needing structure
certainty leads to action
I made an unexpected realization about myself recently: I need to schedule my week so I can feel progress. The need for a defined schedule may come obvious to a lot of people but it wasn’t immediately obvious to me, especially now, when I have complete control of my time.
I’ve spent most of my professional life capable of basically knowing what I need to get done and getting said things done, on time, without requiring a weekly planner or managing a calendar. There have been some exceptions, like being an engineering manager, where using a calendar was basically required to do my job.1
Since leaving full-time, however, I’ve noticed that a typical 9-to-5 provides more than just a steady paycheck, benefits, and camaraderie. It also provides a structure to your day, an organized value system to follow2 , and a hierarchy of challenges that encourage progress. And marked progress, like climbing the corporate ladder, feels good3.
A similar realization, but in a different vein, is trying to build friendships after you’ve completed your schooling. Many adults, myself included, remember how much easier it was to make friends when we were in school. At the time, I used to think that I was some kind of Dale Carnegie because making new friends came so naturally and effortlessly to me. I thought simply being kind and curious was sufficient to forming new friendships. But in my post-school life, I’ve learned that the regimented structure of school played a significant role in forming those new relationships. School required you to show up to the same place, day after day, to work on the same curriculum with a cohort of people who also happen to be the same age as you. Yes, the constraints of school limited freedom and required obedience to a large extent, but it also supplied many gifts in return. Gifts like traversing adolescence with others your age. Gifts that you only come to appreciate once you leave school.
If you happen to manage your own time, a schedule with deadlines (!) is a gift that you can give yourself—there’s no teacher or employer to do it for you. It’s a gift to save you from the daily rumination over all the various things you could be working on, as I’ve been experiencing lately.
Freedom is great, but too much freedom, too much choice, leads to inaction. Should I walk down this particular path? Is it the best path? What if I walk for months and reach a dead end? Uncertainty freezes you in place and, like Buridan's donkey4, can lead to death if you analyze for too long. A schedule, on the other hand, provides structure that gives you the faith5 of certainty and that certainty leads to action.
Good Beats
A 50¢ word (aka words that say a lot with less)
Dubiousness: uncertainty; the quality of being difficult to determine, or open to doubt or question: as, the dubiousness of a problem.
For Your Thoughts
Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
—Gustave Flaubert
Yours,
-Rahul
P.S. a reminder you can reply directly to oldmanrahul@substack.com, or you can tweet me @oldmanrahul about this edition. Thanks for reading and supporting my writing :)
Your day was often defined by colleagues scheduling calls with you. If your calendar has inbound (a life of its own), you’re basically required to watch your calendar throughout the day.
“Dopamine is released in the brain any time you achieve a milestone or you think you’re on the right path” which implies that you needed to be on some path to begin with.
Buridan’s donkey can’t decide between a pale of water to his left and a pile of hay to his right. He looks back and forth not sure which to choose first. Not being able to finally pick one, he dies of hunger and thirst.
You practice faith every time you get in a car and assume oncoming traffic will obey that dividing yellow line. We practice faith everyday.