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Let’s take a step back. Why is discipline such a difficult thing to have?

Two parts to my theory: first, if you’re reading this, the worst thing that might ever happen to you–and this is still unlikely at best–is that you’ll get into trouble with the law, or you’ll have some sort of accident. But you’re probably educated, you’ve probably got some kind of support system, and if you fall off the horse, you’re going to be able to get back on.

In other words, there are no landmines in your backyard. There is no chance you will starve to death. You might lose your house someday, but you’ll never end up living on the street.

Success of some sort is the default condition, and you have to go out of your way to screw that up.

The other part is that the amazing, incredible technology we have today makes it very very difficult to see past the immediate. You watch TV on-demand. A phone call brings food in 45 minutes or less. You don’t even have to go to the library to find the answer to a centuries-old scientific conundrum; it’s on the Internet.

Cause and effect is radically skewed towards the immediate.

So if everything is available right now, it becomes harder and harder to imagine those things that take a week, a month, a year. And we compensate for that far-off by establishing ritual to give us structure. Four years of college classes are unimaginable, so we break it down: year by year, semester by semester, with milestones along the way. We create a structure that allows us to measure progress.

How do you do that for something more amorphous? For “being a writer”? For “getting in shape”?

And if the penalty for laziness is a status quo that’s really quite comfortable, is the diminishing reward for greater risk worth the effort?

I think that ritual has to do with structure. While grad school was not easy, neither was it hard, because it formed a comforting structural framework for my life. Part of my identity was Mark Dalius, part-time MBA student at Boston University, who is at the school two nights a week, and why don’t I tell you a little bit about this case study we just did that I think is really interesting?

There was no option to just skip class because part of the structure, part of the ritual, was weekly attendance. It’s no different than going to church on Sunday or watching an NFL game; you just don’t miss it because you just don’t miss it.

But it’s a ritual. It’s a structure. It’s still not quite discipline.

I don’t think that ritual is bad, by the way. Establishing a repetitive process for crucial tasks keeps our operating rooms clean and functional, and helps pilots land airplanes, and makes manufacturing efficient, among countless other things.

But is ritual enough?

It’s hard to get things done, and I think the key to the struggle lies in discipline.

I don’t have much of it anymore, and I don’t think anybody else does either, by and large. I feel like I, and everybody else, has such enormous potential, yet I don’t feel like we’re reaching it. I don’t know that I can do anything about it for humanity at large–nor would I presume to such hubris–but I’d sure like to do better at getting out of bed in the morning and accomplishing my goals.

So I’ve been thinking about the subject, and I think that discipline itself isn’t quite so simple as this innate drive to do what has to be done.

You might say, “Well, I have discipline. I get up in the morning. I go to work. I make dinner. I honor my commitments. I don’t always want to do things, but I do them anyway.”

And maybe that’s true; I’m certain that different people have different levels of innate discipline, and that I might just struggle with it more. But I also think that, in a lot of our lives, what we have instead is perhaps discipline’s little brother, ritual. We do things by rote; we do things because we’re used to doing them, not through some sheer force of will.

But I don’t think it’s quite the same thing as discipline…

Look again at that person who seems to multitask with ease and you will find someone who is absolutely disciplined about recognizing switching costs, about getting to completion, about not starting too many things, about saying “no” to things that are not worth doing.

I know people will say that following the Rule of 3 and Do One Thing At A Time is not realistic; “My job/industry/life just isn’t like that; I’m a CEO/parent/student; we have to be agile/responsive/attentive to our customer/family/professor’s needs; etc. etc.”

You have to make some tough decisions. What’s better: 20 irons in the fire, or 3 clean, pressed shirts? Do you like looking busy and important, or do you like finishing things?

Nothing is simple and easy, and you have to do the work. You have to prepare. You have to run the numbers. You need a plan. You need to account for the unexpected. You need to understand how to test your results, and how to interpret the results of the test.

Oil is currently spewing into the Gulf of Mexico because somebody didn’t plan. Somebody didn’t account for the unexpected. Somebody didn’t test.

Remember switching costs. Remember setup costs. Remember to account for things you didn’t account for.

