On the recommendation of my good friend and coach,
, I’ve picked up a copy of Daily Rituals, by Mason Curry. I am fascinated by process, ritual, and habit. I’ve been leveraging the Full Focus Planner (Linen, sage green) for quite a while now, after more than two decades using a Franklin Planner (Monarch at the start, Classic for the majority of that time). Both systems have worked well for me, allowing for plenty of room for notes and quick access to my tasks and calendar. I am a devoted paper planner living in a hybrid world - almost all of my work exists and is performed via the internet, and I hand-write all of my notes. I have developed a pattern to my days, rituals performed in sequence (coffee first, all else waits!), habits both good and bad that take me through my days. I’ve created very much the life I wanted, and these patterns, habits, rituals, processes have been essential to it. This was not how I began, of course. Two critical events led to my creating the habits and processes I use: Take Your Kid To Work Day, and high school homework.Take Your Kid To Work Day, 1983 or ‘84.
Those days, this meant not just walking downstairs to the home office, but actually getting into a car and driving. In this case, the car pulls out of the driveway at about 6:20 AM to begin the 45-minute trek to The Pentagon. My father, a career Army officer, was working for The General (I never learned his name, he was always The General) in the Corps of Engineers staff offices. This was a time when the first rounds of base alignment and reallocation activities (BRAC) were spinning up, and my father’s work involved ensuring The General was throughly prepared for his meetings with the confessional oversight committee members and their staff. His solid steel desk, built sometime during the lead-up to WW2, like the cube walls, was vintage Army Green. It was just inside the door into this area off of the E-ring (could have been the A-ring, I vaguely remember there being windows nearby), and right around the corner from the office coffee pot (which had NEVER, not once, since it was first turned on in 1942, been cleaned). His desk, steel bent and shaped in Pittsburgh I’m sure, was invisible. It was covered, from footwell to the top of the three cube walls surrounding it, by olive-drab and manilla folders. His IBM Selectric II typewriter sat on smaller stack of folders, about a foot off the top of the desk itself. It was… overwhelming. And yet…
If you’ve never visited the Pentagon, please do so. The public tour is excellent. You will note the granite hallways that make up each ring and the connecting through-halls are among the loudest you’ll even encounter. Because some soldiers and officers perform ceremonial activities, you’ll often hear the taps on their shoes echoing down the halls long before you can see them coming. It was these taps that first clued me into something coming our way, fast and loudly. Midmorning in a Pentagon office is usually fairly quiet, heads are down and forms are being filled out. The taps, moving quickly and increasing loudly, were shortly followed by the sound of a voice. Deep, quick, and amazingly and increasing vulgar. And mad. Furious. Like the sound of a train engine increasing in pitch and frequency as it comes closer to you stooped at a crossing, the stream of ranting vulgarity was petrifying! And it was coming right into the office area! And now turning into my father’s cube!
I never actually saw him move, but my father was at attention and saluting, greeting The General. Cemented to the small guest chair behind my father, I’m sure my eyes were as big as the glasses I wore (trust me: BIG!).
“Sons of rat munching herb sniffers, the lot of them! Those ass-handed nincompoops will be the death of me! And now they want to see all we have on the DD 4798-42X!1 Can you believe those pencil-licking pop tarts?!?”2
“Sir! Yes sir! I have the DD 4798-42X files right here!” my father snaps, reaching, WITHOUT LOOKING, into the massive stacks of folders on his desk, pulling out a medium-thick file folder and handing it to The General. WITHOUT. LOOKING.
“Thank God for soldiers like you, Mahoney! I mean to tell you, if those rat-kissing sons of bunny hoppers don’t stop trying my ever-loving and patient soul…” His voice, trailing off like the train moving past the crossing, faded off as he snapped around and headed deeper into the office towards his own, followed by an entourage of senior offices and adjutants.
“H-h-how did you do that?!?” I was still a sitting statue in the guest chair, utterly gobsmacked by what had just happened. My father, relaxing out of attention and sitting back in his chair, looked at me baffled. “I know what every single folder and file on my desk is and what it contains,” he said in the same way you might say, “Water is wet.” As in, “How can you not know this?!?” My first introduction to process, organization (of a kind), and mental acuity.
Gonzaga College High School. Orientation, August, 1986
“Fully expect three hours of homwork each night. If it takes you less than that to complete your work, you’re not doing is correctly and completely, and you will not graduate from this school.” That’s a heck of a wake-up call to a DoD and public-school kid who just walked into the doors of the oldest Jesuit high school in Washington, D.C. But that was how Dr. Ciancaglini, Headmaster, welcomed the Class of 1990. And he was not wrong, and there were a few of my classmates who did not come back for sophomore year.
Like my commute with my father on TYKTWD, my day started fairly early while in high school. Living in (beautiful, beige) Burke, VA meant I was up at 5:30, in the car with my father by 6:20, arriving at the Pentagon South Parking Lot by 7:00 after picking up two other neighbors so we could use the HOV lanes without slugs, hopping on the Metro Yellow Line to Metro Center and the Red Line to Union Station and walking up North Capitol Street four blocks to 29 I Street, and hitting my first classroom no later than 8:00. reverse that process starting after Stage Crew ended for the day at around 4:00 or 4:30, arriving home by 7:00 or so. After dinner, I was up in my rook working my way through World History, German 1, Biology, Algebra 1 (you did NOT miss any homework assignment in Fr. Martinez’s class!), English, etc. And no fooling, most nights that meant about three hours worth of work. You’ll have to take my word for it, trying to finish your German translations on the Metro is NOT a viable option. You quickly learned how to set aside the time, set up the right space, and focus on the assignment at hand until you could move onto the next.
The Real World, Sometime Later
The two lessons learned stuck with me and formed the basis for much of my current approach, those lessons being:
Know where everything is (and if you don’t know, find out who does!), and keep it readily accessible.
Plan the work, do the work. 3
From these, I developed my own sets of habits, rituals and processes. But understanding what it takes to complete a task, setting aside that time (and adding 20%, because just like when remodeling, the initial budget is never enough). A critical skill to develop the understanding of what it takes to complete a task (in terms of time, resources, and dependencies) is curiosity. And yes, curiosity is a skill that can be developed through simple, repeated actions, like:
Always asking questions (first of yourself, then of the available systems, and then of your teachers, mentors, colleagues and supervisors)
Remembering to be humble
Remembering to avoid assumptions
Building a system to retain and recall
Does it seem ironic that I’m advocating for building a system of processes to build a process? Yes. Does that make me wrong, though? Clearly I don’t think so!
As in any endeavor, becoming expert is preceded by competence, and competence is built through experience and knowledge acquisition. You become capable of delivering an on-point solution overview and demonstration with very little notice, for example, having built the processes, the habits, and the curiosity into your daily routines. Processes, habits, rituals – these are the fundamental building block of success. Don’t let them become the end-all, be-all (though, that might be another post altogether!).
I have no recollection of the actual file name, though it was mostly numeric with an occasional letter thrown in for good measure, and always pronounced using the military alphabet.
The actual language was AMAZING in its intensity and use of expletives.
My high school friend Justin is a diver, and taught me the mantra “plan your dive, dive your plan”, which I’ve clearly coopted here. Thanks, Justin!