The conclusion I’ve come to with the whole “personal discipline” thing is that you need to use structure to break up the massive task of being disciplined about everything all at once into small bite-sized chunks. So the challenge now is, how do you structure “life”?
And, once you’ve built up a structure, how do you handle emergencies and changes and contingencies? If you drop the plan at the first sign of trouble, it isn’t much of a plan, is it?
Interestingly, I think that I stumbled on a pretty good process for that while Kara and I were on our little Mid-Atlantic Post-Graduate Tour in May. Two steps:
- start with a reasonable plan
- be flexible enough to deviate
That’s it.
The idea evolved out of the fact that we were in a different locale pretty much every day, and we wanted to maximize our time there. But–and this is important–we’ve also been on vacations and trips before where we’ve ended up over-scheduling, doing too much, getting tired, and ending up in that “I need a vacation from my vacation!” mindset.
When we were in DC, we determined that, in the a.m., we wanted to see my old neighborhood in Silver Spring and check out Fractured Prune for homemade doughnuts. In the afternoon, we planned to try to tour the Capitol building.
That’s where that “reasonable” in “reasonable plan” comes into play. What we determined was, one morning and one evening activity was doable, given that we also factored in traveling from city to city, having dinner with our hosts, and so forth. The Rule of 3 recommends having 3 total daily outcomes, but in vacation terms, one of those outcomes might well be the dinner with friends. Bottom line, I think 2-3 is a good number.
But flexibility is key. In regular life, emergencies happen. In our vacation example, you want to be able to go with the flow. I really wanted to have lunch at my favorite burrito joint in the world, California Tortilla, but by the time we got done eating, we would have had to sprint to make it to the Capitol in time. So, instead, we exercised our option to be flexible and spent part of the afternoon touring the National Archives, then walked to the World War 2 memorial.
The idea is, if all else fails, you’re not sitting around twiddling your thumbs–that’s why you start with some structure. But you have to give yourself the freedom to deviate.
Structure isn’t a cage: it’s a framework for hanging your activities.