The other day, I had coffee with my dear friend Ashley. She is the executive director of The Mission, a position she took just a few months before I started volunteering regularly there. She and I are a mutual admiration society—we both see things in each other that we wish we could be.
She recently started using a Monk Manual, after hearing me talk about it. I’ve been using a Monk Manual for about three years now, I think, and just finished “Find Your Inner Monk.” So we were talking about the process and what we get out of it. The Monk Manual is not a lightweight day planner. It’s a heavy process, built on a plan-act-reflect loop with daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual cycles. The reflection piece is critical. The goal is not to get more done or to be more productive. Rather, the goal is to do the right things and to include both doing and being in your goals.
Ashley commented that I’m the most balanced person she knows. Now, perhaps that’s just because she knows all the things I do because they’re pretty public, but I do feel like I’m a well-balanced person. I run, I hunt, I preach, I volunteer. I started a nonprofit, I teach, I do research, and now I’m department chair. How and why do I do so much?
Part of the answer is that I’m not really that unusual among my peers. As I write this, I’m at the annual conference of the ECE Department Heads Association. Yesterday, there was a panel of deans. Of the five of them, two are also serving as presidents of their technical societies. People like me want to give. Everyone I’ve talked to here seems focused on the success of other people—faculty, staff, students—and wants to make the world a better place. We have all achieved certain things for ourselves, and now we want to see other people achieve great things.
The other main part of the answer is that I enjoy the process. That’s a significant teaching of the Monk Manual. If you are fundamentally driven to achieve some particular goal, your life will not be satisfying. Many junior faculty want to achieve tenure, but once they earn it, they find it to be good but not ultimately satisfying. Every mountain you summit just reveals the next one to climb. Goals are good, but they should be big goals, life goals that you know you won’t achieve but that serve as distant targets.
The reality is that life is lived one day at a time. Earning tenure, or achieving any other specific goal, happens on a specific day, which will be a good day perhaps. But the next day, you still have to get up and go to work. The better approach to life is to use your distant goals to determine which processes to put in your life, and then learn to enjoy the process. Find meaning in the mundane.
Take as an example my passion for running. Well, passion is too strong a word, much too strong. I have goals, but ultimately, I enjoy the process. I enjoy how my body feels after I run. I enjoy running on the roads and trails around my house. I enjoy listening to audiobooks while I run, to nurture my mind and soul while I’m strengthening my body. I find hills to be rewarding once I get up them. I run races (5k, 10k) not to win a prize, but for the joy of running with other people. I just enjoy the process.
The same can be said of my teaching, my research, my preaching, my volunteer work, and now my work as department chair. I find meaning in the day-to-day process, the routine. I have sought a variety of activities to nurture the different parts of my mind, soul, and body.
Where Ashley is different is that she has one big thing that she does. She wants to be more balanced; some days, I want to be more focused. There isn’t a right or wrong answer, as long as you are finding meaning in the process.
One challenge for me is travel. As I said, I am currently at a conference, and will be gone from home for about a week. It’s hard for me to maintain my daily processes while I’m out of my normal environment. So I must go now and do my weekly cycle in my Monk Manual, to keep myself grounded in the present.