Moderation

I think that I want to moderate some of what I said in my previous entry - it was maybe a wee bit self-centred.

I'm a morning person - always have been. So my encouragement to get up early and spend time reflecting was based on my own preferences and habits. It would have been more appropriate to have encouraged readers to find some time during each day to be still and think about the things that are of ultimate importance to you.

If you can do it at the same time each day - that's great. If you can't (maybe working irregular shifts), you'll know best how to fit it in.

A thought was triggered this morning (listening to a sermon on podcast) - for many people, summer is a pretty good time to try to find this kind of space. A lot of regular activities take a break, so there can be fewer commitments. In my particular example, it's easier to get up a bit earlier when it's daylight outside and relatively warm (I'm hoping that it's an established habit by the time winter comes!). It's also a time when there seems to be a positive feeling in the air, and maybe holidays provide an opportunity for reflection - as well as relaxation and fun.

Start the day the Bill Murray way

Does the fact that I've been neglecting my blog about developing daily disciplines tell you something? Well, I'm back.

The Bill Murray way refers to a friend of ours who died several years ago. Bill was a lovely man and a devoted Christian. He was very supportive to me through all of the years that I knew him. Yet we came from radically different perspectives on almost everything.

So how did Bill start his day? By getting up early and spending time praying and reading his Bible. (Bill could quote as much of the Bible as anyone I've ever known.) Bill's definition of early was 5:30 a.m.

Recently I've adopted this approach too - yes, up at 5:30 - and I feel fantastic after about 4 weeks. I feel that the day is getting off to the best possible start. Mornings seem calmer, and I still leave for work by 7:00.

I would encourage you to find a way to spend time early in the morning - reading, praying, studying. Take your mind away from yourself. I call it heightened focus - lifting my eyes from the ordinary to the extraordinary, so that I may serve the ordinary better.

5 minutes

As I receive mail I allocate it in a variety of ways (more of that in another entry). Something that I've been trying to introduce recently is my "5 minutes" folder. The idea is that if I think something will take a short period of time (5 minutes is a loose measure of time) and it's not urgent (most things aren't), then I put it in my "5 minutes" folder.

Throughout the day as I finish a task, have time between meetings or need a break from something, I turn to the "5 minutes" folder and deal with something from start to finish. It's quite productive and satisfying. By turning to it a few times each day I find that there isn't an accumulation of stuff in it - and if it is getting too full, I know it's time to concentrate on thinning it out.

It works for paper and electronic material, and also for reading stuff. In theory it should work at home as well as work - but somehow I haven't managed to get sufficiently organised at home.

Caffeine control

One of the earliest daily disciplines that I consciously adopted was controlling my caffeine intake.

I used to suffer from hideous migraine, lasting up to 48 hours. Then I made some changes to my lifestyle and I haven’t had a migraine for over 3 years now.

Addressing my significant caffeine intake was one of the things that I changed. (By the way, I’m following the adventures of AnneDroid as she is attempting to tackle her caffeine consumption.)

Now I like coffee – my preferred way of taking caffeine – and I wasn’t really prepared to give it up completely. So my solution for too much caffeine was to drink coffee only before lunchtime (a somewhat vague measure of time), and to be quite strict about the volume. On a work day that means a cup of coffee with breakfast and some coffee (a somewhat vague measure of volume) in the middle of the morning.

I freely admit to being a coffee snob. I only drink instant coffee when held at gunpoint. So the important part of this discipline for me – is to only drink good coffee. This does mean planning ahead sometimes and taking filter coffee from home in my thermal cup, but it does mean that I haven’t resented the reduction in quantity as the habit has become firmly embedded in my daily disciplines.

Thrupenny thoughts??

Where did the name for this blog come from?

Well, originally it was going to be called “DDD” (as in Developing Daily Discipline), but I thought that might attract the wrong kind of attention – and therefore disappoint readers!

My next thought was 3d, which seemed a lot safer but still carried the potential to confuse.

Then I realised that 3d was how we used to depict threepence (thrupence) in writing. (Yes, I remember using pre-decimilisation British coinage.) This coin would have a relative low value nowadays (slightly more than one penny). It’s also multi-sided – a quaint feature of some British coins, which I like. It’s actually a duodecagon (that’s 12 sided).

So Thrupenny Thoughts seemed to be an appropriate name and metaphor for a blog that will cover different aspects of developing daily discipline (multi-sided), with the thoughts being of limited value in their own right!

Well, it makes sense to me!

Developing Daily Discipline

Over the past decade or so I’ve been collecting articles, snippets, tips and ideas that I have come to associate with ‘developing daily discipline’. The first time that I can find myself using that term specifically was in December 2005, when I was maintaining a reflective journal for a course that I was on at the time. I wrote:

“I’ve written frequently in this journal about: ‘I need to …’. While it’s good to identify areas for improvement, ideas need to be put into practice. For me – I think – this is most likely to happen if changes are introduced as daily disciplines.”

Since then I’ve been a bit more conscious of gathering material on a variety of topics that can loosely be associated with this theme. So I’ve decided to start posting some of them in this blog.

Very few of them will be in any way original; many will be simple; many will be idiosyncratic or even self-centred. Over the years some of these disciplines have changed; some have been completely jettisoned; others exist as ideas that have yet to be tested by me.

Feel free to add comments, include your own ideas or variations on the theme.

I’ll probably post a couple of thoughts each week, but there are no promises!