Routine and Becoming A Lord of Discipline

Posted by Jeff Carter
on January 3rd, 2012

Howard Lindzon and James Altucher have posted about routine. Routine is actually a test of the scientific method, a hypothesis. Toyota uses routine in manufacturing. Every time a person puts a seat in a car on an assembly line, there is a routine and it tests a basic hypothesis. Is this the most productive, cost effective way to build?

In my life, I am trying to apply the same sort of routine. I am creature of habit. It comes from being an athlete. To engage in athletics successfully, you need some sort of routine that you do every week to sharpen your skills. When I was trading on the floor every day, I followed the same routine. Some people freakishly start to become obsessive-compulsive about the routines they follow and develop all kinds of superstitions around them. Instead of worrying about becoming obsessive and inserting randomness to your day, just understand it’s the routine that makes you successful.

The most successful traders I ever saw were what I term Lords of Discipline. They carried out the same tasks in the same order every day. This allowed them to be more effective traders and less likely to make stupid mistakes. The act of trading is so random, that you need to construct some sort of artificial order around it to keep you on the right track.

Routine is simply the most efficient way to go about your daily life. Randomness will happen, because every day is different. You are exposed to new information that you will have to process. New information forces you to look at your daily routine, and ask yourself if it’s the most efficient way to carry on.

The military often is lampooned because of its rigid adherence to discipline. Rank and file, marching in formation. Orders. One of the first things I had difficulty with as an Air Force Academy cadet was the rules and regulations regarding how I had to fold, hang and store my uniforms. They must have had ten to twenty pages written about it. But, having routine for mundane items made it easier to grasp the larger concepts the Academy was trying to hammer home about leadership. The military conducts hypothesis testing every day and the supposed rigidity actually allows combat officers to think out of the box and win battles.

If you have no routine in your life, you probably actually do. You just haven’t examined yourself and realized it. Examine what you do, and try and figure out the best way for you to be successful from the time you wake up and put a foot on the floor to the time you go to bed. Once you start doing the mundane habitually, your world will open up and you will expose yourself. You will become a lot more productive.

One of the toughest thing to do as an entrepreneur is schedule time. This year I am striving to become a lord of discipline for the mundane in my life in order to make really productive use of the time I have left.

What do you do that works?

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