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I’ve always dreaded these two words. Structure and discipline sound like concepts from another age. Bleak, boring, and grey, something that old men praise. Aren’t we supposed to have fun? Well, fun is another quite problematic term, but let’s keep that for another post. The thing with structure and discipline is that I have rediscovered these values, and am in the process of making my peace with them.

Let me shortly define these two concepts: By structure I mean how much of what you do is planned ahead of time. How scheduled is your day? By discipline I mean sticking to your guns, making your plan come true no matter what. So without any structure, there can be no discipline, and without discipline, structure is clearly worthless.

Why do we hate them so much? I think it’s because we have too often heard old men postulate them as absolute values. Absolute values are things that are most important, no matter what. If you value structure and discipline absolutely, they become very oppressive forces keeping you away from life indeed. I propose that instead these are relative values, things that may not always be important or beautiful, but can be life-saving sometimes. Let me give you an example.

My friend Alex works as a male nurse in a hospital. One day when I was really coming apart, he told me the secret of mental hospitals, so that I wouldn’t have to commit myself into one: OK, there’s the drugs, and some other aspects, but he says that what helps people get sane again is mainly having an enormous amount of structure to their day! In a mental hospital you never have to worry what to do next. There’s just no question, and it’s the same every day. Which can be extremely reassuring when you feel weak and insecure.

So I tried it and it works: Planning your week (This is important! Plan your whole week ahead!) gives you a positive outlook and a feeling of security when you’re down. Now if you’re on a retreat this will work out just fine if you still plan generously enough. Allow for large time slots (plan things every hour, forget about the half hours), and maybe plan in categories that can be made concrete spontaneously (4 pm – 5 pm: computer work, instead of 14.34 – 15.25: catch up on mails).

Of course, once we have a plan, the question of discipline comes up. What if we can’t keep up with our schedule? Well, that’s OK. Discipline has really one main function in my understanding, and that is giving you the good feeling of self reliance that comes when you do what you set out to do. So its main goal is making you feel good about yourself, NOT achieving some random task. This implies that we should not be disciplined when it will make us feel worse, for example because we overexert ourself. In this case, it might just be better to change our plan. Self honesty and good judgment are key here: Was our plan overambitious or are we just being lazy? Interestingly, when you are lacking energy, you should be more gentle with yourself. So in a slow phase, increase the structure, but go easy on the discipline.

Then again, when things pick up, we can be a bit more discplined. However, when we go back to leading a fascinating life full of energy, distractions, priorities and surprises, our weekly plan might just be impossible to uphold, no matter how much discipline we bring to the table. And that’s OK. Planning gets much harder when your life becomes more complex. And I find that it’s appropriate to let go of strict plans and become more intuitive whenever you’re on a roll. When it’s on, there’s so much happening that I’m doing best just going with the flow, grasping opportunities as they come up, while being clear about key priorities and the (hopefully few) things that I must not forget doing. Getting Things Done by David Allen is a great book about how not to forget anything important, which has helped me a great deal.

To summarize, structure and discipline are important relative values once we let go of our childish judgments on them. Structure can help us a lot when we are weak and crave security, and discipline can help us when we are full of energy and tend to get confused. However, we need to balance these two so we don’t get overwhelmed or rigid. In Buddhist terms (more on that soon), we can learn to enjoy and adapt to the dance of form and emptiness.

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I’ve always dreaded these two words. Structure and discipline sound like concepts from another age. Bleak, boring, and grey, something that old men praise. Aren’t we supposed to have fun?...