Routines, Habits, and Why You've Been Getting Them Mixed Up

Most people think the goal is to turn all their routines into habits. That belief is quietly wrecking a lot of good routines.

I've been hearing this come up over and over in my community, and I finally had to address it head-on. So many women are beating themselves up over something that isn't even a real measure of success. In this episode, I'm clearing up the confusion between routines and habits once and for all, and sharing why the answer might completely change how you feel about the routines you already have.

What You'll Learn:

• Why the most common definition of "success" with routines is completely wrong
• The one thing a routine actually needs to be 
• The real reason copying someone else's routine almost always backfires
• Two traps that are probably keeping your routines from sticking

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Thanks for tuning in!
Megan 🩷🐝

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:59

I have several routines I've been doing for years, and most of those are not a habit. And that is actually 100% fine. Welcome to the Work Life Harmony Podcast. Guess what? You don't have to feel constantly overwhelmed, exhausted, and stressed out. There is another way. When you have the right systems and tools to plan and manage your time, you can live a life of harmony. If you're ready to stop feeling overwhelmed, this is the show for you. Hey friends, welcome back to Work Life Harmony. Today we're going to be talking about the difference between routines versus habits. Because I've been seeing this coming up in my community a lot. And a lot of women are getting kind of the subtle differences between these two wrong. When we do that, it can cause a lot of serious downstream problems, the biggest ones being guilt and negative self-talk. Now, before we dive into the differences here, I really want you to understand the importance of this conversation. I actually just got a message from one of my top program students the other day. And here's what she emailed in. She said, Megan, thanks to you. I realized I'd been doing routines all wrong. After watching your training on routines and then learning the right way to create a morning routine, everything changed. Not only do I now enjoy my mornings, but I'm getting so much more done every week, but I'm way less stressed. All right. I wanted to share that with you because that is the power of understanding the difference between a routine and habit. And then more importantly, how to create routines for yourself the right way. All right. And that's exactly what we're going to be diving into here today. Now, why is it so important to understand the differences here? Well, what happens is I see a lot of people feeling and talking about the fact that they think success is when we master habits. And I'll hear people say, Yeah, well, it's just not a habit yet, right? And they're beating themselves up. They're claiming that they haven't achieved success or they aren't doing things right when something isn't a habit. All right. And because they're striving for habits, and I'm going to give you the definition of the differences between the two here in a minute, but because people are striving for habits and they're not achieving habits, they think that they've failed. All right. And the other problem that is connected to this, and I talk about this a lot, is that people are going out to the internet, social media, et cetera, looking for influencers or, you know, people who claim to be productivity experts, sharing their routines and telling other people that they need to copy their routines. All right. And copying other people's routines can 100% be a recipe for disaster. All right. So let's back things up here and take just a couple seconds and really talk about the difference between a routine versus a habit. All right. When I talk about routines and you really dig into what a routine is, a routine is something very, very basic. It is simply a series of tasks that are done in the same order. All right. Every time you do it, you do it in the same order. Now, notice I'm not saying a routine is something that has to be done at the exact same time every single day or every week or every month. All right. And this is where people a lot of times end up failing on executing routines, is they believe that the only way to make a routine work is that it has to be done at the exact same time. And that is not true, especially if you are in a season of life like I am, where there's so much unpredictability every day. And I don't have the luxury of knowing that I am always going to have the exact same time available every day or every week to execute on a routine. All right. So a routine, again, is just simply a series of tasks that are always done in the same order. All right. But you get the flexibility of the specificity around when you are executing it. So some examples of routines that a lot of people have is a morning routine, right? But maybe it's at 6 a.m. one day and 7 a.m. the next. A lot of people have evening routines or are starting to build those when they're recognizing that they need some like ways to kind of help wind down their day. Maybe there's a kitchen cleanup routine where you do the dishes and the cleanup the exact same order every time you do it. A routine is something that you design and create