Could you benefit from adopting a rhythm-based routine instead of a schedule-based routine? I’m sharing what’s been working for me and why I’m leaning more into one than the other right now, plus questions you can ask to decide if it’s time to switch.

Links

Subscribe to Cat's Momentum YouTube channel.

Want to join Cat live? Subscribe to get a reminder email and a link to the live stream so you can watch the episode live and join the Q&A session.

View and add The Momentum Experiment calendar so you never miss a live recording and Q&A.

Find Cat on Instagram (@catmulvihill)

Submit a question for the podcast.

Join Cat's Email List

Cat's Website

After more than a year hiatus, I started to pick up piano

lessons again recently. Now, getting back into it, I'm reminded

of how awkward it can be at first. How slow I am

as I am moving from one note on the keyboard to the next

and then adding in my left hand. Things can get pretty dicey. But

then there's this moment when your hands know what to do

and they just start to find their rhythm and you know that it

has clicked in your brain, it's maybe moved from a different part and it goes

from being really conscious and awkward to unconscious and

your fingers are flowing. And I've been thinking about this idea of

rhythm a lot lately as I've been playing piano. But not

just that. Also when I think about routines and I think about my

work and the year ahead without even fully

realizing it, over the past few months I've actually transitioned

from following more of what I call a schedule based routine

into what I'm referring to now as a rhythm based

routine. And today I'm going to share what I mean when I say

that. An example from my real life of the shift that has happened without

knowing it and why this matters to me and why it matters right now.

And if this idea resonates with you, I've got some questions that you can

consider if you want to try on this transition.

So the first thing I want to clarify is what, what do I mean when

I say maybe schedule based versus a

rhythm based routine? And the other way you could phrase this is

the concept of time based

routines or sequence based routines. And there are

some connections and in some ways they're quite similar, but the vibe is different

and how I approach it, even mentally, it is different. For me

there is still an element of timing that shows up, but this

is informed by past experience of how things,

approximately how long they take. And so I'm taking that into it. So I

want to show an example and this is with my mornings.

Now keep in mind when I show you this, I am

self employed and so I do have autonomy over my schedule and I really try

to block that those early morning hours out for me.

And I try not to put anything in my calendar until after about 10 or

30, preferably in the afternoons. So I just want to say that as a caveat

because I know not everyone has the same schedule or the same circumstances.

But let's actually show it. So here you can see

an example of if you are watching the video, if you're not. What I'm showing

right now is a calendar. It's just a snapshot of a calendar.

And this is what I used to try to do is block out

specific times of when I do things. In the morning, I would start with

journaling for about half an hour, usually around 8:15.

Then by about 8:45, I wanted to transition into writing.

And that's writing for work. Now, just as a little side note for me

personally, I would sit down at, I call it my writing desk.

And it's just a desk separate from my office. It's near a big window and

that is where I like to write. And I have fewer distractions, so it's much

easier for me to journal and write without getting swept into my day

just yet. So during that time, journal and then I would

Write until about 9:45. And then I would try and

transition up to my office, spend about 15

minutes where I look at the day ahead, go through my

planner, make sure I add anything I need, and then I also spend a little

bit of time going over the day before. So instead of recapping my day at

the end of the day, because I always skip it, I do this in the

morning and I'll just take a look at how yesterday went.

Then I will shift into focused work. So this is maybe a major project that

I'm working on or just something that deserves my attention because this is my best

time of day for focused work. So that is how I would follow this

schedule, is that I wanted to try to be at my desk working on a

main project by 10am and what I noticed is that over

time there was a lot of guilt and pressure and

stress was starting to pile up. So instead of

adhering to a schedule, I started to adopt

more of a rhythm. And this is still following

the same sequence, but I don't have hard and fast

times attached to them. I do not have things blocked in my

calendar. I just know that I'll start with journaling for however

long it takes, I'll go into writing, which usually is about double the amount

of time. I know that typically when I am doing my

daily kind of check in planning and also reviewing the next day, it

still takes in and around 15 minutes, but not always. And then

my focused work. And these look so similar

side by side if you are seeing the video version. But. But I just

described doing the same thing and I know how long they take

based on experience. I mean, I tried to follow this approximate

schedule for over a year. So I generally know,

but the mood has shifted and it has shifted considerably.

You see, when I would follow the

rigid Schedule I would notice that if I was not, if I

started my day a little later, I started with pressure and then the whole morning

I am feeling that pressure and that stress. And then if something

interrupts me during that morning, maybe I have to take a phone call or something,

I would start to. Then the stress would rise even more. So my

nervous system was just starting in this really elevated

situation in the morning I was stressed, it was flowing into my work

and then I always felt like I was behind and I would start to resent

any kind of interruption because things weren't going according to the

plan as I had scheduled in my calendar. However, when I flipped

to this idea of you know what, I'm going to follow a flow of things

that naturally have worked for me, but I'm not going to

stress out about exactly when I start and exactly when I transition to the next

one. If I know that there is something coming up in my

calendar, maybe I do have an appointment or a call I need to be on,

that is okay. I will adjust the rhythm and

the tempo. And so this is actually where a lot of the piano

stuff has come in, where I have noticed that this

is attractive to me, to my brain and to my nervous system

because I am able to adjust the tempo based

on what is going on, what my circumstances are. Now

when I teach the momentum formula, I always emphasize and

encourage people to look inward at how do you naturally

work. So for me, letting go and releasing

a timetable was extremely freeing and had

real impacts on my nervous system and my stress levels.

For others, the mere suggestion of releasing a timeline

might actually create stress. And this is all about

understanding how you are wired. And for me, the timeline

source of stress. For others, the timeline might be a source of calm.

And I think it's really helpful to understand the difference and I think that's good

context as I start to talk about this and why this is something

that has worked well for me. So this self imposed

pressure and clock that just was not working.

