In my last post I referred to my current approach to many of my endeavors as “vague discipline” (perhaps as opposed to “focused discipline”). I’m not sure this is a real phrase, so I figured I would start this post by elaborating on what exactly I mean. If I employ vague discipline in an area of my life, it means that I consistently carve out time/effort/energy for that part of my life and/or stick to a loose set of rules, but I’m not making a focused effort to always improve, and I don’t self-reflect and change my rules and approach if something isn’t going quite the way I’d like. Some examples where I have applied vague discipline and it has been successful are personal finance and my PhD. The extent of my personal finance strategy pretty much boils down to two guidelines: don’t spend money on things that aren’t worth the cost and use savings for diverse and productive investments. Following those guidelines, I’ve been able to maintain a 20-30% savings rate since I started my PhD, which isn’t as productive as the focused discipline of people who follow the FIRE movement, but puts me in much better shape than most Americans. While I worked on my PhD, my whole approach was pretty much just to show up every day and try to learn something. I didn’t finish as quickly or with as many publications as people I know who took a more focused approach, but in the end I still successfully completed my PhD.
The best example of an area I have been applying vague discipline with results I am not happy with is rock climbing. Rock climbing has been my main sport for over five years now, and for most of that time I didn’t strive for anything specific beyond going to the gym 2-4 times per week. In my first 6 months climbing I saw clear improvements, but after that any progress became much slower and there have been periods of regression as well. In the past ~6 months in particular, I haven’t felt that strong on the wall. There are many potential reasons, but after some reflection I think that it’s because my changing work schedule has led to me cutting climbing sessions shorter, oftentimes before I’ve really even started to push myself.
This leads into my first resolution for 2019. I’ve always known that I could climb stronger if I started climbing specific training or actually got organized about hangboarding, but I’ve never pursued either. I think this is because climbing is one of my sources of “play” so I’m hesitant to apply any strict structures over it. So for 2019, my first resolution will simply be to have at least two climbing sessions per week that are at least two hours long. With work and commuting, it will require some better planning on my part, but it won’t require busting out spreadsheets or anything like that. If, by the end of March I’m still not happy with how strong I’m climbing, I will re-assess and potentially revise the resolution. (To make this resolution more specifically measurable, I’ll say it warrants revision if I’m not able to climb half the V6s in my gym at the end of March.)
My other resolution for 2019 has to do with an area where I haven’t really been applying discipline, vague or otherwise. Since I started my third part time job in August, I’ve returned back to basically a full time work schedule, which means that all my personal projects have fallen by the wayside. It may have actually started before the job, judging by my post history on the blog. While the blog is not equivalent to my personal projects, they are definitely connected, and so my second resolution for 2019 is to publish at least one blog post per month. My hope is that taking time to write (and think about whatever I’m writing about) will reignite progress on a project or two. But even if that doesn’t happen, the reflection involved in writing should help me be more intentional about other areas of my life – namely my work and career. So here’s to 2019 – I doubt it will have as much self-reflection as the middle years of my PhD, but it should at least have more than 2018.
