The Cost of Starting Perfectly
Most people, when trying to become disciplined and start sticking to a schedule, they try to plan for the entire day or even the week ahead in advance. They divide the day into slots for different tasks. The thing is that this has never worked for me personally. It always felt like I was trying to control too much too early.
This tendency to over-structure doesn’t just show up in daily routines and it has been bothering me for a while. Most of us seek a roadmap or a checklist to reach a goal, whether it be starting a business or learning a subject or developing a skill. People who ask someone experienced for a roadmap often fail to understand that what worked for that person is most probably not going to work for them.
The desire for a perfect, pre-defined system before action is counterproductive. I feel most of us should take the first step towards our goals and try to figure out the variables that are optimal for our own setting. Even roadmaps, which are necessary in cases like the order of books to read to understand a topic, should be taken as a framework with variables in it, rather than a rigid path to tread upon. Learning from others’ experience is invaluable. Trying to replicate exactly what worked for someone, without adjusting for different settings, does not make sense.
When people assume there is a ‘correct’ path, they also assume deviation is failure. Individuals try to get everything perfectly right based on a standard they set at the onset of a journey, and when failing to live up to the unrealistic expectations, a downward spiral coupled with self-flagellation follows: “I am incapable of reaching this destination due to some flaws in me, so I am going to abandon the journey towards it.” This happened to me with fixed schedules, and when some task did not go according to the plan, the familiar logic surfaced: “Since I could not stick to this schedule, I wasted the day and I will try to stick to it tomorrow.” In contrast, keeping a few fixed slots and leaving the rest flexible worked far better. The remaining time was still for productive work, but with expectations already adjusted, it no longer turned into a ‘wasted day’ if I fell short. Those flexible parts were the variables in the system, the parts you only understand by doing. In them, not just the method but even the expectations and reasons for pursuing the goal evolve over time.
This is what premature optimisation looks like in the real world: optimising before the variables are even known. Before you have tested whether your motivation for an objective is strong enough to carry you through the journey. Before you understand the hurdles those you admire actually faced, rather than the bliss they appear to be in today. Before you have even stood on a pier, you are planning how to cross the Atlantic. The danger is not wasted planning. It is that you never begin. And what gets lost in all this premature calculation is something quieter: that for many who did begin, the hurdles were not interruptions to the journey. They were the journey. The destination only confirmed what the path had already taught them.