readiness.

Habit and regularity

While that spontaneity often feels good in the moment, a lack of routine can feel distinctly unhealthy. The result is an internal tug-of-war between making it to a workout class or getting an early night, and surrendering to the more reckless possibilities that make New York feel like New York. Maintaining an equilibrium becomes difficult. Am I supposed to prioritize regularity, or accept a more impulsive and unpredictable way of living?

Admittedly, routine has never come naturally to me. As a child, I moved from archery to jiu-jitsu to water polo, enthusiastically taking up each new activity before struggling to sustain my engagement with it. My interests weren’t shallow, more restless. Once novelty became repetition, my attention tended to move elsewhere.

Yet we are consistently taught the merits of regularity. We build gym routines, diet plans, morning practices and organized calendars. Habit is presented as a form of self-improvement: ‘repeat’ the golden word and regularity a sort of socio-personal merit good.

In user experience work too, best practices follow the principles of structure. Designers align journeys with intuition, place familiar functions where people expect to find them and remove unneeded friction.

And yet branding agencies seem obsessed with disruption, innovation and differentiation. UX asks us to respect established behavior, branding asks us to interrupt it. We’re told to break convention and deploy an eagerness to the new, while having to maintain the perfect measure of reservation and structure.

So is regularity always the good thing we’re told it is?

I read a recent article around the nature of email subscriptions. They’re embedded in our lives, with the intent being for organizations to integrate themselves into our routines. In theory, they enable regular engagement. In practice, they can tend to breed passivity – and perhaps even disengagement. When we have 23 unwelcome visitors in our morning inbox, ‘participation’ seems to be putting it more and more generously.

It seems then that efforts to build routine, to develop habit, can backfire. There is continuation of an action, but without sustaining our attention.

Outside of subscriptions and organization-user dynamics, the same is true. If I meal prep chicken and rice for four consecutive days, routine is built, externally structure is seen, and there is continuation of an action.

But my taste buds grow tired, my passion in the culinary endeavor falters, and it starts to barely feel like ‘eating’ in the more experiential sense. An effort to build regular engagement with the subject, ends up disengaging me from it almost entirely.

So then where lies the value of routine? Where does habit become active participation, not mere continuation?

Perhaps the answer is that routine should create capacity, not confinement.

In our personal lives, that means building enough structure to protect our time, energy and wellbeing, without allowing repetition to become an end in itself. If those foundations are well set, perhaps they create more room for spontaneity.

In the worlds of brand and UX, it means balancing familiarity with renewed attention. UX should provide the consistency that allows people to navigate intuitively and act without friction. Within that framework, brand should provide the distinctiveness, relevance and surprise that cements their positioning.

Jacob Whiteley-Guest, Intern, Living New York