The following is an excerpt from a private exchange. I am reproducing it with th permission of my correspondent without disclosing their identity. I am sharing this because it might be useful to others as well.

I was wondering what your daily routine is. You seem a very disciplined person. You said you walk 2 hours on average everyday. And your essays on these personal matters reveal that you know how to do what must be done. This shows you understand deeply what Aristotle has said more than two thousand years ago: that one achieves virtue by cultivating good habits. Good habits, as I understand, comes with a daily schedule, which doesn’t need necessarily to be a rigid scheme of time and tasks, but only so that to allow you to flourish and achieve your goals. Since child, I was absolutely obsessed with daily routine. And even nowadays I am interested to read about the daily routines of intellectuals, artists and people I generally admire, bc it seems to me that their discipline is at least partially one root of their success. The same applies to you. I really admire not only your authenticity and personality, but also your achievements, whether in programming, philosophy, building a hut from scratch, or just dealing with usual problems of life. So what is your daily routine?

Before I tell you about myself, I must state the following important provisos:

• What works for one person does not necessarily apply to another. What is benign to one is detrimental to another. There is no one size that fits all of us.
• It is okay to learn from others, though you have to maintain a critical eye for what is effective for you and what is not. As such, you are in a process of experimentation that culminates in your self-discovery.
• If something another person does is not working for you despite your best efforts, do not make the mistake of blaming yourself as a failure. You simply need to find something else that is consistent with your actuality.

Now about myself and the topics you bring up. Discipline is the attitude of sticking to the rules you have formulated for yourself. It comes from within. Discipline is another way of describing autonomy in the literal sense: rule by oneself or rules for oneself. Otherwise it is conformity with the dictates of another, i.e. heteronomy. If, for example, I have declared that I shall no longer consume alcohol, then I live accordingly by upholding my commitment. My word is my contract. If I do not follow through on my stated ends, then I am not honest with myself and ultimately what I say is foolish: I am fooling myself and then telling lies to others. In other words, if I keep reneging on my promises to myself, I cannot be relied upon in general. Similarly, if I willy-nilly come up with so-called “cheat days” where my rules do not apply, I am introducing arbitrariness that can—and typically shall—result in the inapplicability of the rules. I am simply rationalising my lack of effort under the deception of “I will try harder later”.

You mention Aristotle who is an important thinker. Though virtue has been the midpoint of Greek society probably for as long as we know about Greeks. It starts from the ancient hero culture, as embedded in myths and legends, continues with the klephts who spearheaded the many rebellions against imperialism, is found in folklore, and extends all the way to modernity through the age-old concept of philotimo/philotimia that everybody ought to have (the word literally means “friend” (φίλος) of “honour” (τιμή)). Virtue is about one’s deeds: you are what you do, not what you claim. Intentions are ultimately irrelevant if they do not match up to tangible outcomes. Virtue is practical: it concerns one’s impact on the world. It is not about how a person is in their own head, such as in some vague “relationship with God”. Ultimately, virtue is discerned in one’s way of living. The modus operandi and the modus vivendi are two sides of the same coin.

To use the example of alcohol consumption again, if I am honest with myself and thus follow my rules without cheating myself, then I am already in the flow of being honest, of following rules, and of not cheating. When I am invited to the Christmas table, I politely decline a drink saying how I quit it ages ago. There is no hint of equivocality in my statement, which people understand as me being 100% focused on my commitment. Having that capacity means that I can, in principle, extend it to other affairs and even in my relationship with other people. My word is my contract because I am the first to treat it as sacrosanct. I do not fool around and thus exude the aura of not being fooled against. When I treat myself with consistency, i.e. when I do not lie to myself, I ultimately create the conditions of getting the same treatment from others. This is because others see in me what I see, namely, respect.

This is all about basic powers. I do not do things to impress anybody. My deeds do not have a “wow factor” when treated in a vacuum. For example, nobody will give me a job because I wrote in my CV that I have never missed a day of walking in decades. They will probably think I am a fool for even mentioning it! Similarly, no-one will congratulate me for the “grand achievement” of doing my bed every morning. It is not special in its own right, in the sense that virtually everybody can do it competently with almost no prior practice. I am not doing anything fancy in this regard. Of course, I could turn myself into a caricature by boasting about my qualities and making it all a show, but I think that is ultimately a distraction as a side-quest for inflating one’s ego. I just get the basics right and mind my business.

Strong discipline is the cumulative effect of small things done properly, i.e. not cheating or fooling around. This is where habits come into play. The key is to have commitments that you actually care about for their inherent value to you. Otherwise you will be faking it. If you only treat a habit as an instrument for building up discipline, you will ultimately fail. The reason is that you have your rational side saying “I will do this because EXPLANATIONS” while your emotional side is like “those EXPLANATIONS are arbitrary as in truth I have no enthusiasm for this”. You will not go anywhere while such disagreements persist. Consider, then, how habits are established through the initial harmony between the various facets of yourself and persist for as long as that harmony is in place. We are not purely rational agents. And we also are not just spiritual beings. There is a body and there are animalistic tendencies that we have to acknowledge and to couch together with our capacity for intellectuality and art. This is why I reminded you about the importance of paying attention to what works and does not work for you. Otherwise you will be ignoring your inner world and thus sowing the seeds of discord.

