Maintaining discipline

How does your routine change when you have a day off? You may say "I've worked hard all week so I deserve a rest today. I'll get up at 10:00, have a lazy bath and then slowly roll towards brunch at midday - followed by a sofa and TV session in the afternoon. Perhaps I'll consider all the things I really need to do afterwards."

Absolutely - but don't rest too hard.

You see, a "day off" is not really a day off - from work yes, but from life, no. Your life continues outside of work whether you like it or not and stuff still needs to happen. You might feel like you're just treading water at work - your life on hold until you rush out of the office door at the end of the day towards a binge-watch of Modern Family when you get home. But it doesn't have to be like this. You are in control of your own time.

Your own time is when you get shit done and advance in life.

Life can be hard, I get it. I'm in the same boat as you - I try to live my life as best I can, just like most other people. But I do try to exercise a little discipline every day in order to advance in life. Every morning, whether I'm working or not, I ask myself this: What do I want to achieve today, like really achieve?

The status quo might be just to tread water - get up, go to work, come home, watch some TV, go to bed. The problem is that when you look back on this after a period of months or even years, what do you really remember? The work all blurs into one, while the bits you do remember are concentrated around time outside of work - and often associated with simple, free, life events. Having a delicious, fresh home-brewed cup of coffee with your family on a Saturday morning, watching your kids perform at sports day or the nativity, going on a nature walk in your favourite woodland on a fresh spring day, or watching the sun rise.

That's what I did this morning - I watched the sun rise. And I'm on a day off work today. I set my alarm for 05:30 to walk to a small hill nearby and watch the sun rise at 06:12. It was glorious - one instant I was standing in the serene glow of the pre-dawn with a bitter easterly wind gnawing at my face, and in the next, the first glint of the Sun's disk emerged above a distant hill to signal the start of a new day. Maybe it's the fact that I live in the UK and it's often cloudy here - but it felt extremely special to watch the Sun rise over a sleepy England this morning.

Sunrise this morning, 18th March 2025.

This is something I'll remember for some time - and all possible because I had the discipline to get up early this morning - and go to bed early last night.

In The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey, he introduces the Time Management Matrix - a simple way to categorise the different types of task we have to contend with on a daily basis. It goes like this:

"PC activities" represent your personal well-being and skills that allow you to produce results or outputs over the long-term. By the way, I strongly recommend The Seven Habits - it will change your life!

The idea here is to spend as much time as possible in Quadrant II (important but not urgent activites). This is the heart of effective personal management, and helps to prevent urgent and important things from happening in the first place. It's not easy to prioritise Quadrant II activities. It requires discipline. There it is, there's that word again.

Effectively building a meaninful, efficient life filled with fun and interesting things requires the discipline to spend as much time in Quadrant II as possible. What's more, you will remember what you do (it won't all blur into a single smudge when you look back in years to come), because these activities prioritise the long-term personal development which is most important and meaningful to you.

Going back to the previous blog post, Investing for your life, having the discipline to regularly invest no matter the state of the market (and to keep your money in the market when there is an unexpected downturn), is one of the fundamental cornerstones of successful investing according to Vanguard.

To live intentionally is to live according to a plan (ideally a written plan), and to live with the discipline to stick to that plan. It won't be easy - nothing worth having ever is. But that's the point - the fact it's hard makes it sweeter when you do achieve your long-term goals. And that, surely, is the point of living.

So take some time to chill out on your day off - but not too much. Keep your day structured with a written plan (you could even structure in some recreation to the day), and stick to it. With a touch of discipline and consistency, you can - slowly - build the intentional life you want to live.