I truly envy people with routines or rituals. I have tried the simplest ones, and none of them stick. I've been frustrated by this for a long time now. I see people having routines and being more productive and it makes me almost sad.
I think you need to be a special kind of person to have them.
On the contrary, I think it would be very unusual to be a person with no routines. Perhaps you mean specifically 'routines that help with productivity'?
Ah, fair enough. The only real routine I have is "make coffee, kiss wife, watch rerun of the evening news". And that's about it.
So yes, I have no productivity-helping routines.
Some of the ones I tried in a lot of different ways are time management (pomodoro, toggl, ..), activity logging (toggl, todoist, paper book, ..), waking up and going to bed on fixed hours, remembering thinks (google keep, evernote, paper book,..) and all of them fade away after less than 5 days.
The conscious part of the human mind is basically a justification system. It exists to justify actions so that they become socially acceptable through rationalizations (this statement stems from this hypothesis: [1]).
After understanding this it's clear to see that your motivation is simply too low - there's not a reason that is important enough for you. That means you don't really feel the need to change your behaviour. It's a good sign - you are content with yourself and don't fear the social repercussions of your current behaviour to change anything about it - but it also means that you stagnate.
You'll change your behaviour if you have the fear that you could lose social status.
It seems that you try to control your behaviour through rational thinking. But please understand that this is not how the brain operates. It first and foremost wants to be socially accepted while minimizing energy consumption (with bursts of curiosity). If you want to use rational thinking for your behaviour, you have to add a value in your belief system that rational thinking leads to the best decision. This also has to be associated with emotions and you need some memories and stories where rational behaviour was advantageous to back this belief up. Change other parts of your belief system to make it injustifiable to yourself to live with unproductive routines. I have to admit that I'm not sure if this will lead you to happiness/fulfillment (pretty sure it won't if you're currently happy and fulfilled with your current beliefs), but that's how you change behaviour.
This might seem like “just another thing” after all these example, but have you looked into bullet journalling? It can be taken less as a fixed-in-stone method and more as a continual improvement at shaping your rituals.
Also, these rituals should either come to you naturally or be grown into with multiple attempts, so you shouldn't brush everything off at once.
This is also a fun project to build a virtual machine for. I've been working on one, but haven't finished it yet. Not too complex, but very educational.
But there is the whole glass castle principle you forgot to me too. That 5 minute break does not take 0 minutes to recover from in some cases. You need to rebuild your glass castle in your head over and over again. So in reality it might take just as much time to go back to full productivity.
That's a very fuzzy, if not non-existent, distinction. The only real difference is the designers' original intention. Of course the Java VM was originally only destined to exist only in software, but hardware versions do exists [1]. And of course x86 was always destined for hardware, but there's more software implementations of that than can be counted. There's also a third type in the LLVM sense, where the VM is just an intermediate step in compiling from a high level language down to machine code. And that's where the JVM (mostly) falls today.
The VM described in the OP could easily fit in any of the three.
I think you need to be a special kind of person to have them.