Beat chaos with order

Order is inversely proportional to chaos. Less order means more chaos.

So the question is not how well organized we are, the question is how much disorder we allow in our lives.

In this article we discuss what is a simple way to stay organised and why it is important.

Matrix of 4 states.

Ambitions are our plans, intentions and illusions. Ambitions reflect what we want to achieve and what we think about ourselves.

The bigger ambitions we have, the more efforts we should invest in achieving them.

Without matching amount of effort (diligence), ambitions become illusions and only feed our Ego with cheap thrills.

Let’s use a matrix of 4 states and classify people according to the ratio of ambitions and diligence.

1. Followers

Low ambitions / Low diligence.

The most populous group. This kind of people simply live their lives and arrange their existence around what they already have. They avoid challenges of any kind, since they consider themselves to be an unnecessary burden.

Their biggest dream is to win 1 million money in a lottery and buy a house or at least an apartment. Highly chaotic and unable to make any considerable effort for any reasonable time. For them it is not an issue since they live slow and low-intense lives.

They are happy with what they already have and who they already are.

2. Rowers

Low ambitions / High diligence.

The happiest people in the world. Most of the small entrepreneurs belong to this group. They love to work and deal with reasonable challenges, which normally do not exceed their present abilities. Their effortless creativity and high productivity allow them to live way above their natural level of enough.

Moderately chaotic, while still able to keep order to run at least small business ventures.

Valuable as team players.

3. Illusionists

High ambitions / Low diligence.

These people are mostly dysfunctional and unstable. They like to set high goals and think much about themselves while lacking energy and intelligence to support their mere existence. They like to talk about big projects they want to build but never actually start anything. Event if they start something, they lose interest and abandon the whole thing really fast.

Highly unreliable, manipulative and therefore extremely chaotic.

95% of politicians and 80% of startup people bear this type of personality.

4. Pioneers

High ambitions / High diligence.

Inventors, explorers, authors, athletes, successful military commanders, remarkable political leaders, proven professionals and similar kinds of individuals.

People who set goals which exceed their current abilities. People who are able to put efforts in amounts which are beyond the understanding of other groups. That is why such people are often called overachievers.

They try to put a maximum into each day of their life and aim to get to the highest levels of order and efficiency.

Very rare type, since becoming one demands a considerable amount of personal work over a long period of time.

We all fit into one of 4 groups, more or less.

And which group we belong to depends solely upon our personal choice.

Cycle of think-plan-create.

The higher our ambitions are, the more effort we put into achieving them.

For the purpose of efficiency and stable tempo, we want to utilise a simple cycle:

Think – Plan – Create.

Developing a habit to follow this cycle will massively help in moving towards our goals.

Think

First, we think about our ideas about what is important about these ideas and why we want to bring them to life.

Thinking means focusing – every time we think about something we are focusing on it.

We think about importance and complexity. We think about resources. We think about activites of current day. We think about people involved. We think about our personal abilities.

Thinking helps us to get a better understanding of the results we want to achieve.

Plan

Second, we plan our work to fulfill ideas we thought about.

We set tasks, projects, events. We break down tasks into algorithms. We record key data about planned work. We set priorities and dates.

If we have a team, we assign work to our teammates.

Planning helps us to structure and simplify our work.

Create

Finally, we work – we undertake focused efforts to achieve specific results. By specific we mean the ones we planned and thought about.

We create content, we meet people, we go into specific places, we fill in special documents, we bend things. We do anything needed to achieve results.

Creating means paying attention to our actual lives.

Think – Plan – Create is a powerful tool for beating chaos with order

Cycle of order-focus-confidence.

Nothing in this world happens without confidence.

Confidence describes our capacity to perform actions and achieve results.

The more confidence we possess, the better our results will be.

Focus is the key element of confidence. We can only be as confident, as focused we are.

This is particularly visible in sports – all high-tier athletes possess strong skills for staying focused during their performance.

“Badminton is a cruel sport” – Lin Dan

And stable focus on its turn is impossible without a high level of personal organisation.

Being disorganised means being chaotic, which means random. Things are just happening and there is not much we can do about that.

There is no confidence without focus and there is no focus without order.

If we want to be confident, we want to stay focused and therefore organised.

Simple as that.

Record your path.

Actually, it is not that simple.

Chaos is a real thing and being chaotic is a much more natural state than being organised.

Moreover, we have to invest considerable efforts into improving our level of personal organisation.

The simple and efficient routine to beat chaos with order is developing a habit of recording our everyday life.

Develop the habit of recording your everyday life.

In this way, we create a sort of a mirror which reflects our daily activities. It shows us what our lives are about and what we could do with it.

Without the habit of recording our lives, it is literally impossible to stay organised and focused.

The easiest way to keep records is to use the Calendar tool of ByCycle, which was specifically designed for that purpose.

This is also the simplest way to stay organised. It takes about 5 minutes per day and gives us the objective picture of how chaotic we are at the moment.

ByCycle Calendar is a simple tool to record daily activities

How to stay organised with ByCycle.

ByCycle will be very useful for people with high level of natural diligence.

Use Calendar to record all everyday activites.

Utilise Weekly Plans for focused work.

Try ByCycle for free and see how it works for you.

For any questions or comments, feel free to contact us here.

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