On routines

Routine checklists are a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, my routines are one of my superpowers at work. I have daily and weekly tasks that make sure I have a 360° view of everything that I would need to know about, and to make sure as few things as possible slip through the cracks. These enable me to be as proactive as possible, and to have confidence that the base layer that we're building on top of is stable.

On the other hand, these routines take up real time — which is very often in short supply! It's easy to let your routine list balloon into quite a bit of pre-committed work. It's certainly the case that mine take up a measurable amount of my time every day — though not too much, and many of them can be skipped every now and then when I need to. I try to eliminate, automate, and delegate as many of these as possible, to make sure my routines continue to be a net positive and don't take up too much of my time.

My advice to you is to consider trying the following things:

You should never need to "just remember" something. You should have a home for all of your regularly-occurring tasks, and a way to check them off.

Make one of those tasks be an audit of your routines. For each of your regularly-occurring routines, ask yourself: am I the right person to be doing this, or can I pass it off to one or more people? How hard would it be to automate this? Can I eliminate this work completely?