Every once in a while, you come across little gems like this one on the internet:

Without order, civilization is impossible. Without chaos, civilization is intolerable.

Indeed, if we couldn’t coordinate our efforts into an orderly society, we’d still be animals fighting for survival in the wilderness. But order by itself is not enough. We need the spice of chaos to make our lives worth living.

A good life comes to those who achieve a healthy balance between these two opposing forces. So, let’s dissect this never-ending balancing act.

Defining Order and Chaos

Order is pretty easy to understand, but we need to treat chaos with a little more care. The word “chaos” has a bad rap. It’s often used when things are in total disarray — a hopeless mess. In this article, though, we’ll consider the positive attributes of chaos, particularly where it can counteract the soul-killing drone of excessive order.

The next four sections cover specific areas of life where order and chaos play major roles. Each time, we’ll discuss some techniques or philosophies for finding the right balance between these opposing forces.

Space: Organic Minimalism

Take a look around you. Where do your immediate surroundings stand on the order/chaos scale? Too much chaos and your living spaces quickly lose function. But a bit of chaos is needed to give your surroundings some personality. It also saves plenty of maintenance effort.

An environment with the perfect order/chaos balance is enjoyable, practical, and low-maintenance all at once. It makes you feel good, helps you stay productive, and takes very little time and money to maintain.

Minimalistic living spaces make this ideal much easier to achieve. The larger and the more cluttered your environment becomes, the riskier it becomes to let things evolve organically. And since we rather enjoy letting things evolve organically, such a situation can be a real pain.

Organic minimalism means you maintain order by keeping things simple rather than by keeping things structured. It allows some natural chaos to creep in without sacrificing functionality.

But what if you love being surrounded by pretty things? Go for things like art, designer furniture, or robust plants that are low-maintenance and unlikely to create clutter. And if you think you can’t be happy without many moving parts (pets, gadgets, frequent guests), please try some gradual simplification to give organic minimalism its fair shot. Undoing minimalism is very easy, so this is a risk-free experiment.

Overall, it’s fun and liberating to let a little organic chaos into your living environment. Organic minimalism can give you this freedom by ensuring that chaos brings character instead of dysfunction.

Time: Routines, Blocks, ARW

Perfect order is no fun when it comes to living spaces, but it’s downright soul-killing when we talk about scheduling. The creative human mind needs freedom and variation. That bit of chaos is essential for a good life.

But if you just let your mind do whatever it wants all the time, your life will be a (painfully short) mess. Indeed, we need plenty of order to keep ourselves in check. Let’s look at three tools to maintain this balance.

Structured routines for accommodating chaos

I do whatever I feel like for most of the day. But all this randomness is kept firmly in check by three simple routines:

• Morning routine. This one is highly structured and happens at the same time every morning (weekends included). If you’re looking for maximum order from minimum effort, look no further than a perfectly tailored morning routine.
• Afternoon nap. If you have the possibility to nap during your natural afternoon energy dip, this offers a beautifully structured daily reset. My afternoon nap is less rigid than my morning routine, but it still happens about 90% of my days.
• Evening wind down. A good morning routine already starts the previous evening. Like the afternoon nap, this one is also not too rigid, but it happens most nights to ensure I give sleep the priority it deserves.

These routines only consume about two of the 16 waking hours I have every day. And that’s the magic of well-structured routines: two hours of structure can safely facilitate 14 hours of organic unstructured flow.

Time blocking for controlling chaos

A decent amount of chaos in a daily schedule is essential for high motivation and creativity. But it needs to be the right kind of chaos. Constant distractions from colleagues, social media, and the like are not the kind of chaos we’re looking for.

That’s where time blocking comes in. I schedule almost all my meetings on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings. All the remaining time is reserved for focused work or whatever wholesome indulgence I feel like.

I also use RescueTime to block any digital distractions after a short period of use. This was essential to my productivity in earlier years, but following my philosophical shift on the Instant Pleasure Industry, serious digital temptation has become refreshingly rare.

Asynchronous remote work (ARW) for unstructured collaboration

ARW is when people from around the world work together without any deadlines or fixed schedules. I do my part when I feel like it, pass the (digital) ball to you, and trust that you’ll do your part in good time.

The beauty of ARW is that it allows for plenty of flexibility in everyone’s schedules. Usually, teams work according to a fixed schedule with strict deadlines, turning the process into stressful and tedious work. ARW breaks this outdated pattern, creating happier and more productive teams.

There are three main requirements for effective ARW:

1. A project that is interesting enough that people want to work on it.
2. Self-driven collaborators. If one or two team members need deadlines, that’s OK. Just remember to give them the deadlines they need.
3. Plenty of interesting things to work on while waiting for collaborators to do their part. It works well to run several ARW projects in parallel.