on purpose, right? And there should be a reason that you are doing that. So what is a habit? A habit is something that is done kind of on autopilot. You really aren't intentionally thinking about it. You're not having to look at your planner and figure out when am I fitting it in? You're not having to remind yourself, you're not having to pull out a checklist, right? It just happens. All right. So what's the relationship between routines and habits? Well, sometimes there is one and sometimes there isn't. And that's the big disconnect because most people believe or have been taught that the relationship between a routine and a habit is the following. You create a routine, right? And the ultimate goal is to do it enough times that it becomes a habit, that eventually you don't have to plan for it or remember what the steps are or look up, you know, your reminder of what are the four things that you want to do in order every morning or every evening. And because so many people believe that successful implementation of a routine only counts when it becomes a habit. They feel like they've failed at routines, right? So therefore they stop trying to build them. That is just fundamentally not true. The relationship between a routine and a habit is not that all routines need to become habits. A routine does not need to become a habit for you to be successful at it. And a lot of things that maybe you do, that's just a habit, is not actually a routine. It's just one behavior or one thing, right? Like I could probably have my eyes closed and be almost fully asleep and be able to walk into my kitchen and get my morning cup of coffee going. I'm not even like intentionally going, oh, how do I do this? Right. It's just, it's just happening, right? That's just a habit that I have that probably a lot of other people do as well. So let's talk through some examples of, you know, routines that I've had in my life where sometimes they've become a habit, meaning it just happens on autopilot. And I'm going to share with you some of the routines that I have that are not habits that I have to really think about, that I have to go remind myself what are the order of activities that I'm doing. All right. Cause I think when we start to have specific examples around this, it starts to make a lot more sense. So I recently joined a new gym. I'm back at Orange Theory. Some of you have been following me for a long time know I had an accident and broke some ribs a while back and it kind of wiped me out for a long time. But I'm finally cleared. I'm back at the gym. And for me to be successful at like getting out the door on time in the morning, I have learned like I have to set out my clothes the night before, my shoes, my water bottle, my little heart rate monitor, get stuff ready for the dogs. And I have it written down on a little sticky note because I haven't been doing this again for very long. So that is a routine that I am doing every evening before going on the mornings that I'm going to make sure that I'm not scrambling in the morning. It doesn't just happen, habit, right? I have to intentionally think about it. Now, my morning routine, what I do every morning to serve myself before I serve others. Notice I said morning routine should be serving me, not others. I'm not talking about a morning task list. This series of things, how I spend kind of my first 30-ish minutes awake every morning, happens 100% on autopilot. That has become a habit. My body just moves through it. I know where everything is. I do the same series of tasks in order, but it's happening on autopilot. But I've been doing morning routines for years. And so because it's every day for years, it has actually become a habit. Now let's talk about planning because I get asked this a lot, right? Well, is your weekly planning process a routine or a habit? So I teach four levels of planning: weekly planning, monthly planning, quarterly planning, annual planning. Now, my weekly planning process, all right, it's a 10-step process I do every week. It takes me about 15-ish minutes, maybe 20 if it's a complicated week. That has honestly become a habit for me, but I've been doing it for years. So I have executed this weekly planning process, you figure 52 times a year. I've been doing this for probably 10-ish years, right? I've done this weekly planning process over 500 times. And because my life just doesn't operate without it, I just instinctively, as the week is coming to a close, either on a Friday or on a Sunday, depending upon what type of week I'm having, I just reach for my pens and do my weekly planning process. It truly is a habit. I don't, I don't even have to create space for it on my calendar anymore. I don't have to remind myself to do it. I don't function without it. So it has become a habit. Now, monthly planning. There is a nine-step monthly planning process that I teach. Keep in mind, monthly planning only happens 12 times a year. Yes, I have done this for many, many years. And I will be honest, this year, here in 2026, is the first year that my monthly planning is actually shifting from a routine to a habit. Meaning, this is the first time I haven't had to prioritize time on my calendar, be thoughtful about when I'm doing it. And this is the first year I haven't had to pull up my step-by-step process to remind myself of what order of events I go through to do my monthly planning. Right. And