Day Four: Setback

I didn't make time to post on this blog yesterday, so I will have to catch up and do two posts today. This particular post is a reflection on the fourth day of my month of discipline. As the title suggests, all did not go according to plan.

Instead of moving on past Ben Franklin's first three areas of self-improvement: Temperance, Silence, and Order, I decided that Order posed enough challenge that I should spend an additional day on it. Order is my mount Everest, a fundamental flaw in my character. Rather than spend a few minutes each day to maintain order, I allow things to slowly slip into incomprehensible mess, putting off mundane chores always to tomorrow. It is one area of my life that I do not look sufficiently into the long term. It is a challenge that demands self-control, rigidly making myself tidy up each day until order naturally integrates into my daily routine.

I did make progress with order, taking care of things that I've put off, and tackling an area that I have always let lapse into a clustered mess of icons: My desktop. Order is about imposing organization, a heirarchy, where everything goes where it belongs and is easily found. While it seems silly, my desktop now makes me happy, where as before there may have been some implicit overwhelming sense of chaos.

The benefits of order are tangible, and I need to recognize that although I believe I do not need it, I in fact do. It is interesting that our self-models of various phenomena can be so wrong, and yet we can feel so certain about it; I was certain that order was something that would be a waste of time, that chaos suits me. And yet, after imposing just a small amount of order in my cluttered life, I can feel the goodness in order; my model was so wrong, and now I must fix it.

One of the aspects of successful people that I've begun to embrace is that of 'being a doer'. Planning is not enough, in order to be productive, one must produce. This tautology is powerful and is a mindset that I must adopt; too many times, I have ideas for projects but fail to follow through. No longer! And so, I put aside a few hours to become a published author; I'm producing a trivial book, but I hope that it leads to more substantial works later. Another principle I am embracing is that of baby steps (a la the classic film What About Bob); each baby step is a stepping stone to less trivial accomplishments.

However, today was not all roses; I fell back in productivity towards the end of the day. I allowed myself to be caught in a rut, to spend too much time on something undeserving. I also fell backwards when it came to Temperance, I went out for drinks with friends and lapsed into my old habits; had more to drink than I rationed myself, ate more than I should have. So today, I will redouble my efforts on that front; punish myself in a sense with a more restrictive diet in order to flex that all-important self-discipline muscle. Like any other muscle, repeated stress at manageable levels increases its strength.

Today I will be productive, set goals, and reach them. I will not move on to another principle of self-improvement yet, as it is clear that I have not fully embraced Temperance or Order yet.