Do you get it yet? We simplify tasks in our heads because we envision successful outcomes and are not realistic about the number of steps that are required to achieve them. That’s the real reason the old Project Manager’s rule of thumb is so frequently applied: think about how long it should take, then double it, then double it again.

You have a certain number of hours in a day. You will be interrupted as you try to complete tasks. You will encounter challenges. You will encounter switching costs and unexpected setup costs and things you didn’t know you didn’t know. If you are not realistic about your time costs, you will overrun your time budget. You will not finish on time. You may not finish at all.

Do you want to start a bunch of things? Starting things is fun, but adds no value. Do you want to finish one thing?

Finishing one thing doesn’t look as impressive as that guy over there. Look at him! He’s working on 10 things at once!

Who is adding more value?

Quit starting things. Start finishing things.

I am loving the Rule of 3. It’s a fundamental recognition of the fact that, averaged out for time, it is not possible to plan for and achieve more than 3 meaningful outcomes in a single day.

The idea is, you have 3 “outcomes” for the day, 3 for the week, 3 for the month, 3 for the year.

“By the time I go to bed, the laundry will be done” is a meaningful outcome. If you subdivide that into the gathering, washing, drying and folding steps, you’ll have more than 1 task. But the outcome is that you now have clean clothes to wear.

Consider the following: on a given Saturday, your 3 outcomes might be to get groceries, to straighten up the house, and to get the oil changed. That might seem like a pretty light list.

First: getting groceries should take about an hour. Right?

The outcome “get groceries” includes the following tasks:

• make a list – 15 minutes
• determine what groceries you already have – 10 minutes
• think about your menu for the week – 10 minutes
• go to the car – 2 minutes
• remember that you forgot the reusable bags and run back inside, then back to the car – 5 minutes
• drive to the store – 20 minutes
• actual shopping – 60 minutes
• waiting in line – 10 minutes
• drive home – 20 minutes
• bring bags inside (2 trips) – 10 minutes
• put groceries away – 10 minutes

Closer to 3 hours, all told. Time yourself the next time you go shopping. You’ll be surprised.

You can and will do more than 3 “things” during the day, because things will come up that need to be done right now and are not negotiable, and outcomes have multiple tasks associated with them. Also consider that during the day, you will need to eat, shower, get dressed, have conversations and interactions with others, and probably take a breather. You will be interrupted.

3 is a realistic number, and it’s a good way to discipline yourself to say “no” to those things that are non-essential tasks for the day. I have an additional list: my “Big Bucket.” That’s where other things that need to get done are relegated. When I choose my 3 Daily, or even 3 Weekly, I look in my Big Bucket to see the big picture.

Sometimes things get changed mid-day. An outcome that depends on somebody else gets moved back to the bucket once I learn that they are on vacation. I choose another task instead. If I’ve finished my 3, I might add another.

The other part of the Rule of 3 is to avoid getting overwhelmed. Just keep it to 3 things. If you start to feel yourself pulled in 10 directions, refocus on one of your core 3 things.

Remember that the idea is to finish 3 things in a day. Maybe the clothes are washed but still wet, and you’ve vacuumed half the carpet, and you put some of the groceries away, and you wrote half a blog entry, and you scheduled 2 of the 5 meetings you need to do, etc. etc.

You have not finished anything. You have 5 outcomes in a partial state of completion. Keep doing this, then wonder why the house is a mess and your inbox never gets empty.

Remember setup costs.

If it takes one hour to set up a new computer–install all the software, set up the email client, update the antivirus software–how long does it take to set up 5 computers?

Should take 5 hours, plus a small amount of switching cost. Right?

Not even close.

How long did it take to decide on the list of tasks that had to be completed on each computer? How many meetings, phone calls, and email conversations had to take place? The time to research what hardware to buy, what software, what versions, and a reasonable price? To get budgetary clearance? To get the hardware delivered, then unboxed?

What about the time it took you to get comfortable with the new Windows installation process? What about the software driver that was incompatible with that version of Windows and the time it took you to find an obscure website with a driver that worked? The number of times the installation was 99% complete before it crashed completely, leaving you to start from scratch until you found a fix for the bug that was causing the problem?

