How Do I Build a Routine With an Irregular Work Schedule?

I was twenty three years old, with a mortgage I barely understood, a baby who did not care what shift I was on, and a plant that moved my hours around every few weeks. You build a routine with an irregular work schedule by tying it to events instead of clock times, and by shrinking it until it fits your worst week instead of your best one. That is the whole answer. Not more willpower. Not a better planner. A routine that does not depend on the clock, because on a schedule like yours the clock is the one thing you do not control.

At twenty three I had the mortgage, the baby, and the full time job. My hours rotated. Some weeks I was in before the sun came up, some weeks I got home after the eleven o'clock news. I had bought a stack of books I meant to read and a notebook I meant to write in, and the two of them sat on the same shelf collecting the same dust for most of a year.

I kept telling myself I would start when things settled down. That is a sentence I would like to go back and take away from myself. Things did not settle down. Things have never settled down, not once in forty years, and I am sixty three now.

What finally changed was not my schedule. It was the size of the piece I was trying to fit into it. I stopped hunting for an hour. I started taking fifteen minutes, and I quit caring what time of day those fifteen minutes happened.

Why Does a Normal Routine Fall Apart on an Irregular Schedule?

Because nearly every routine you have ever been handed was written by somebody who works nine to five.

Read any article on building a daily routine and you will find the same bones. Wake at the same time. Journal before work. Gym at six. Wind down at nine. That is decent advice for a person whose Tuesday looks like their Thursday. If your Tuesday is a day shift and your Thursday starts at eleven at night, the advice is not just unhelpful. It quietly tells you that you are the problem.

You are not the problem. The design is.

Think about it the way I would think about a machine. When a machine only runs under perfect conditions, we do not call it disciplined on the days it runs. We call it fragile. We go back and build tolerance into it so it runs in the real plant, with the real humidity, the real operators and the real wash-down at the end of second shift. A routine is no different. If yours only works during a week that never actually happens, the routine needs redesigning. You do not.

That is the Law of Design doing its work. To maximize growth you have to build a strategy, and a strategy has to survive contact with the life you really have.

The Two Rules of a Routine With an Irregular Work Schedule

There are only two.

Rule one: anchor the habit to something that always happens, not to a time on the clock. Rule two: make the habit small enough to survive your worst week.

Everything after this is decoration.

Anchor It to Events, Not to the Clock

Your clock moves. Your sequence does not.

No matter which shift you are on, some things happen every single day in the same order. You wake up. You drink the first cup of coffee. You put the badge on. You take the first break. You walk back through your own front door. Those are anchors. They land at a different hour every week and they still land.

So instead of saying I will read at seven, say I will read for fifteen minutes after the first cup of coffee, whenever that cup happens. Instead of walking at lunch, walk ten minutes at your first break, whatever o'clock it lands on.

Pick one anchor. One. Write it on paper as a sentence with the blanks filled in: after I do this, I will do that, for this many minutes. Then put it where you will physically see it. The inside of the front door, the dashboard, or the refrigerator. Not an app you have to remember to open.

Build It for Your Worst Week, Not Your Best One

Here is where most of us go wrong, and I include myself.

We design the routine on a Sunday afternoon, which is the calmest hour of the week, and we design it for the person we are on a Sunday afternoon. That person has energy, an empty calendar, and strong opinions about what Thursday is going to look like. Thursday then shows up with a double and a sick kid, and the plan built by Sunday Jay gets run flat by Thursday Jay, who has nothing left to give it.

So build it for Thursday.

Ask one question. What is the smallest version of this I could still do on the worst day I have had in the last three months? Not an average day. The worst one. Whatever that answer is, that is your routine. Ten minutes of reading. One page of writing. One lap around the building. It will feel insulting at first, like it is too small to count.

It is supposed to feel too small. Too small is what survives. A ten minute habit you keep for a year beats a ninety minute habit you keep for eleven days and then feel guilty about for the next decade. I have done both. Only one of them ever changed anything.

How Do I Stay Consistent When Every Week Looks Different?

Stop measuring consistency in days and start measuring it in weeks.

A daily streak is a fine thing if you work the same hours every day. On a rotating schedule a streak is a trap, because the first swing shift snaps it, and the day a streak snaps is the day most people quit the whole project.

Set a weekly number instead. Four times a week. Not Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. Just four, whenever the four fit. Some weeks you will get them all in by Wednesday. Some weeks they all pile onto the back end. The week still counts.

