The objective of a wanderer on the path is to spend as much time as possible on the path of mastery.
Each wanderer has multiple paths so that mastery can be pursued at all times, all throughout life, without retirement. The great samurai warrior Miyamoto Musashi followed swordsmanship, and later in his life he followed sculpture, calligraphy, writing, and other paths to mastery.
He was a master swordsman and is also known in Japan as a master artist, which many in The West are unfamiliar with, as his legend of being a samurai overshadows his other masteries.
Improving your ability to walk down your paths uninterrupted is important. Before you start walking, you need to prepare your Body, Mind, and Spirit for the path. That’s what a setup routine is for.
You should conduct a setup routine every morning so you are best prepared to travel your paths. Setup routines can happen daily, morning and night, weekly, monthly, and yearly. You can make a routine for any cadence of time.
You must have a day-starting and day-stopping routine, and a weekly Setup Sunday routine at a minimum. It does not need to be complex, but it does need to exist.
Design your setup routines to enhance your ability to progress down your paths.
Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
– Abraham Lincoln
Recommended Abraham Lincoln Books:
- Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness
- Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
- A. Lincoln: A Biography
Use the setup routine to make your day more efficient by grounding first thing in the morning. Use Setup Sunday to batch process all of your household chores so the other six days of the week are on the path.
Setup routines reduce the amount of chaos in your life. By creating setup routines, you create order. You add structure to your life, which will give you more control over your life.
The Setup Routine reduces the energy your brain uses to make decisions, so you have more energy for the path. We want to set up automations for non-path activities that get us back to the path quickly and with high energy.
The path is new, inconsistent, difficult, unpredictable, painful, and ultimately where all meaning and true, deep rewards come from.
Andreia is The Path of Paths: Fulfillment Through Attainment.
The Setup Routine can be done any day that works for your schedule. Since Sunday is a day of rest for a large number of individuals, it tends to be a good day for your setup routine, hence why we call it Setup Sunday. You can have a setup Saturday, or any other setup day that works for you. You can even call Saturday “Setup Sunday” because the name sticks. We are making shortcuts for our brains.
The Setup Sunday routine prepares you for the next six days. So you dedicate an entire day to the process. If you finish early, you can get started on the path, or, depending on how far along you are, you can have some free time. Be sure your free time does not pull you away from the path. We do not want off-path activities to overflow to the path.
Setup Routine Cadences
The setup routine can be done at different cadences. A morning routine and night routine are essential setup routines, with the morning setting you up for path engagement during the day, and the night routine signaling that it’s time to rest so you have good sleep for the next day.
The weekly setup routine(Setup Sunday) sets you up for the rest of the week. Pick the day of the week you want for your setup day and stay consistent.
You can have a monthly setup routine for things that need to be done monthly and an annual setup routine if it makes sense to do so. Be aware the farther out in time you go, the more you are forecasting outside of reality. Something to keep in mind.
Components of The Setup Sunday Routine
The Setup Sunday Routine is a day you dedicate to all non-path activities and activities that sharpen your tools for engaging with the path. Think of it as a chore day and a preparation day.
Strive to spend as little time as possible doing non-path activities. So instead of doing a little tidying each day, dedicate one day to a deep clean as part of Setup Sunday.
If a chore is going to take more than 10-20 minutes, save it in a to-do list and schedule it for Setup Sunday. TikTik is a tremendous to-do-list application made by a small company.
Saving chores for later will train you to stay focused on the path and ignore distractions. A mess is a distraction–if you let it be. This doesn’t mean you stop cleaning up after yourself, but instead of mopping Wednesday, mowing the lawn Tuesday, and cleaning up the house on Friday, you do all this on one day so the rest of your time is focused on attainment.
Listening to audiobooks while choring lets you learn–grab a free audiobook below.
- The Courage to Be Disliked: How to Free Yourself, Change Your Life, and Achieve Real Happiness
- The Laws of Human Nature
The goal is to have long blocks of focus on the path. If you cut your nails Monday, trim your eyebrows Tuesday, and shave Wednesday, you have all these small interruptions that will take you away from the path. The path is a difficult lover who needs constant attention for you to make progress with her.
Do you really need to get the mail every day? Why can’t you get it once a week? Think about batching chores like this that can be done once a week.
The Setup Sunday Routine is also a great day to review your personal code and philosophy. It would be nice if you could take a look morning and night, but once a week at the minimum. You could also add reviewing your goals or your philosophy to your morning or night setup routine.
You can deep-dive into your philosophy and code on Setup Sunday. If you don’t review your code, then you don’t have a code. This is crucial. You need to review your manual for living at least once a week. This way you can reflect and update it to make it better, which will make you a better wanderer on the path.
Throughout your life, you should be updating your code with what you learn. Steal parts for your code from us, and create what works for you.
Think about non-path activities you can concentrate into one day for Setup Sunday:
- Charging devices (batteries, headsets, watches, computer gear, games, etc)
- Setting up supplements for the week with an old-man-style pill organizer
- Water plants
- Meal prep for the week
- Grocery shop
- Grooming activities
- Clean and minimize your physical space
- Clean and minimize your digital space
- Pay bills
- review finances
- Get the mail
- Read the paper, read blogs
- Review your investments
- Plan school assignments
- Schedule next week
- Review next week’s schedule
- Back up digital spaces to backup devices
- Review your personal code and philosophy
Think deeply about the tasks that take you off the path and consolidate them into a single day. This will train you to let go of things that control you.
Setting up Setup Sunday
You can use a to-do list application like TikTik that allows you to make reusable templates. You can also use pen and paper, or a notetaking tool like Joplin(free, open source) to store your setup routine. We used to recommend Evernote, but not anymore. Joplin is open source.
You can use your mind to hold your setup routine, but it isn’t recommended. If you have a longer setup routine–which isn’t bad and could be better than a short one–it’s difficult to keep it in your mind.
When we are thinking about building our personal philosophies and codes, putting them down into a physical or digital space makes them LAW. Laws are written down. They are codified. Organized. Archived. This makes them real.
If you are storing your code, philosophy, or setup routine digitally, make sure to take backups. You can even backup your written routines digitally.
If you lose your code and your philosophy you can still remember it, but likely you will forget something. And you will have to rebuild from no foundation. We want to make a solid foundation and continue to build on it, continually looking for improvements and additions to make our structure taller, and stronger, so we can bear any burden and have little risk of being torn down by life.
Backing up your code is easy. You can buy two external hard drives and back both of them up with your digital files. Do not store them together. Put them in separate places like one in your home, and another in a safety deposit box, your car, a parent’s house; somewhere that does not correlate with the other location. A correlated storage scenario would be putting one drive in the top drawer of your filing cabinet and another in the bottom drawer. If your home burns down or your cabinet is stolen, you’ve lost your code backup.
Regardless of whether you write your philosophy down, or you are even aware of having a personal philosophy, you have one. Like everyone has a diet no matter what they eat, everyone has a philosophy on living–even if it is unconscious to them.
- Diet is what you eat.
- Philosophy is how you live.
- The Code is the rulebook.
Takeaways
Designate one day per week to complete all tasks and chores that are off the path. This will allow you to spend most of your time on the path and will train you to not become distracted by any entity off your path. Setup Sunday.
Make a clear morning and night routine. The morning setup primes you for the day ahead. The night setup prepares your mind to rest and recover fully.