In these first weeks, I have spotted the determination all over campus: fresh notebooks, color-coded planners, Canvas tabs lined up, even meal-prepped containers stacked in the communal fridge. Many students are convinced this will finally be the semester they nail the perfect routine — every reading completed on time, every club meeting attended, eight hours of sleep, workouts, maybe even yoga and mindfulness squeezed in.
But then life arrives. The color-coding smudges. The syllabi that seemed crisp now look daunting. You miss one reading and tell yourself you’ll catch up, then another slips, and suddenly the system doesn’t look like a system anymore. You skip a meeting because of a midterm, or you go to the meeting and feel guilty about not studying. Sleep starts to feel optional. And somewhere in the middle of all this, you cannot help but wonder: Am I already failing?
Here’s the truth: routines almost always fray. The problem isn’t you — it’s the myth that a perfect routine exists in the first place.
I’ll admit: I never really had a routine. My academic path was anything but a straight line, as I outlined in a previous column. At the time, every detour felt like evidence I was “behind.” But when I look back, those zigzags weren’t failures of routine; they were the shape of my real education.
This didn’t just shape my studies; it shaped how I lived, too. In Paris, my days revolved around long hours in the Sorbonne library, punctuated by café breaks. Later, in Princeton and Boston, my routines meant train schedules, FlixBus rides, and bakery sandwiches while finishing my PhD. Now, in Ithaca, the rhythm is different again: cooking at home, teaching, attending events on campus, writing in the evenings. Each move forced me to scrap old patterns and find new ones. None lasted forever — none needed to.
Even now, I sometimes chase the illusion of perfect order. I keep detailed schedules of research deadlines, archival findings, lectures, and columns like this one. Some weeks, everything clicks, and I feel like a semblance of routine is humming. Other weeks, I’m writing at odd hours or putting final touches on a lecture at midnight. The work still gets done — sometimes even better because I allowed myself to adapt instead of clinging to the “ideal plan.”
This lesson can also be applied to the personal level. Not long ago, I tried a “spending freeze” to save some money. I notably cut out Coke Zero, cooked from the freezer, and even baked cookies from a dollar-store mix (delicious). Was I flawless? No. I slipped, many times. But each reset taught me something: that small experiments, even temporary ones, reshape habits more effectively than waiting for the perfect master plan.
Students often imagine routines must be permanent and airtight. But the reality is that routines are living things. They bend when life bends. They need breathing space. And sometimes the smallest tweaks — switching libraries, changing where you study, skipping one activity to rest — can be the difference between a schedule that collapses and one that sustains you.
In my experience so far, rigid control cracks under stress, but flexibility bends, and that’s what lasts. That’s true in study habits, in friendships, in careers and in life. So here’s my advice: Don’t measure yourself against the mythical perfect routine you may have laid out in week one. Instead, ask yourself what rhythm works this week, and be willing to change it when the week after looks different. If you miss a reading, you can still catch up — or you can decide, honestly, that not every reading will shape your education equally. If you miss a meeting, you can still show up the next time. If you sleep through an alarm, you can start fresh the next morning.
The point isn’t perfection — it’s all about persistence, forgiveness and the courage to keep adjusting. The myth of the perfect routine sets us up to feel like failures as soon as life intervenes. But letting routines bend without breaking — allowing them to shift as you shift — is how real balance emerges.
So, if you’re worried that by now, in late September, your routine is already in pieces, take heart: You’re not alone. This is when the cracks show for everyone. What matters isn’t the cracks themselves, but the life you keep building around them.
Jan Burzlaff is an Opinion Columnist and a Postdoctoral Associate in the Program for Jewish Studies. Office Hours (Open Door Edition) is his weekly dispatch to the Cornell community — a professor’s reflections on teaching, learning and the small moments that make a campus feel human. Readers can submit thoughts and questions anonymously through the Tip Sheet here. He can also be reached at profjburzlaff@cornellsun.com.