That one change did more for me than everything else on this list put together. When the unit of measure is a week, a bad Tuesday is not a failure. It is a Tuesday, and you still have four days to make your number.

Keep a Record You Can Actually See

Write it down somewhere you will walk past on purpose.

I am not going to argue that a paper calendar is morally superior to an app. I will tell you that I have spent a working life watching people on a plant floor, and the thing that gets done is the thing that is visible to the person doing it. We did not hang production boards in the hallway because they were pretty. We hung them because a number you can see behaves differently than a number buried in a system.

Buy a cheap wall calendar. Make a mark on every day you did the thing. That is the entire system. At the end of the month you will not be guessing about whether you have been consistent. You will be looking straight at it.

Be Honest About What This Costs

This is the part most articles skip, so here it is straight.

Fifteen minutes is not free. It comes out of something. At twenty three mine came out of television, and later it came out of sleep, and I will tell you plainly that taking it out of sleep was a bad trade I kept making for about two years too long. If you work rotating shifts, your rest is already taking a beating. Do not fund your growth out of it.

Find the fifteen minutes somewhere that can afford to lose them. The phone is right there holding a lot more than fifteen minutes, and it will not miss them.

The other cost is social. The first time you protect a small block of time, somebody notices, and somebody gives you a hard time about it. You will have to say a version of no out loud. That is real, it is uncomfortable, and nobody warns you about it in advance.

What Do I Do When It Falls Apart for a Week?

You start again at the next anchor. Not Monday. Not the first of the month. The next time you pour that first cup of coffee.

Everybody falls off. I have fallen off for a week, for a month, and one memorable stretch for the better part of a year. The difference between people who grow and people who do not is almost never the falling off. It is the size of the gap between falling off and starting again.

Make that gap short and unceremonious. No fresh notebook. No new plan. No Sunday afternoon redesign with colored pens. Just the next cup of coffee and ten minutes.

And if you fall off three times in a row at the same spot, that is not a willpower problem either. That is the design talking to you. Shrink it again, or move the anchor.

Common Questions About Building a Routine With an Irregular Schedule

Can you build a habit if you cannot do it at the same time every day?

Yes. Same time is the easiest cue, not the only one, and it happens to be the cue people with ordinary schedules were handed for free. What a habit actually needs is a reliable trigger, a small action, and enough repetition that you quit negotiating with yourself about it. A trigger can be an event just as well as an hour. After the first cup of coffee is every bit as dependable as seven in the morning, and on your schedule it is a good deal more dependable.

How long does it take to build a routine if you work rotating shifts?

Longer than the twenty one days people like to quote, and that number was never real to begin with. Honest answer, plan on a few months before it stops feeling like a decision you have to make. Count it in weeks you hit your number rather than consecutive days, or a rotating schedule will tell you that you failed roughly every third week when you did nothing of the kind.

Should I use a habit tracker app if my schedule is unpredictable?

Use one if you already open it for something else. Most app based tracking dies quietly because opening the app is itself a habit you have not built yet. A paper calendar on the wall by the door has beaten every app I have tried, for one boring reason. I walk past the door.

Am I just not a routine person?

I have never met one. There are people whose routines fit their lives and people whose routines were borrowed from somebody with a different life. If you have ever kept anything going for a season, a league, a lift, a show you never missed, you are a routine person. You had an anchor and a size that worked. Build this one the same way.

Reflection Questions

1. What is one thing that happens every single day of your life, no matter which shift you are on?
2. What is the smallest version of the habit you want that you could still do on the worst day you have had in the last three months?
3. What have you been waiting to start until things settle down, and how long have you been waiting now?
4. Where are those fifteen minutes going to come from, honestly, and can that place afford to lose them?
5. The last time you fell off, how many days went by before you tried again?

The Bottom Line

Pick one anchor this week and one habit small enough to embarrass you. Write the sentence on paper. After I pour the first cup of coffee, I will read for ten minutes. Stick it on the refrigerator and make a mark on a calendar every time you do it. One week. That is the assignment.

A routine with an irregular work schedule is not a watered down version of a real routine. It is a routine built for the life you actually have instead of the one in the article.

So here is my question back to you. If your schedule never settles down, and mine never did, what is the thing you have been putting off until it does?

This ties back to The Law of Design — one of John C. Maxwell's 15 Laws of Growth.