Discipline is most important if you’re going to accomplish big goals.

I find that I repeat this in various wordings and journal entries and motivational memes for my vision board.  I tell myself some version of this statement several times a day.

I wish that meant that I was good at being disciplined about writing and exercising and eating well and housekeeping and…

I have some very big goals, and I have some even bigger dreams.  And I struggle to stay on top of my daily chores list to keep my life and my family running more or less smoothly, much less knock off items on my goals list.  I fight with the knowledge that if I sit down to write or paint, then I am not doing something else worthy of doing on my to-do list.  I have to make space to write, and that space will always come from the space of something else I could be doing.

It’s always a dance of time management.  I think I have two left feet when it comes to this dance.  I am always scrambling to keep up with parenting and housework and work work and goal work.  It’s not really possible to do it all well all the time.  I know that, but I still think I should be able to do it all.

Enter discipline.

Discipline does not mean I will do it all well all the time.  Discipline will allow me to work in each space for a focused amount of time while maintaining an acceptable level of slack in the other areas – when I’m good at it, anyway.

Without applied discipline, I have too much slack everywhere, not enough focus on anything, and everything slides to hades in a handbasket.  What I aim for is to keep doing small chunks of maintenance work every day.  I want to spend less time more frequently doing things like cleaning my house or doing laundry so that I can keep larger amounts of time every day open for goal work.

If I spend 45 minutes per day on laundry and housework, I won’t spend 5 hours on the weekend doing it, which is when I usually get to do the most writing and crafting.  (I say this like I’m an exceptional weekly house cleaner – I’m not.)  If I do smaller weekly tasks every day, even if I skip something one week, I will probably get it the next, and maybe it won’t snowball into horrendously ignored levels.

Also, if I manage to stay disciplined on the small things like completing a daily housekeeping chore, I feel less guilt about what’s undone when I sit down to create.  I need to create, but I’m also responsible for a lot of other things.  It’s hard to escape that pressure to get everything else right before I spend time making something, but if I’m disciplined enough to keep things in good enough shape, I can sit down and work on the things that make me happiest without the nagging feeling that I should be washing dishes.

Mostly, I need to practice discipline to actually get the work done on my big goals.  I’ll never get my book published if I don’t do the steps to get there.  I’ll never finish a painting if I don’t sit down and do the sketching and brush work.  It’s great to have goals; it’s better to make them happen.