The Every Day Rule: How I Stay Focused and On Track

The Every Day Rule is how I run my life for bet­ter results.

I’ve always been fas­cin­ated by per­son­al devel­op­ment. I know the self-help industry is a can of worms, but the idea that we can aspire to bet­ter ourselves is beautiful.

And for many years, I thought I had a great approach to achiev­ing my goals in life. However, I had to rethink everything from the ground up — because my frame­work wasn’t working.

I found a con­trari­an approach that now runs how I live my life. I call this approach the Every Day Rule.

Here’s how it works:

The Flawed Epic Year Concept

A dec­ade or so ago, I star­ted com­par­ing my years. Some years pro­pelled me for­ward by a lot, and some weren’t. The dif­fer­ence between such years wasn’t subtle; it was substantial.

I figured that years of immense per­son­al growth con­tained at least four major life events (mov­ing homes, get­ting mar­ried, hav­ing chil­dren, start­ing a new job etc.), so I named such years Epic Years.

The Epic Year Approach: Push to shorten the inter­val between sig­ni­fic­ant life events to max­im­ise per­son­al growth.

It was an under­stand­able con­clu­sion at the time, I think. 

The years between 30 and 40 can be stress­ful; a lot is sup­posed to hap­pen for any well-adjus­ted white-col­lar urb­an pro­fes­sion­al with a uni­ver­sity degree. Find someone to marry, start a fam­ily, elev­ate your career, and organ­ise your household.

Today, how­ever, I’m more relaxed about hit­ting as many mile­stones as pos­sible. And more import­antly, I find that sig­ni­fic­ant life events tend to occur on their inher­ent sched­ule and shouldn’t be forced. 

Instead, I’ve applied a drastic­ally dif­fer­ent approach.

A New Approach to Goal-Setting

I’m grow­ing less and less inter­ested in fight­ing the com­ings and goings of tides.

The change in per­spect­ive came about as I was think­ing about achieve­ments. I felt that there was a down­side to set­ting goals. A goal can quickly morph into an author­it­at­ive pres­ence in life.

And I’ve nev­er been at ease with authorities.

I reasoned that the per­fect goal provided the sense of being on the right tra­ject­ory here and now — without over-emphas­ising the import­ance of reach­ing the des­tin­a­tion as soon as possible. 

Another way to put it:

The import­ance of a goal is not its res­ult but how it impacts me today. According to this reas­on­ing, I now set goals to give mean­ing and pur­pose to my present, not my future.

Allow me to elab­or­ate fur­ther.
Because I’ve giv­en this some thought.

The Every Day Rule

Let’s say that I want to write a book. It’s a non-trivi­al goal and a sub­stan­tial under­tak­ing. And pub­lish­ing a book would undoubtedly qual­i­fy as a sig­ni­fic­ant life event and count toward an Epic Year.

But, If I were to write every oth­er day, I would soon write every third day, then every fourth day. And so on.

Soon enough, I wouldn’t write reg­u­larly, but the goal would still lurk in a dark corner of my brain. The idea of writ­ing a book would make me feel lousy.

A goal set to pro­pel me for­ward is instead set­ting me back.
This is not a good strategy, right?

So, for me, it’s every day — or nothing.

Why does this approach work so well for me?

If I write daily, being a writer becomes a part of how I identi­fy myself, like a psy­cho­lo­gic­al mas­ter override. 

Writing daily makes me a writer.
A writer writes daily.

From Long-Term Goals to Daily Efforts

Based on the Every Day Rule, I now only set goals that can be broken down into daily efforts. 

For example:

There’s Only One Day — Today

The Every Day Rule has an excit­ing con­straint: time in a day.

By pri­or­it­ising daily activ­it­ies instead of goals, I’ve cre­ated more focus and achieved more sig­ni­fic­ant res­ults in less time.