French novelist Gustave Flaubert once said, “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” Known for his obsessive revisions and solitary habits, Flaubert structured his life to minimise distraction. He believed that discipline off the page made freedom on the page possible.
At one level, being regular and orderly in one’s life seems like a no-brainer. However, it is easier said than done. Modern life is distracting, and if you are juggling multiple responsibilities, having perfect order is a luxury many of us can’t afford.
The challenge, then, is not to imitate Flaubert’s monastic routines but to adapt his principle to messier lives. Order today is provisional and fragile: a meeting runs long, a child gets sick, an inbox fills faster than it can be cleared. In this context, discipline means returning to important priorities even when conditions are imperfect, and resisting the temptation to wait for the right time. Personal discipline, works through repeated acts of recommitment. Therefore, it needs to be directed toward ourselves, not the calendar.
I call this dynamic discipline which means committing to what matters rather than to a fixed time slot. It is the difference between saying, “I write every morning at 6 am,” and saying, “I write for two hours each day, whenever I can protect that time.” The former sounds impressive, but the latter is sustainable. The goal is to capture the spirit of Flaubert’s approach in a world that rarely allows hours of uninterrupted focus.
Many people mistake discipline for obedience to a schedule. They follow the calendar faithfully while quietly losing contact with the work itself. Over time, the routine becomes the goal rather than the means. What gets preserved is the appearance of order.
The key is to treat creative or focused work with the same seriousness as a doctor’s appointment. If something genuinely urgent disrupts it, you reschedule intentionally rather than waiting for an ideal moment. In practice, this means opening your calendar immediately and blocking the next feasible time. Doing so prevents the slow erosion that occurs when work is endlessly deferred with promises to get to it later.
Dynamic discipline also requires knowing what counts as a legitimate interruption. A genuine emergency qualifies. A colleague wanting to chat about weekend plans does not. The ability to distinguish between the two, and to protect your time accordingly, is a skill that improves with practice.
There’s another advantage to this approach in that it reduces guilt. When you maintain rigid routines, any deviation feels like failure. But when you practice dynamic discipline, adaptation becomes part of the system. Instead of breaking your routine, you’re honouring your commitment in the only way your life currently allows.
Flaubert could afford to be inflexible because he had few obligations beyond his writing. Most of us are not so fortunate. But we can still be regular and orderly in our own way by refusing to let our most important work disappear into the margins.
Order without obsession offers a practical way to take our work seriously without pretending our lives are simpler than they are. It accepts distraction and disruption as facts, not failures, and asks only that we respond to them with intention. Flaubert’s discipline was extreme, but its lesson is modest and durable. Meaningful work requires protection. By practicing dynamic discipline, we preserve that protection in forms our lives can sustain. We may not control our schedules, but we can control our follow-through. Over time, that consistency, quietly maintained, becomes its own kind of order.