What about the time to test the system to make sure everything worked? The time it took you to write the tests? The time it took you to interpret the results of the tests?

Do you get it?

A car that is traveling at 60 miles per hour will take 1 minute to travel 1/60th of a mile.

Walking to that same car, putting on your seatbelt, starting the car, adjusting the mirrors, then accelerating to 60 miles per hour, then slowing down and stopping at the end of the 1/60th of a mile will take considerably longer.

Now consider that the driver also has to study for and pass a learner’s permit test, find a driving school, learn to drive, pass a road test, get insurance, research vehicles, qualify for financing, and buy a car.

You have to consider the time you spend learning and setting up your task or process or outcome as part of the whole process. It’s not always going to be so dramatic–maybe you already have a car, or are an expert at installing Windows–but there will be some setup cost.

No project starts at full-speed.

The 80/20 rule as it applies to task completion: 80% of the work takes 20% of the time. If you have a project that seems, to you, to be “nearly done,” you aren’t actually even halfway finished. That remaining “20%” will take 4 times again as much as the time you’ve already spent.

There is no such thing as “just a quick thing you should be able to bang out in, like, 2 minutes.” Nothing meaningful, anyway. I cannot count the number of projects that I’ve worked on which had completely unrealistic assessments of complexity.

This is not a condemnation of Agile. It is, however, a clarification for the 80% of people who don’t get it, who think that “Agile” means “it’s ok to constantly and quickly switch directions completely.”

It’s not. Agile means, “We accept that we’re unlikely to get the whole big project vision right at the beginning. Therefore, we recognize that things that are simple on the surface often hide great complexity, and we refuse to try to do anything beyond a completely self-contained sub-process in a given development cycle. We would rather do something simple that adds a tiny bit of real value today than something complex that might add value someday.”

In other words, do one thing at a time.

You can work on one thing at a time. The more knowledge-intensive the task, the higher the switching costs.

Plan to clean your living room. Get out the dustcloth and the vacuum and the polish and the glass cleaner, then discover that everybody is in there, watching the big game. You have to do something else for awhile.

That isn’t as tough because you can just leave all the cleaning supplies out, and when you come back, they’re there and ready for you to start the task.

Your brain doesn’t work like that. As soon as you decide to do the grocery shopping instead of cleaning, your brain begins mentally putting away the dustcloth and vacuum and so forth, making mental space for remembering the milk and the vegetables. By the time you start back on the cleaning task, you’ve lost all the time you spent preparing.

If a task takes you an hour to complete, but half an hour of that is preparation time, and you keep switching tasks within the first 30 minutes, you will never complete that task.

Find anybody who seems to have a whole lot of stuff going on. I guarantee that you will find somebody with a lot of projects that are half-finished.

My thinking is this: we start too much and finish too little.

Fact: you can only really work on one thing at a time.

Multitasking is a myth. Literally. “But my computer does multitasking,” you say. Elaborate ruse. Your computer is actually switching–very, very quickly–between separate processes. Because it’s a computer, and because it’s designed to do all that, and because it has a massive amount of fast-access memory, it reduces switching costs to almost nothing.

You are not a computer. You can’t switch that fast.

Suppose you have two tasks. Each takes you 4 hours to do. How much total time will it take you to finish both?

8 hours is not the answer.

If you do first one, then the other, it will take you 4 hours, plus whatever amount of time it takes you to switch from one to the other, then another 4 hours. At best, it will take you 8 hours plus a little.

If you switch from one to the other after every hour, it will take you 1 hour, plus a little, then 1 hour, plus a little, then 1 hour, and so on. The more you switch tasks, the more it costs to finish.

I once mentioned to a former colleague that I preferred working on one project at a time. “That’s not the way we work here,” he responded disdainfully. “We multitask a lot. Better get used to it.”

Is it any wonder that this individual–and this company, for that matter–never finished a single project or product on time? And that what did get churned out suffered from so much feature creep and additional complexity that it never satisfied its original design goals?

You don’t always have the option to finish what you started. But don’t think that it doesn’t cost you.