Now one of the other things that I want to share is that

when it comes to sharing this, since making this shift, yes, I'm more

calmer, I'm more present and I'm talking about an example with my

morning routine. But if I'm being honest and I do

my best to be honest with this podcast, this is. There was really a deeper

reason why I had this shift and this focus on rhythm

over a schedule. You see, at the start of 2025,

I had a timeline mapped out for how I was gonna run

my business I was making a pivot with my content,

my focus and what I was doing. And I had it planned out month

by month. But life had other

plans, threw me a major curveball I didn't see coming. And I

ended up losing my brother after his sixth birthday battle with cancer. And it was

a months long battle. The schedule I had planned,

it fell apart, it completely collapsed.

And during those months when everything was happening, there were some

weeks where I had the capacity and I also had a desire to work on

my business. But I didn't know which notes to play,

I didn't know what was coming next because my schedule was reset to

zero. And I felt really lost during those times.

So as 2025 was drawing to a close, I

started to think about how can I start to adopt more of this

rhythm based approach overall, choosing which

notes I like to play in which order, knowing that when life

happens, and it will, I can adjust the tempo, I can

slow it down, I can even take a pause if I need to, but then

I can play the next note once it's time to play again.

If you are listening to this concept and it's appealing to you, maybe

there's a part of your brain that says, you know what, I actually don't love

the pressure of timing and calendar and all of that. It feels very

prescriptive and maybe too rigid. So let's talk about what

you consider. But before I get into this, I think it's really important to point

out that I am self employed and I have a lot of autonomy over my

schedule. And you might be listening, thinking, you know, that must be nice, Kat.

But my days are way too scheduled, way too structured for this to work. And

it is possible that it might not work well

in some or many aspects of your life as it is right now,

but there may be some pockets of your week where this could

work or you could experiment with it, even if it's a short time frame. Now,

I shared the example of my morning as I start my workday, but I am

experimenting with other parts of my week for how I can start to

establish this more rhythm based routine

for practices that are important to me. So if you're thinking about

this, what I first recommend is you say to yourself,

what practices do I want to establish as more of

this consistent routine that I could follow with this

approach? When do they normally happen, where do they normally happen?

And do you already have a sequence that you kind of naturally

follow anyway? Is that working well? Are there things you want to

change and maybe you've Got a few things that you do pretty regularly as part

of an existing routine. But. But you want to add something new to it. Maybe

it's a new practice that you'd like to adopt. Could you

pair that? Does it fit somewhere naturally within what you already do?

And what is the first thing you do to kick off this routine?

You know, when I talked about the morning, I actually skipped apart. What's one of

the triggers for me is actually once my coffee is ready, then I sort of

migrate over to that desk and I start that process. So

really coffee comes first. But let's say for example, you

wanted a wind down routine at the end of the day.

What practices would you want to include? Maybe

you put away your phone for the night and don't go back to it. Or

you choose your clothing or put it out for the next morning. Whether that's for

work or maybe exercising. Maybe you are reading a chapter of

a book or doing an evening meditation, having a warm

drink like tea. Everyone has a different thing that they might like for a

wind down routine at the end of the day. So what is the

natural flow? Maybe it's moving throughout your house. There's a natural flow.

Or if you make a warm tea before you read your book, whatever that is,

what is the trigger that starts this whole routine? And maybe

it's something a nightly practice you already do. So if you

are putting kids to bed or maybe at the end of the evening you start

to run the dishwasher and that can be your trigger or you can be like

me and actually set a reminder. So for me I use my watch a lot.

I. Or it could be on your phone of just saying, oh hey, it's time

to get started with your routine. That sounds like it's a schedule based

thing, but everything after that first thing is actually just following a

rhythm, a sequence and not a timeline, not I will read for 15

minutes and then I will meditate for 10 minutes. That to me is more rigid

and that's where my stress starts to rise. Try this out

for a week. Notice what happens. Pay attention to your reactions. How

do you feel about mentally? How do you feel physically? How's your nervous system

doing? Is this a good fit for you? Do

you even like the song you're playing? What are the notes you're playing and does

it? Do you like it? This is the intentional

experimentation phase when you are observing

what works and you're making adjustments based on what you learn.

And it is easy to rush past this part,

but it actually really matters. And I think we often

assume that a new routine is just gonna. We're gonna get into the practice really

quickly. But that's just not always the case. At the start of this episode,

I mentioned that I was returning to the piano after a long

hiatus. You see, the last time that I was

learning the piano consistently, I hit a wall. I was learning

chord inversions and I just could not seem to keep pace

with the lessons. I wanted to keep pace with the lessons that I'd been following.

And suddenly I was struggling and it was fr. Frustrating and

things were not clicking on the same timeline that they had with

previous lessons. Instead of sticking through the uncomfortable

phase, I stepped away. And before I knew it, months had

passed. And I tell this story because anytime we are

learning something new, including what routine might work well for us

consistently, there is this conscious phase where

when we're learning something new, we are watching what

happens, we're learning what works, what doesn't, decide what to try next, and.

And then we keep this cycle continuing. This is how we learn. And

sometimes things will click quickly and then we shift more

into this unconscious phase where sort of our hands take over

or our routines and rhythms take over and you're not thinking so much

about it. But when things don't click according to the way we expected,

maybe other routines really snapped into pace quicker,

but these don't. We often will walk away too early or we just. We didn't

stay in that conscious period long enough. And if you are starting

out to test something new, whether it's schedule based or rhythm based,

there is this conscious period that might feel awkward and clunky and

slow as you are figuring it out. And that's really natural.

So I want you to stay with it and notice what happens. You can make

intentional adjustments because eventually you will

learn what works for you and find your

rhythm.