A habit is something you do. A ritual is something you do on purpose, and know that you are doing. The difference sounds slight and turns out to be large.
I keep three. The first is the kettle, mornings, with nothing else open. The second is a short walk at the end of the working day, a deliberate border between work and the rest. The third is a line of the day written before bed: one thing that happened, in a sentence.
None of them takes more than ten minutes. All three do the same quiet work, which is to mark time, to turn a flat sequence of hours into a day with a beginning, a middle and an end. If you have been feeling that your weeks blur, that may be what is missing: not time, but its punctuation.
