Now that the academic semester is ramping up, everyone I know is starting to wilt.

The excitement of new classes and new students have worn off. Committee meetings and other service has begun in earnest. Students are actually showing up in office hours. And all those great plans we had for being organized and on top of things are starting to fray.

It’s not just academics, although the vagaries of the academic semester make it more visible. Many workplaces are a little more casual over the summer. People are on vacation, so decisions happen more slowly, and work slows down as a result. But once Labor Day passes, everyone’s back. The cooling of the air makes everyone a little frisky. Suddenly it’s a long, hard slog to the holidays.

All those things you wanted to accomplish this semester or season are starting to feel further away and less possible.

You need a routine.

What we know about people

For a long time, we understood “willpower” to be characterological. That is, some people (the good people) have it and some people (the bad people) don’t. The good people were able to make the “right” choices (always the ones aligned with longer-term goals) because they were simply better or stronger.

It turns out that, like most cultural characterological judgments, it was completely wrong.

It turns out that willpower, otherwise known as the ability to make decisions and favor the logical brain (the long-term plans) over the emotional (whatever I want now) brain, is a limited resource in every single one of us. We can easily exhaust our store of willpower, making it impossible to force ourselves to choose along our long-term goals. Instead we fall into habit, fall into whatever we want in the short-term, or simply get paralyzed.

No matter what your long-term goals are – whether it’s a dissertation, your next book, your next project at work, finding a way to get out of academia altogether, or running a marathon – to meet a long-term goal you need the willpower to go on that run, head to the library, sit down at the computer for a frustrating session of writing. These things aren’t necessarily fun, even if we value the long-term goal. That’s why we have to bring our willpower to bear.

Most of us have had the experience of running out of willpower right when we need it. It’s cozy and warm inside, and it’s cold and dark outside, so maybe I’ll run tomorrow. I planned to write tonight, but I’m tired and there’s good television on, so I’ll write tomorrow.

It’s totally normal.

It’s easy to get mad at ourselves later, castigate ourselves for lack of willpower, but what we know now is that if we’ve exhausted our store of willpower and it hasn’t had time to replenish, then we can’t actually force ourselves to do anything that doesn’t appeal to us right this second. No one can, even those people who think they have so much willpower.

This is where routines come in

We often think about decisions as only big-picture things – where to live, what to study, where to work. But we make decisions all the time.

What should I have for breakfast? What time am I getting up? Should I read this research or grade papers? What should I wear? Should I go to the wine bar with X or get Thai food with Y? Should I start this article with this anecdote or that quotation?

If you actually recognized how many decisions you make every day, you’d have to go back to bed from the sheer exhaustion of it.

If, then, you have a long-term goal that is important to you, invoking the power of routine will enable you to conserve your willpower for the places you actually need it to make that long-term goal: going for that run, sitting down to write, logging on to research alternate careers.

What we mean when we talk about routine

A routine is nothing more than a single set of decisions that play out repeatedly. That is, you decide once instead of over and over – at the beginning of the semester, say, or once a week for things like meals.

You decide to get up at the same time every day, which means you don’t have to think about what time to set the alarm for.

You decide to spend Tuesday and Thursday mornings at the coffee shop writing, so you don’t have to think about what you’re doing today or when you’re going to write.

You decide to go running every evening after the kids go to bed, so you don’t have to decide how you’re going to fit it in today.

All those decisions you don’t have to make give you space for the decisions you do have to make. Do you want to run a marathon? What will you write your next book on?

It’s infinitely easier to tackle big, long-term projects when you aren’t exhausting your ability to figure things out on stuff that doesn’t actually have a meaningful impact on your life.

It doesn’t have to be boring

Many people despise routine. They despise anything that doesn’t vary.

Fair enough. I know plenty of people who feel that way. And if you do, and you’re able to get done the things that march you towards your long-term goal, then power to you. Seriously. Routine is a tool, not a manifesto.

But plenty of people who despise routine are also struggling to get things done. If you’re that person, then build variety into your routine.

For example, if you would love to plan the six dinners you’re going to cook at home, because deciding every single night what you’re going to eat frustrates you and takes forever, but you can’t bear to stick to “Monday is spaghetti night,” pick six meals, make sure you have the ingredients on hand, and pick one at random every night. You still get variety and surprise, but you aren’t having to make a decision or choose between options.

Routine doesn’t have to mean rote. It simply means taking as many decisions off your plate as possible to make room for the ones you want to be making.

Work with yourself, not against yourself

We humans like to think we’re so logical, and if we can just convince ourselves of X, we’ll do it.

But we’re messy, complicated, layered organic systems. There are parts of our brains that developed when we were consumed with finding food and avoiding being eaten, and those parts aren’t so much into things like writing books or running marathons. They’re older and much bigger than the parts of our brain that can read text and plan things out for the next five years.

That’s why we have to pay attention to how we actually function instead of how we’d like to function.

So think about what you can automate. Think about what you can decide once instead of over and over. Think about how to put those decisions into practice.

Experiment. See what happens when you block out your time based on your classes or your projects or your commitments. See what you get done. See where things fall apart.

There’s no virtue in routine. There’s no virtue in willpower, either. We all have it, and we all exhaust it.

Like any tools, routine and willpower are available to help us reach the goals that matter to us, no matter what they are.

Academia tends to spin our emotional compasses until we don’t know which way is north. If you’re feeling lost, I offer one-on-one coaching to help you figure it all out.