How I Adapt My Routine for Autumn

In the summer, my routine is that I don’t have a routine. I do whatever feels right, but now that the temperatures are below 20 Celsius it is time to get back into the reality that allows us to go off in the summertime. It’s time to budget, work out, start cooking real meals, and getting back into a cleaning routine.

The reality of my week is that it is structured around work, Monday to Friday 8:30-4:30, when I’m not traveling or working overtime. My other big time commitment is my volunteering, which also really picks up in the autumn as it is structured around the school year. I would guess I spend between 10 and 15 hours a week on that, sometimes more, sometimes less.

So if we have 168 hours in a week and I spend 40 at work, 15 volunteering, and 56 sleeping. That is 111 hours of the week used up, leaving 57 hours for chores, commuting, having a social life, doing hobbies and crafts, and just relaxing. Which is disappointingly low, especially since autumn and winter are when I like to work on my crafts and hobbies and stuff like that.

What’s coming next is completely unhinged and probably unrealistic.

Monday to Friday:

For “wellness”, I alternate between a couple things. Either a morning walk with a coffee or a podcast or a morning journal session plus 10 pages of non-fiction and coffee. I am very much a fair-weather walker. I don’t like walking when it is too cold or slippy, and the sidewalks are very poorly maintained here in the winter, so once there’s a snow pack it’s always too slippy. I do kind of want to buy crampons this winter, I feel like they would make a huge difference in my walking confidence.

One of many from my morning walks.

In particular, what I really want to make sure is that I don’t leave chores for the next day. No more dirty dishes left overnight, not leaving stuff all over the tables to deal with the next day, packing my work bags, not leaving my ironing all week. Being tempted to go to Tim Horton’s, Subway, or a coffee shop because I didn’t meal prep for breakfast or lunch.

The biggest problem with this is when I have meetings. They are typically at 6 or 7 pm, which means that typically exercise gets dropped in favour of an early dinner or prep work for the meeting and then a late dinner. But I don’t like that exercise is always the first thing to get dropped. Exercise getting dropped means that physio gets dropped, which means my back and hip start to hurt more. It means I have a harder time sleeping. It means I feel increasingly worse about how I look. All not good things, all things that make my brain unhappy.

So, in an ideal world, that would be the structure of my work week.

I don’t like having a strict schedule on the weekends. I want the flexibility to sleep in, read all day, needlepoint for hours, or have a social life. However, that does leave the larger chores.

Before the snow comes I need to:

Clean out my car,
Bring in my outdoor furniture,
Get winter stuff (snow shovel and boot tray) out and clean.

But that’s not part of the autumn routine, it’s just part of the annual routine. I still want to get away from feeling like I am spending all weekend doing chores. But I don’t quite have that figured quite out yet.