Growth: Super-Compounding and the Zorro Circle

Now we get to the most crucial order/chaos balancing act. On the one hand, the power of compounding makes an ordered growth philosophy immensely powerful. But on the other, growth often pushes us into a potentially chaotic unknown.

Most ambitious people take this too far, though. They chase every half-decent opportunity at once, mostly ending up with little more than dysfunctional chaos. Part of the problem is that such sporadic growth might work on the rare occasion when the stars align perfectly. When it does, the result can be spectacular, making a big media splash.

Sadly, these headlines say nothing about the thousands of chaotic growers who end up a mess for every one of these fluke success stories. This gives a badly distorted view of how success works. So, let’s put things straight.

Super-compounding supercharges the 8th wonder of the world.

Einstein reportedly called compounding the 8th wonder of the world. Everyone who has ever read anything about investment will be familiar with this concept. For example, someone investing $500 per month in a fund that returns an average of 6% per year over a 42-year career will retire a millionaire. Compounding is responsible for turning a quarter of a million in savings into a million in wealth.

But such simple investment examples only scratch the surface of compounding’s potential. A smart growth strategy unlocks the power of super-compounding — a setup where multiple exponential trends interact and augment each other.

One of the examples I’m currently pursuing is the interaction between wealth and creative potential. Two years ago, I started leveraging my (still quite modest) wealth to work almost exclusively on inspiring, growth-oriented projects. If this gives me a 6% personal growth rate layered on top of the 6% investment return, our previous $1 million suddenly turns into $8 million over a 42-year career.

This is more than enough for most of us, but ambitious individuals will find many synergies between personal and public investment to achieve even faster growth. And such deep engagement will keep compounding going far beyond conventional retirement. Playing around with these numbers, it’s easy to end up in the hundreds of millions.

I’ve been tracking that grey line quite nicely over the first decade of my career. But let’s be honest: I’m still far from the kind of person who can effectively direct millions of dollars. That’s where I need Zorro’s help.

The Zorro Circle keeps ordered growth on track.

Shawn Achor gives an example from the film The Mask of Zorro where an aging swordmaster trains a hot-headed apprentice to become the new Zorro. Central to his training philosophy is a small “training circle” where the apprentice must first master core skills before moving on to the next level.

Just like the hot-headed apprentice, human nature is notoriously impatient. We want everything right now. And in pursuing everything, we often end up accomplishing nothing, experiencing crisis after crisis as our core skills fall short of the challenges we undertake.

In contrast, the Zorro Circle patiently expands ambition in line with competence. You take on challenges that lie right on the edge of your abilities, placing your life neatly on the border of order and chaos. It’s here where we find real exhilaration without falling prey to the swarm of overlapping fiascos just waiting to devour those who reach too far.

So, be patient. A career of gradually expanding Zorro Circles designed to capitalize on super-compounding can really take you places.

Risk: Engaging Diversification

When it comes to risk, the orderly approach is to take calculated risks with a long-term perspective. The classic example is consistent and dispassionate stock market investments with a long time horizon.

Anyone who enjoys enough financial security to ensure they’ll never be forced to sell stocks out of desperation can invest in the volatile stock market risk-free. Sure, the market will crash once in a while, but if you never have to sell, you can simply wait for the inevitable recovery that far exceeds the previous high. This is orderly risk-taking — seemingly risky high-return opportunities exploited in a surprisingly low-risk manner.

But while orderly risk-taking is a brilliant way to get ahead in life, it’s not particularly exciting. In our stock market example, all you need to do is set up an automatic investment order and forget about it.

To bring more spice to life, it’s great to diversify into a little bit of chaos: exciting and more intuitive long-shot opportunities that offer a small but conceivable opportunity for thousand-fold returns.

The reality is that such high-risk opportunities will yield nothing most of the time. That’s why you should always limit such investments to a small fraction of your resources (time, energy, money). Even more importantly, make sure there is no contagion risk, i.e., the potential for things to go badly wrong and mess up the rest of your life. The worst-case scenario should be that you lose your entire investment.

A couple of such risks add plenty of spice to life, even if they don’t amount to anything. And even though I’m yet to experience it, I can imagine the thrill when one of them actually comes off one day.

Final Thoughts

The ideal balance between order and chaos will look different for different people. Like all of life’s other balancing acts, it’s a process of continuous learning and adjustment.

In general, it’s easier to make these adjustments from a place of order. Chaos is the natural state of things, so adding some chaos into an orderly system is much easier than bringing order to a chaotic system (especially when the chaos has started spreading to other systems).

So, err on the side of order, but make sure you enrich your life with a healthy dose of chaos.