Discipline and Freedom

Day 237 / 365

Last year around October I was in a very bad place personally. I was burning through the days wasting time online, staying up late and getting up minutes before I had to leave for work. When I finally decided I need to get things under control again, I decided to plan it all out, as that is one thing I am best at. I made an excel sheet with things that I had to do every day, like getting up before 6, reading 10 pages of a book, coding for an hour and so on. Every day as I did all this I marked the tasks as done on the sheet, and the goal was to get everything done before going to bed.

The few people that I shared this approach with were a bit repulsed by it. The common argument against it was that if you are living life by such a tight schedule and to-do list, what does it mean for your freedom. People see being disciplined as just being tied up with tasks and having no freedom. And through personal experience, I can guarantee you that it’s exactly the opposite.

How many times has a weekend came and gone so quickly that you couldn’t even notice where the time went? It’s Sunday night already and you would rather go out for dinner or watch a movie at home, but you can’t do any of that as you are stressing about the report that you have to turn in on Monday morning which you still haven’t finished it yet. Would you call that freedom?

On the other hand, if you would have spent 15 minutes on Friday night making a list of things to do, and just alotted some time on Saturday to get them done, you would have had a lovely and tension-free Sunday.

Freedom means having control of your life. And there is no better way to gain control than to bring some discipline into your life.

This post is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here

Yesterday’s blog —Being productive in chaos