The Routine Workflow

Written By Manos Mastorakis

Last updated About 7 hours ago

The workflow below is an example of how Routine can be used to reduce context switching, stay focused on what matters, capture all thoughts and ideas, and organize long-term information to act on later.

💾 Capture everything

As advocated by David Allen in his popular book Getting Things Done, anything left on your mind is a blocker to focus.

The advice is simple: get things out of your head quickly so they can be processed, reconsidered, and categorized later.

Routine is designed with that philosophy in mind, letting you capture a thought, idea, note, or task within seconds.

  • Open the Console through the CTRL+SPACE (or CMD+SPACE on macOS) hotkey

  • Type something you want to remember for later

  • Hit Enter — a task is created and saved in your Inbox

Because the Console can be opened from anywhere on your desktop, it's the fastest way to capture something without losing focus on what you were doing.

On mobile, the process is equally fast — long press the main button to use voice capture and speak your thought naturally. The AI assistant will create the right object and place it in the right location automatically.

🛠️ Connect your third-party services

Work arrives through many channels — emails, project management tools, chat apps, and more. Bringing all of those into one system makes it easier to prioritize, plan, and act.

Through Routine's integrations, you can connect your daily tools and pull all your work into a single workspace.

  1. Head to Settings

  2. Open Integrations

  3. Activate the services you use daily (Gmail, Slack, Notion, Asana, Todoist, GitHub, and more)

Once connected, tasks and items from those services appear in Routine alongside your personal tasks, giving you a complete picture of everything on your plate.

📥 Process your inbox from time to time

All tasks you create land in your Inbox by default. Process it the same way you manage your email inbox — regularly, until you reach Inbox Zero.

For every item in your Inbox:

  • 🧽 If the task is no longer relevant, discard it

  • ✅ If it takes less than 2 minutes, do it right away and mark it done

  • 📅 If you know when it needs to happen, schedule it for a specific day

  • ⏰ If you're not sure when, postpone it to a later week to reconsider

  • 🌀 If it belongs to a larger objective, link it to a project

  • 🔄 Repeat until you reach Inbox Zero

📅 Plan your week

The Calendar screen combines events from all your calendars with your tasks for the week.

At the start of each week, go through your tasks and decide:

  • 🎯 If a task is important, block time for it — drag and drop it into the calendar

  • 📅 If you know which day you'll work on it, schedule it for that day

  • ⏰ If a task isn't important this week, postpone it to a later week

  • 🌗 Leave tasks in the list that you want to complete this week but haven't scheduled yet

Reassess priorities throughout the week — postpone tasks that have lost urgency, block time for new priorities, and keep your plan realistic.

🎯 Focus on what matters right now

The Agenda screen is designed for daily execution — surfacing the tasks you've committed to and the events you need to attend.

At the start of each day:

  • ❌ Hide events you won't attend

  • 🗳️ Pick 1–3 important tasks you absolutely want to complete

  • 🎯 Allocate time for the most important items — drag and drop or use CMD/CTRL+L

  • ⏰ Postpone everything else to a later week

When you're deep in work and don't want to switch to Routine, use the Console (CTRL+SPACE) to check upcoming events and today's tasks without breaking your flow.

🌀 Organize work around projects

For work that spans multiple tasks or involves a team, use Projects.

Projects let you group related tasks around a shared objective — whether it's a product launch, a client engagement, or a personal goal. Each task linked to a project displays a project chip so the relationship is always visible.

Team organizations also have shared Projects screens, allowing you to coordinate work across workspace members without leaving Routine.

📚 Organize information

Routine lets you save and organize information contextually.

Tasks can have descriptions and notes. Pages let you write rich documents with embedded media, checklists, and references to other objects. Any task created inside a page appears in your agenda automatically.

For recurring daily writing, the Journal gives you a dedicated space to reflect, plan, and capture thoughts — each day gets its own entry, and tasks created there connect directly to your workflow.