4 years.
That is the time it took for me to build a solid regime that I could stick to where I felt most productive and fulfilled. It had all the ingredients I wanted and perhaps needed; all in palettable portions. I was efficient. I was on the ball. I was always moving, I was excited, I was motivated, I was exhausted in a positive way, I was happy. I was really enjoying the journey.
At the peak of it I was sleeping almost exactly 6 hours a day. In a week, I managed to divide my time to exercise my various “selfs”;
- Physical;
- Mental;
- Emotional; and
- Spiritual.
I too strived to apportion time for religion, family, community and myself.
In creating and adopting this regime I discovered a new angle in the importance of discipline. Through my errors, I learnt the hard way that as much as it is important to be disciplined to start doing productive work, it is as equally important to stop when it is time to.
That perfect dream-like routine occasionally came down like a house of cards. What’s fascinating is that they are almost always due to the same reason. It’s usually because on some nights, instead of sleeping by 12am, I would refuse to stop working my assignment/studying until I completed a certain milestone. While that sounds reasonable and responsible to do, unfortunately it threatens the whole system I had painfully built over days or weeks.
The act of adding just one more card into the structure triggers the collapse of the entire formation.
An additional 10 mins of seemingly harmless well-intentioned work results in either slightly less sleep or oversleeping my usual wake-up time is equivalent to throwing a wrench into the cogs. One cog. Two cogs. Then everything crashes. Dramatic as it seems, with a small nudge in my system, I found my “selfs” to be quickly tilted out of balance and needing realignment.
And those cards on the table? It takes serious time to rebuild anything decent.
thatmalayguy 