My 20 year old self hated structure and routines

That I have started embracing now…

In a world where everyone is preaching about freedom and YOLO, structured and routine life seems very boring. I would never be living such a life — wake up, go to work , come back home and sleep, all in fixed defined time. This was my opinion about the corporate world and pretty much anyone who was doing their scheduled job, and always thought I would never follow that.

Are they humans or machines, right?

Coming out fresh from the routined life of school or colleges, our wishful thinking about life is to do our own project, that somehow pays enough to travel the world and live a fancy looking lifestyle. In simple words: live a free life.

In an experiment done with children in playground, one group of children were let into playground with fence, while other without-the-fence. What they discovered was pretty interesting. The children playing inside the fenced-in-playground explored to the farthest end of the boundaries, while the children without fenced playground stayed closer to their teacher and explored less. This goes to tell us that our boundaries do not limit us in exploration, but in fact they give us freedom to explore more.

Routines and schedules seems boring, but they will help you organize your chaos. When you work within a limited boundary, you will have more freedom to explore within that. You don’t worry about going too far off, or staying too narrow. And at any time, you feel like you have explored enough within that space, you can always raise that boundary to explore more avenues.

To live and excel in a world full of fixed structure and schedules, we somehow need to start making truce with them.

3 things about routined life that late 20s have started embracing, which my early 20 year old self didn’t understand or never attempted to do so.

1. Schedule based on facts, not expectations.

Have you ever started some resolution on the new year and forgot about it, by the next month? The reason our resolutions do not work is because we often fail to identify clearly between our reality and expectations, to meet our goal. We start by creating a checklist of to-do’s and a perfectly ideal timetable, which is often not supported by the facts.

Say, you are on your weight loss journey, your schedule includes waking up at 5 am in the morning, although you never saw the rising sun in years. Then you start adding items like eating 1000 Calories a day, when your normal day Calories intake is 2500. Uh uh.. this is not a proper scheduling, your reality is far off from your expectation, and that cannot get you towards your goal. Stop right there!!!

Start by a schedule something like going to the gym few times a week. If you want to build a habit of reading books, start by creating a schedule to read few paragraphs a day. Not a fixed number, but a checklist you wanted to have, by the end of the day, a week or a month. You still have a schedule with a list of things to do, but you have a freedom to execute, all within your goal-time.

Then the real work begins. You will start by evaluating your current state. We all are our own and best version of Control System. Based on our daily, weekly or monthly goal and whatsoever input you have logged, you know how much more or less, you can accomplish for the next period.

So the next schedule will look like — I will read 3 pages this week, based on the fact that I have completed 2 pages last week with some free time in one of the weekday. And don’t worry, you will re-evaluate that again next week, if you didn’t meet the weekly goal or either exceeded the expectations.

Setting this weekly goals based on reality of your actual work, dedication and eagerness to achieve your goal, you will most likely succeed.

2. Small Repeatable tasks

Instead of working on larger goals and schedules, work on smaller ones. If you want to build a garden in front of your house, you can work 8 hours a day, all of your Saturday and Sunday, this weekend. For the entire 2 days, you will have to sacrifice a lot of things, sideline your existing responsibilities or delay any fun activities you have planned with your friend. And you may complete the task after all.

But, if I ask you to build another garden, say this time in your backyard, next weekend. You will most probably not do it. This is because our mind doesn’t see that as rewarding task anymore. It’s a lot of continuous effort in contrast to the one-time reward at the very end of this tiring work.

Start breaking down the goal into small achievable and rewarding tasks. Our final goal is still to build a garden. But, let’s create weekly goals. This week, we can level the ground and lay out the foundation , next week, we will plant flowers and the week after- put in fences around it, working just few hours every week. And we can still enjoy our weekend.

This shift in scheduling is very important. Although it might take longer time to finish the whole project, we will have small achievable goals each week. Each week we can see our progress and be proud of the work. Each week, we will have the flexibility to work on different days/hours as long as we meet the expected hours for the week. And each week, we can still enjoy the other fun activities that we would otherwise have to sacrifice.

Constant rewarding is what keeps our work enjoyable and keeps dopamine flowing in our mind. And if we have to build another garden: Sure, Bring it on. When we are trying to complete the whole project in 2 days, our focus will be towards completion, while if we are making smaller scheduled task, our focus shifts towards innovation , modification ideas and varieties .

3. Freedom is a mind game. Play it in your favor

Scheduling is a plan for carrying out a process giving lists of intended events and time. Giving a lil’ bit of freedom to play around will always makes any task enjoyable (and less boring).

If you have a open schedule to work 3 hours this week on your singing lessons, you are letting yourself a freedom to choose those 3 hours out of 168 hours this week. Let your mind think its powerful, rather than a piece of paper dictating it, what it needs to work from 6–7 am on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of this week.

This way of scheduling gives you a sense of freedom, and makes it enjoyable to perform any task. After all, freedom is a mind game.

A prisoner lives his life within a fixed boundary, but his freedom and happiness may not be defined by those boundaries. Yes, he will have to live within those 4 walls, but he has the freedom to choose what he wants to do, he has plenty of time to do a lot of things, and can enjoy what he does. As compared to, say a life of a corporate stock trader, who is not limited to any physical boundaries. But is he able to enjoy his freedom and wealth? He may not be. Because of his work responsibility and structured work life that he has to comply, he may just be able to take handful of days off to travel or enjoy the freedom of boundaries. But besides that, he might just be working round the clock, throughout the year on meeting corporate needs.

In the end, freedom is all about your mentality. It’s a mind game, which we need to start getting better at.

Do what suits you more. Evaluate and iterate. You’ll do great.