Discipline, or that damn working day
As a purely civilian person, for most of my life I despised the very word discipline. It meant: an ugly state coercion to some kind of primitive senseless activity, such as walking with a drill, which no one in his right mind would choose for himself. Disobedience is punishable by a stupid, hateful, superior force. Unattractive traits on both sides of the disciplinary process. Enforcers - impenetrable "peaks" from jokes, reveling in their piece of power. And disciplined - humiliatingly obedient sheep without their own will. He is not attracted to any of them.
A fair portion of suffering for such a device of life goes to a civilian at office work. We have to adhere to fixed working days and hours (who invented them at all?), And also sometimes to sit at work when not working and do objectively meaningless things. It's no secret that there are days when it would be cheaper for an organization to just let us go home on an extraordinary paid vacation. Just lie on the couch, get enough sleep and gain strength. On such an unfortunate day, we are not workers, and it’s not necessary for this disciplinary violence with more than modest results. In the end, our business is to generate added value, and not impress the bosses with the duration of their working day. Having rested and regained strength, we will return with more energy and productivity.
Advances in this direction have long begun among companies that are pioneers of management techniques, such as Netflix, whose type of activity allows for such experiments. Flexible work schedules, lack of vacation and weekend accounting, remote work, afternoon nap at will - theoretically, for 10 years now, you won’t surprise anyone. They are really great! After all, we all have different biorhythms, and how to spend a lot of energy on overcoming our nature, why not the work schedule to step aside and adapt to the person? We are all for an ideal workflow - integrated into life, natural, into joy.
However, lately I have been respecting the discipline. There are several reasons for this.
To begin with, discipline is not an elemental misfortune and not an evil uncle with a whip. Discipline is the determination to fulfill intentionally assumed obligations. Own choice to do or not do something for an equally long time, as a result of our overall picture of what is right and what is not. It is said that Gogol spent several hours daily standing at the desk, which he had preferred from the time of Ganz to Küchelgarten to writing. In the days of apathy, when the literary process did not go on, he industriously covered the paper with phrases in the spirit I am not writing today. Whether there is inspiration or not, please stay in the position as if it is. Limit your freedom to its desired application.
Discipline provides a tremendous saving of mental strength. It is impossible every time the alarm rings to reconsider your intention to get up early. His intention must be formulated once, in a sober mind, and then methodically enforced. Just because it is necessary, it is so decided. Without philosophies and alternatives. To make so that one part of the brain makes a decision, and the other adheres to them. These processes are so different in nature and involve so different mechanisms of the psyche that switching too often between them is an extremely wasteful task.
Finally, discipline is a gigantic animator. What is done regularly is done quickly. Just work every day at work. Just forty minutes every night to read books. Or play clarinet three times a week. Or run cross. Or write tempera. And those around you gasp how fast you go! It is only an aimless watery life that flies by unnoticed. The same one that is subordinate to some intention is much denser and lives much more intensively. And the mechanism of this submission, this determination in actions, is discipline. The very set of process goals that I wrote about earlier , and which ensures progress on our chosen path.
There is a fairly common myth that the slave standard of the 40-50 hour work week leaves no room for life. Like, if it were not for this hated labor discipline, I would have turned mountains in some side field, and, alas, deprived of this opportunity. However, the experience of a huge number of people, including my own, clearly states: regimen and structure gives you much more chance to do something than just a large amount of unorganized time. And people who, by chance, were left to their own devices for a long time, either spent it aimlessly and mediocre, or very quickly harnessed themselves to the discipline of another activity.
... It seems that the concept of discipline has gone through all the stages of the classical Hype cycle in my lifeand relatively recently reached its "plateau of productivity." There he stay.
A fair portion of suffering for such a device of life goes to a civilian at office work. We have to adhere to fixed working days and hours (who invented them at all?), And also sometimes to sit at work when not working and do objectively meaningless things. It's no secret that there are days when it would be cheaper for an organization to just let us go home on an extraordinary paid vacation. Just lie on the couch, get enough sleep and gain strength. On such an unfortunate day, we are not workers, and it’s not necessary for this disciplinary violence with more than modest results. In the end, our business is to generate added value, and not impress the bosses with the duration of their working day. Having rested and regained strength, we will return with more energy and productivity.
Advances in this direction have long begun among companies that are pioneers of management techniques, such as Netflix, whose type of activity allows for such experiments. Flexible work schedules, lack of vacation and weekend accounting, remote work, afternoon nap at will - theoretically, for 10 years now, you won’t surprise anyone. They are really great! After all, we all have different biorhythms, and how to spend a lot of energy on overcoming our nature, why not the work schedule to step aside and adapt to the person? We are all for an ideal workflow - integrated into life, natural, into joy.
However, lately I have been respecting the discipline. There are several reasons for this.
To begin with, discipline is not an elemental misfortune and not an evil uncle with a whip. Discipline is the determination to fulfill intentionally assumed obligations. Own choice to do or not do something for an equally long time, as a result of our overall picture of what is right and what is not. It is said that Gogol spent several hours daily standing at the desk, which he had preferred from the time of Ganz to Küchelgarten to writing. In the days of apathy, when the literary process did not go on, he industriously covered the paper with phrases in the spirit I am not writing today. Whether there is inspiration or not, please stay in the position as if it is. Limit your freedom to its desired application.
Discipline provides a tremendous saving of mental strength. It is impossible every time the alarm rings to reconsider your intention to get up early. His intention must be formulated once, in a sober mind, and then methodically enforced. Just because it is necessary, it is so decided. Without philosophies and alternatives. To make so that one part of the brain makes a decision, and the other adheres to them. These processes are so different in nature and involve so different mechanisms of the psyche that switching too often between them is an extremely wasteful task.
Finally, discipline is a gigantic animator. What is done regularly is done quickly. Just work every day at work. Just forty minutes every night to read books. Or play clarinet three times a week. Or run cross. Or write tempera. And those around you gasp how fast you go! It is only an aimless watery life that flies by unnoticed. The same one that is subordinate to some intention is much denser and lives much more intensively. And the mechanism of this submission, this determination in actions, is discipline. The very set of process goals that I wrote about earlier , and which ensures progress on our chosen path.
There is a fairly common myth that the slave standard of the 40-50 hour work week leaves no room for life. Like, if it were not for this hated labor discipline, I would have turned mountains in some side field, and, alas, deprived of this opportunity. However, the experience of a huge number of people, including my own, clearly states: regimen and structure gives you much more chance to do something than just a large amount of unorganized time. And people who, by chance, were left to their own devices for a long time, either spent it aimlessly and mediocre, or very quickly harnessed themselves to the discipline of another activity.
... It seems that the concept of discipline has gone through all the stages of the classical Hype cycle in my lifeand relatively recently reached its "plateau of productivity." There he stay.