About my habits, I start my day by getting out of bed as soon as I open my eyes. I then put cold water on my face. This ensures that I get a healthy dose of controlled discomfort. It wakes me up and gives me that tiny bit of feedback I need to know I am still capable of coping with the challenges. I will then make my bed and proceed to do whatever my duties are for the given day. I will always go for a walk in the morning. The exact timing will depend on my agenda, though it typically happens before I even switch on the computer. There will be more walks afterwards, again, depending on whatever else I have to tend to.

When I have a meal, I do it away from the computer. I take my time to enjoy it in full without distractions. I thus do it slowly. There is no rush. If I have to rush for my meal, then I have made mistakes somewhere; mistakes that I should address as a matter of utmost importance. Because I give my meal my undivided attention, I do not feel pressured by external forces. This calmness carries over to whatever subsequent tasks, which themselves are done in the same way of slow and steady. What emerges is a virtuous cycle of emotional stability: I do not pressure myself, therefore I do not feel stressed, I thus do not run around like a headless chicken, and I then do not feel guilty for failing to do things properly. This is all due to self-respect. Think about how you would allow another person to finish eating at their own pace, instead of forcing them to gobble it all up and leave. If you do not grant them that, then you are being a bully. The same treatment should be applied to oneself.

The “no rush” mindset is strengthened through walking. When you are on foot, you learn to live in accordance with your natural pace. You cannot go faster than that. And this pace is relatively slow. If, for example, I am an hour away from home, I cannot get excited about trying some programming concept right in that moment: I have to wait until I reach the computer. This daily practice conditions me to be patient and to not get upset when my whims are not met instantaneously.

Walking has the added advantage of embedding in my conscience the aforementioned notion of not cheating and also of living with the consequences of my actions. If I am far from home, then I have to deal with the fact that the only way back is by covering all that distance on foot. And if I find myself in such a situation, it is because I made the decision to even venture outdoors. Since the consequences are a direct result of my rules, I make no complaints: this is what I chose for myself and I have the honour of admitting as such.

You will notice again the theme of honesty. I am honest about the fact that I made a decision and I accept that what happened is because of what I did. If I blame the world for what I brought upon myself, then I am lying. If I always find something/somebody else to blame for my shortcomings, rather than me admitting that I erred or failed to have situational awareness, then I still have to ask the hard question of why am I always labouring under those unfavourable circumstances and why did I not have the foresight to put myself in a more advantageous position. This is about having the appropriate attitude of putting your life in order and then owning what ensues.

Going back to my habits, another pattern is how I keep a separation of concerns. If I am meant to work on the computer, for example, I will dress up properly as if I had to go to the office. The reason is that I want to put myself in the correct mindset of “now is work time and there is no fooling around”. As such, I do not take the laptop away from the desk. If I am feeling tired or have nothing specific to work on, then I will not stay on the computer, for that is a major source of distraction and, ultimately, self-loathing. Instead, I will go out and do something that requires a different level of focus. For example, I might water the plants or simply check around to make sure everything in my land is in order. Or just play with my dogs.

I emphasise again the centrality of doing the basics right. Because I do not seek out the “wow factor”, I do not feel envy to try out things on a whimsy. More so when those come with lofty claims and marketing hype behind them. This keeps me focused. As I do not try to form new habits on a regular basis and to break old ones, I ultimately do not have to muster the requisite willpower for thoroughgoing reform. I wrote about discipline before, which is there as a robust backstop, though I ultimately proceed through the automaticities that have formed over time via continuous practice. And I keep doing what I am used to out of a sense of care. Remember what I wrote about doing something for its inherent worth.

Finally, I do not think in terms of quantifiability. I do not keep track of any data, such as logging how much time I spend on a task, how many glasses of water did I drink, and so on. I do not clutter my life with tasks for doing tasks. Nor do I feel the need to manage my time, simply because I do not pursue things that I do not need and so I always have time for what I enjoy. My agenda follows a basic principle: if something is genuinely time-sensitive, such as a meeting, it shows up on the agenda, otherwise it is a “wishlist” entry that I will tend to when I feel like it. As such, I do not fill up my day with aspirations and the concomitant delusion of “I will try harder tomorrow”. I declutter my head by staying true to the basics, which in turn guarantees that I have a clutter-free, slow-paced experience that is benign. The momentum of all those little things being done properly means that I do not actually try hard. There is a lightness to it. It is simple and easy to live with.