In your normal life, a lot of people like to make a schedule. Write down every technique you know. We've given you quite a big tool box. Write down every one that you know and fit them all into a schedule over the period of maybe two weeks or a month. But you cannot do them all equally, for the same amount of time. Compassion/Lovingkindness is something you could do every day. You could do a session of that every day, no problem. You could do the breath everyday, no problem. But if you do death reflection everyday for half an hour or an hour, whatever, and you do Dukkha reflection the other part of the day everyday, you're just going to make yourself depressed. We don't want that. In the same way, you can't reflect on how fortunate you are for a whole period everyday, everyday, everyday. It's overboard. So with something like how fortunate you are, you might want to do it in the beginning of a period once a week, and once every two weeks for a whole period. You might do death reflection once a week. You might do Compassion/Lovingkindness five times a week. Jiggle it as you wish, setting up a kind of schedule and then seeing how it flows. After you've tested it a little bit you might want to jiggle it a bit more in the future. This may work for some people. That's how some people choose their techniques during their normal life.
Other people make a decision about what they're going do when they sit down. This works for a lot of people. It may not work for everyone, but for some people it does. Sometimes the decision is stimulated by what happened in the last hour, what happened that morning. Even if you have a schedule in your normal life, and you plan that night's meditation is going to be on impermanence, but your grandfather died that morning. Impermanence and death are a bit similar, but you may want to focus it much more just on death because that was so important that morning. It was something bigger than just general impermanence as a reflection. So sometimes there are important things that happen during the day, in which case forget the technique that you had scheduled and just do something in relationship to what happened that day.
We do encourage you to do the short form of the Five Reflections and a little Compassion/Lovingkindness at the beginning of every period. So we do encourage that you always put a little bit in, every time, in your normal life, too. There's also bowing, reflecting on the Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha. You can also do that every time at the beginning. It's very helpful. And then, after that, either work from a schedule or consider something that happened in the day. If you find, though, that you haven't done, say, a reflection on death for five months, it's time to put that in there. Don't let any of the techniques disappear. You can end up being like the person with the hammer who loves building boxes.