Your Life Is Not a To-Do List

We feel we should be doing something useful with every spare minute. And when we aren’t, there’s that nagging feeling we’re falling behind. But when did being happy stop being a good enough use of our time?

Somewhere along the way, having a morning became a competitive sport.

Waking up was no longer sufficient. You needed to hydrate, stretch, get sunlight, write something grateful and ideally have an experience involving cold water. All before checking your phone, which you had almost certainly checked while reading about why you shouldn’t.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to feel better. A walk can be lovely. Going to bed at a sensible hour has much to recommend it. But the language surrounding our daily habits has become remarkably managerial. We build them, track them, stack them. We examine our mornings as though there might be a disappointing employee hiding somewhere between the shower and breakfast.

It is possible to become so occupied with arranging a better life that you barely notice what the current one feels like.

This is where the work of Harvard Business School professor Michael Norton offers an intriguing change of emphasis. In The Ritual Effect, Norton explores the significance we attach to everyday actions. Habits and rituals can look much the same from the outside, but the emotional investment differs. A habit allows us to do something with little thought. A ritual carries meaning. The boundary is less a dividing line than a spectrum.

Consider your morning coffee.

There is the coffee you drink while hunting for your keys. And there is the coffee you make in a particular cup, taking it to the window for a few minutes before anyone needs anything from you.

The ingredients might be identical. Your relationship with those five minutes is quite different.

You might recognise this more easily when something interrupts it. Someone uses your cup. The radio isn’t working. You have to leave early. You still get your coffee, but you miss the small occasion you usually make of it.

For all the attention we give to changing our habits, it is worth being curious about the ones we would be sorry to lose.

Perhaps you always visit the same bakery on Saturday. Perhaps you play a particular record while cooking, or take the slightly longer route home because you like seeing the sea. These choices may have no impressive effect on your output. You might struggle to explain them to someone who wanted a practical reason.

Yet they give a day its particular character. Saturday feels like Saturday partly because you come home carrying that paper bag.

The same idea becomes especially interesting when other people are involved.

Research by Norton and colleagues Ximena Garcia-Rada and Ovul Sezer found that couples who reported sharing rituals also reported greater relationship satisfaction and commitment. A crucial detail was mutual recognition: both partners needed to understand the activity as a meaningful part of their relationship. The same regular activity could be experienced as a ritual by one couple and an ordinary routine by another.

Think of the difference between eating together because you both happen to be hungry and protecting a particular dinner because it has become something you look forward to all week.

It needn’t be elaborate. There is no requirement for linen napkins or an ambitious recipe. It might be a shared breakfast, a familiar walk, or an unnecessarily prolonged goodbye at the front door. Its importance comes from what the people involved understand it to mean.

This offers a rather appealing way to think about everyday affection. We often imagine that making someone feel loved requires finding something new to say or organising something memorable. Familiar gestures deserve some credit too. There can be enormous tenderness in knowing exactly how someone will greet you.

Of course, the temptation is to turn all this into another assignment. Identify three meaningful rituals. Schedule them. Purchase the appropriate ceramics.

But you could begin by noticing what already matters.

Which part of your day do you anticipate with pleasure? What do you and a friend always end up doing together? Which small family custom would you like to keep, even though nobody remembers how it started?

You may find that something worth preserving is already there, squeezed into the edges of a busy week.

You could give it a little more room. Sit down for the tea you usually drink standing up. Put on the music you keep forgetting you love. Make a regular arrangement with the friend you are always vaguely hoping to see.

Treat these as experiments. Some will feel contrived and disappear. Others will become familiar enough that, one day, you will realise you have something you would miss.

Good habits have their place. It is helpful to take care of ourselves without having to renegotiate the terms every morning. But when we consider what deserves repeating, pleasure, affection and personal meaning belong in the conversation too.

An ordinary Tuesday takes up quite a lot of a life.

It deserves something to look forward to.