The all-caps STANDARDS project is an interesting new project from the constantly re-inventing Jake Lodwick. He describes it as a self-management project, a set of rules he designs, revises, and lives by.

“STANDARDS” is a system I both live in and control. Its entire purpose is sanctioned by me, for the purpose of allowing me to consciously guide my life into a state of long-term happiness. It is a gentle system; it knows that sudden, drastic change is counterproductive. Every week is slightly different than the last; it is evolving into a progressively complex mechanism for optimizing my behavior… in a sense, it is my behavior. I think about it constantly; I judge the merit of my own actions in reference to its directives; I do what it says. It’s not enough to say we exist symbiotically; it is part of me.

The post that introduced me to his thinking best is here.

Basically, he has a set of rules which he can edit and revise once a week that he strives to follow for the following week. Some of his current rules are:

1. Eat each meal within 1 hour of 9:30, 1:30, & 8:00.
2. One 3-hour creative block per day.
3. One hour reading print.
4. Begin bed routine by 11pm.

This caught my attention because I’m also obsessed with the idea of self-management. Creating meaning for your life out of your best ideas, beliefs, and goals, while also taking into account the fickle beasts of motivation, determination, and strength of will.

For me, however, the most problematic element of these rigid self-management plans is their lack of flexibility, variety, and spontaneity. Not everyone is like me, obviously, but over the years I’ve learned that I work better in environments that allow intense amounts of focus for certain projects until those projects are done and new ones can be invented or old ones can be revisited.

I get the strange feeling that a “perfect” day according to the STANDARDS would be fairly moderate or mediocre day to my gut.  They assume that you can make progress on all of your goals and principles every day.  That, if having a great living space is very important to you, you should then devote 10-30 minutes every day to improving your living space.  It doesn’t take into account that a single burst of uninterrupted improvement once a month might actually be more effective (to me).

Now, this is just my opinion.  What works for me probably wouldn’t work for anyone else, and what works for Jake probably won’t work for me, etc.  And if I’m reading this correctly, the whole point of the project is to NOT adopt someone else’s standards — the whole point is to create your own system of meaning and to fully face your plan for long-term health  and happiness with the amount of dedication and planning that any other serious project might.

So, given that goal, I’m going to hop in and try to come up with my own STANDARDS and see where that leads.  Thanks, Jake, for inspiring me to do that.

This entry was posted by Buster on Monday, July 27th, 2009 at 6:17 pm. It is filed under Standards and has these tags: Jake Lodwick. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.