Your routine is too long
You sat down and put together a routine. It came out at about twenty-five minutes, because that’s what it takes to cover everything that needs covering — the hips, the shoulders, the thing your back does, a bit of core because obviously.
Twenty-five minutes is not a long time. That’s the reasoning, and it’s correct in the sense that twenty-five minutes is not a long time.
It’s the wrong measurement though. The question isn’t whether twenty-five minutes is long. It’s whether twenty-five minutes is short enough to survive the worst day you’ll have in the next month — the day you slept badly, the day something at work went sideways, the day you get home at nine. Because that day is coming, and what happens on it determines whether there’s a routine in December.
Why the routine is always too long
Two mechanisms, and they compound.
You design on a good day. Nobody builds a routine while exhausted and demoralised. You build it in a burst of intent — a doctor’s appointment, a birthday, a bad night’s sleep that made you notice your neck. In that state, twenty-five minutes reads as modest. You’re calibrating against a version of yourself who is, by definition, unusually motivated. Every routine is designed by your best self and executed by your average one.
Completeness is the wrong objective, and it’s the objective everyone optimises. When you design a routine you’re thinking about coverage: what’s missing, what should be in there, what a good routine would include. Coverage pushes length up monotonically — there’s always one more thing worth adding, and no force pushing the other way. Nothing in the design process represents the cost of length, because at design time the cost is zero. You pay it later, once per day, forever.
So routines drift long in one direction only, and the drift is invisible while it’s happening.
The number that matters is the floor, not the target
The useful reframe: stop designing the routine and start designing the floor.
The floor is the smallest version you’d still count as having done it. Not the ideal, not the usual — the minimum that means the day counts. Most people don’t have one at all, which means their floor is implicitly the whole routine, which means a day when the whole routine isn’t happening is a day when nothing happens.
That’s the actual failure mechanism, and it’s worth stating precisely: without a floor, every day is all-or-nothing, and “all” isn’t available on maybe a third of days. A third of days missed isn’t a routine, it’s an occasional activity, and occasional activities decay.
THE FLOOR — the test
Picture the worst realistic day in the coming month: late, tired,
nothing went right. Now ask, honestly:
· Would you do the full routine that day? → your routine
is short enough
· You'd do it but resent it → borderline; it
survives now,
not in month three
· You'd skip it → too long, and the
skip is already
scheduled
· You don't know what "doing some of it"
would even mean → you have no floorAnswer for the worst day, not the average one. Averages are the reason the routine is long.
Setting a floor
Pick the smallest unit you’d count. For most people’s routines that’s one component or a couple of minutes — you know your own better than any general rule would.
Three things make a floor work, and they’re all easy to get wrong:
It has to be genuinely trivial. If the floor requires a decision about whether you can manage it, it isn’t low enough. The whole point is that on a bad day you have no deliberation budget, so the floor must be beneath the threshold where deliberation starts. A floor you’d have to talk yourself into is a second full routine.
It has to count fully. Not “at least I did something.” If the floor is met, the day is done — no asterisk, no deficit carried forward, no intention to make it up. The moment the floor is a consolation prize, you’ve re-created all-or-nothing with extra steps.
It has to be fixed in advance. Deciding in the moment how much would be acceptable is a negotiation, and you will lose it, because the part of you doing the negotiating wants to go to bed. Write the floor down while you’re calm. This is the same logic as deciding the missed-day rule before you need it.
The thing nobody believes
Here’s where this gets resistance: doing two minutes instead of twenty-five feels like it can’t possibly be worth anything, so people would rather skip than do the trivial version.
That instinct is comparing the wrong things. It’s comparing two minutes to twenty-five. The actual comparison is two minutes to zero — because twenty-five wasn’t on the menu that day. And over a month, the difference between a routine you do on twenty-eight days at varying length and one you do on eighteen days at full length isn’t primarily about the total volume of movement. It’s that one of them still exists at the end of the month and the other has quietly become something you used to do.
Continuity is the thing being protected. Volume can be rebuilt from continuity. Continuity can’t be rebuilt from volume.
What this costs
You will do less. That’s real and it should be stated plainly rather than waved away — a routine with a low floor, run over a month, will contain fewer total minutes of movement than the same routine executed perfectly. If perfect execution were available, the long routine would be better.
The trade is optimality for survivability, and it’s only worth taking because perfect execution isn’t available. If you’re someone who genuinely has done the full twenty-five minutes daily for six months, none of this applies to you and you should ignore it.
There’s a second cost: the floor can become the ceiling. Some people set a two-minute floor and do exactly two minutes forever. That’s a real risk, and it’s a much better problem than the one you started with — scaling up from a routine that exists is tractable in a way that restarting from nothing is not.
What this doesn’t fix
A short routine is still a routine you have to start, and length isn’t the only reason routines don’t start — not having a cue is at least as common and completely independent. Shortening a routine that you never remember to do will produce a shorter routine you never remember to do.
And if the routine came from a clinician, don’t shorten it on your own reasoning. Tell them you’re not managing the full version and ask what the floor should be. That’s a normal conversation and they’d rather have it than have you quietly stop.