The Effectiveness of a Re-Syncing Routine

2025-06-30

Epistemic Status: High confidence about my own experience, medium confidence on how it generalizes

Epistemic Effort: Medium, this is anecdotal information, but about a practice that I've used for an extended period of time

As social, community-dependent animals, we rely on being in sync with our surroundings and obligations. Knowing when appointments, meetings, and gatherings are, which people need to be called/messaged back, and managing things that need to be planned. There's also a dependence on sync within oneself, ensuring that our own plans for the next day, week, and month line up with our internal goals, reflect our priorities, and aren't exceeding our finite time and capabilities. Many people have tools and systems to aid us in these endeavours, such as calendars, to-do lists, project trackers, personal notes, and so on, but these too rely on us to keep them in sync, from ensuring appointments are in our calendar, tasks are in our todo lists, important details from conversations are noted down, and so-on.

TL;DR: Our lives are surrounded by a constant influx of information, and we as humans rely on being in sync with what's going on around us, being asked of us, and what we want for ourselves.

However, I semi-frequently find myself in situations where I've "drifted" from that sync. I begin to feel a slight unease, like I'm perpetually forgetting something. It's harder to mentally plan my time. My inbox piles up, and I find things that haven't been put in my todo list or calendar. I start finding it hard to start tasks, agree to go to social events, or get myself to move from one thing to the next. I find myself less predictable, in the same way that a computer that's starting to get a little low on memory might be. I'm a systems-oriented person, a creature of habits and procedures, so my version of this "drift" might be much more drastic than it is for most, but I do feel that I'm not alone in this experience.

There are typically two scenarios where I predictably find myself drifting. The first, and by far most common one is travel. Whether it's traveling with my partner and focusing on spending quality time with her, going to an academic event and focusing on that, or embarking on a solo trip and focusing on being present and in the moment, I'll typically drift pretty far out of sync in multiple ways whenever I travel. This is particularly an issue during the semester, when there's always a good few weeks where I'm out of town during the weekend and then only returning late Sunday night or early Monday morning. The other common time is when I'm ill or have some other health issue. Between the lack of mental energy during the illness, unexpected nature of these things, and the extra chaos of needing to reschedule or take a break from major commitments, it can become a tough hurdle to handle being out of sync while also still experiencing the physical effects of being on the tail end of a health issue. There are also other times when I find myself "drifting", often when I'm mentally focused on or stressed about something for more than a few days.

Ultimately, being out of sync makes it hard to return to normal routines and activities, and as such I've begun to realize the importance and effectiveness of having a routine to, in essence, forcibly re-sync myself.

My Re-Syncing Routine

What approach works for each individual might be different, but for me, these re-syncing sessions have a set location, set vibe, some set goals, but no prescribed method or order.

As soon as I possibly can after something like travel or illness, I try to get myself to a specific coffee shop a couple minutes away from home, where I'm a regular. It's a familiar place, where I'm at peace, and has good coffee and good hours. I bring my laptop, and often some scratch paper. The goal is to sit down and just have unstructured time to do whatever I need to do until my mental slate is clear, and a few specific objectives are achieved.

The biggest objectives are:

• Handle my personal inbox. This does not mean inbox zero, but it does mean that every important email has been read, and has had important information from it logged in my todo list, calendar, and/or notes.
• Ensure my calendar is a source of truth. My calendar should accurately reflect all of my commitments in the near term. I also will often adjust recurring events to match with my current schedule, or create new recurring events.
• Ensure my todo list is up to date. If there's anything where I know somewhere in my mind I need to find a piece of information out and make a relevant reminder, now's the time to do it.
• Do some reading. I don't tend to keep up with my rss feeds while travelling, so I like to catch up on blog posts and such as an injection of inspiration into my brain.
• Ensure I have a plan to return to normal adulting. Any routines that have been interrupted, like groceries or laundry, should have a plan made to get back on track.

Beyond that, I try to keep it free-form, just scratching whichever mental itches I need to until I feel ready to take on the rest of the week. I find myself coming out of these sessions feeling far more at peace, and logistically it makes a huge difference in the amount of time it takes for resettlement into routines, obligations, and a normal mental state.

Having this routine also helps me even before I'm able to sit down and carry it out. If I'm landing early morning Monday, but need to head to class for the afternoon, it helps a lot to know that I just need to push through the classes and then I'll go to the coffee shop and get everything sorted out, as opposed to spending the classes worrying about all the disparate things that need to be done. It offloads the pressure of returning to normalcy onto a dedicated, planned time.

End Notes

I find that having a set practice of intervening before post-travel, post-illness, or post-whatever-else chaos snowballs into medium-term impact on my life is supremely useful. Do you have your own post-travel or post-something re-syncing routine? I'd love to hear about it!