this is a system I built. But again, because it's only happening once a month, it's hard for it to become a habit, right? It's hard for me to remember all the steps. And then when I look at my quarterly planning and my annual planning processes, I have to pull up my notes to remind like my step-by-step process. Same thing I give all my students to go, okay, what's step one in quarterly planning? What's step two? I'm only doing that four times a year. It'd be impossible for that to become a habit. So am I not successful at implementing those because they're not a habit? Absolutely not, right? I'm executing on them. When it comes to routines, you define success on the routine by two things. Number one, did I execute on it? Did I actually follow it? And number two, was it valuable? Did it produce the result I wanted? That's it. So here are a couple traps I want you to avoid. All right. I do not want you to fall into either one of these traps. Trap number one is thinking that success means it becomes a habit. Let go of that. You may need to write down the steps of your routine that you are going to follow. You may need to set an alarm for yourself to remind yourself, you may need to get it into your plan. And then the second trap that we absolutely have to avoid falling into is copying other people's routines instead of designing your own. And that ties back to that second part of success, where I said, was the routine actually valuable for you? Did it give you the end result that you wanted? Often when we copy other people's routines, it's not satisfying for us, right? Because everybody is so different. Somebody else's specific morning routine is should be built for their life, their reality, and what fills them up in the morning, which could be completely different from yours. So just because you see somebody that's an expert in their space telling you what their routine is for whatever it is they're executing on, whether it's a morning routine, a fitness routine, an evening routine, a writing routine, whatever it is, does not mean that you will have the same success with that routine that they do. Because your body's different, your brain is different, the realities of your life are different, your calendar is different, and your needs are different. All right. So it is really important. Now you might take inspiration from somebody's routine if you're hearing about it and going, that sounds amazing. Then maybe you take some inspiration from it. But just because it works for someone else does not mean it's the right routine for you. Okay. So quick recap here. Let's remember a routine is just simply a series of tasks that are done in the same order that you do on purpose. All right. It doesn't have to be the exact same time, the exact same rhythm, et cetera. It's just a series of tasks done in the same order. A habit is something that just ultimately happens on autopilot. And the goal should not be more habits. The goal should be the right routines that fit your life over time. The consistency of them may or may not turn them into a habit. And either way is totally fine. So here's what I want you to think about this week. I want you to think about, take a real look at your life and think about what routines have you been trying to implement. Figure out that one just hasn't been executing well, dig into it. Did you design it or did you copy it from someone else? Or is it not executing well because you thought a routine meant it has to be at the exact exact same time every day or every week? Give yourself permission to redefine it as just a series of tasks done in the same order and reevaluate are they the right tasks? Is it too many to be putting into one routine? Make your goal this week to identify one and only one routine that you want to test out in your life. If morning routine is on your list of one that you're like, yeah, I think I'd really like to build a morning routine that works for me. At the time that this podcast is dropping, all right, the live podcast is dropping. I'm actually going to be teaching a free event called Master Your Morning that's going to be kicking off on Monday, July 20th. Uh, you can head over to MeganSummerle.com forward slash morning to get all the information about it. If you miss the live event, you can still go to that URL. We'll we'll give you info on how you can go like catch the replays and all of that. But I'm gonna guide you through a process on how to create a routine that actually fits your life, right? Just this series of tasks done in the same order. All right, friends, I hope you have a happy, happy rest of your week. I'll see you back here next week. And in the meantime, getting on top of all things, time management, organization, and productivity doesn't have to stop just because this episode is over. If you are feeling overwhelmed, the calendar's out of control, or you're just running in a race that will never end in terms of your to-do list, I have great news for you. I have an app in both the app store and Google Play called the Pink Bee. And it is full of small, incredibly powerful framing to help you get out of Overwhelm. It includes my signature, which the Overwhelm framing, and introduction to my time management framework built specifically for Women. So open up either your app store or Google Play, do a search on the word Pink B, all one word, and download the app to get started today.