Self-Discipline Part 2

This is the second part of my article on self-discipline that continues where the article from yesterday left off. Today I am writing about techniques you can use to build up part of your internal self-discipline.

Awareness

Discipline is deciding, consciously, that you need to act in a certain way, or perform a certain task, possibly repeatedly, in accordance with your most basic goals. It requires an awareness of self that few people have and even fewer people are willing to pursue. Awareness, even when sought, does not come easily. Many people believe they are one type of person, or act in a particular way, but to an outside observer the person’s actions are not congruent with their goals.

Having solid foundational goals and a daily task list is important but you cannot have either of these things without first giving yourself over to introspection and analysis. This does not mean you need to run out and get $300 an hour therapy from a psychoanalyst or spend your days in endless meditation for the ultimate truth of whom you are. Some of these can help, and are tools in an extensive toolbox.

No, the simple acts of journaling your thoughts, first in an unstructured way and then later in a more rigorous exploratory structure will pay huge dividends with regard to self-analysis and your own inner awareness. This journaling will also help you to find hidden goals that you may not be aware you desire. It may also help you to eschew some goals that you thought you cared but after exploration no longer do.

Persistence

It could not be simpler. Build a routine. Stick to it.

That’s it.

If you are a college student, you already have a routine. If you work for a living, you have a routine too. You get up in the morning (assuming you work days), get ready for work, commute to the office, show up at your desk, put in however many hours you are required too, and then have another routine for going home. Your whole day cycles around basic routines.

If you are like most people, your morning routine is pretty much the same from one morning to the next. It is this routinized part of life that lets you get through the morning when you are only half-awake and have not had any coffee yet. Routine allows us you proceed through life without having to make moment-to-moment decisions about what to do next. Routinizing parts of your life is a good thing, especially when you need to develop persistence to see something through to the end.

Most people are very, very good at building routines to live in. The problem is that the majority of people routinize almost every aspect of their life and then just let the world happen around them. We would refer to those people as being "stuck in a rut." And the poor, stuck sod has no way of getting out of the rut, most of the time they’re not even aware they are in a rut, and they lack the tools to get out.

An extreme act of life has to happen to them, a huge boulder in their path of life, has to be thrown up to bounce them out of that rut. Putting your goals and projects into a routine will ensure they actually move forward and get processed. Routine is one of the foundation tools of building self-discipline.

Commitment

Once you have decided on a direction that you want to grow in, one of the hardest parts, after all the planning and thought-provoking journaling, is actually getting started on the endeavour. This is a huge step for most people. You often hear the phrase "one day I’d like to…" or "I need to make time to learn…" as though merely by wishing for something it will come to pass.

For a few lucky individuals, or those with amazing autonomous self-discipline already instilled in them from birth, the desire, the goal, may happen for them very easily. For the rest of us, those of us that go through life with ADD, ADHD, or just the general mediocrity of enough to get by in life that we have had drilled in to us from the first day of school, require something a little more.

Commitment comes from making a conscious decision, there is that word again, conscious, to act on your plans. For many people, the act of planning is too great a task, for others, the act of the first task is the hardest. All the planning in the world will not turn in to productivity if the plans are then ignored and you go back to just doing the same-old-same-old that you were doing the day before.

How can you commit to a project, goal or endeavour? How can you develop persistence? There are a few tools for that, and those are given below.

Scheduling

The art of scheduling is actually the art of creative procrastination. You can set up a commitment for some time in the future, be it two minutes from now, or two months from now, and when the appointed time rolls around, you perform the task at the fixed date and time and then move on to something else completely unrelated.

How can scheduling work? Easy, have you ever gone to college and attended class? Do you have Monday morning meetings? Those are scheduled; they take place at a particular time and day, with or without you. If you show up late, you usually have some explaining to do. Nobody waits for you, unless you are the CEO. Part of your job or life is to be at a particular place at a specific time. You cannot just reschedule arbitrarily without having to work it all out with a whole bunch of people.

When you schedule your goals you should only attempt to schedule the next step, do not try to lay out a grand plan of days and times of when things will be done by — unless of course you are attempting to develop the entire schedule in to a routine, and if so, see the next section.

You set up one task that can be completed in a single sitting, perhaps write a single page of your book, and when it is time to work on that, you do so. At the end of the scheduled time you figure out where you are, what you have gotten done, make some notes of what was achieved, where you left off, and so on. These notes are important because they are for your future self. Your future self may come back in a few hours or a few months to work on the project again.

It is important that you get these notes down clearly and succinctly so that you can quickly and easily pick up the threads of the project again. This way you do not waste valuable time figuring out what you did last time. Once you have compiled your closing notes you decide on the next task that should be done and schedule that.

By scheduling out the tasks one at a time, you gain the benefit of not failing. It is very easy to be overly optimistic and schedule out dozens or hundreds of tasks with estimates of how long each of them will take, and then after three or four of the tasks you find yourself falling behind, and by task number ten you are so far behind you are disheartened.

By writing out your notes at the end, you build up an effective and valuable journal of achievement that you can review to find out how well you estimated the amount of work, problems that you did not foresee, and ideas for new tasks in the current goal or even new goals.

Routine

Same as with persistence, building a consistent routine that you follow without question, until there is no more to do, will push you to commitment. The routine becomes part of the commitment. Let us say you decide to create a new mini-goal of studying a foreign language. You do some research about what your options are, such as Rosetta Stone or a local community college, you take a wild stab in the dark about which language you are going to study, you pick up some brochures on local colleges to find out what time class is and how much it costs. And then… nothing!

You have spent your most precious resource, your time, doing the planning and research, and then you just left it all hanging out there. Perhaps you are hoping that someone else will come along and do the actual work for you. After all, you did the hard part already; you did some research and came up with the bright idea of learning something new, should you not be rewarded now?

By building a routine in to how you handle your new goal, once you have decided on one, will push the endeavour forward and let you actually achieve a satisfactory result. The routine I tend to use, once I have come up with a goal that will take longer than five or six hours to achieve, is to set up a fixed time and place I need to be to actually work on that goal. It might be at my desk in the office, it might be at the local coffee shop. It is all about location…

Location

It can be difficult to achieve your goals when you have mental noise cluttering up your life. I work from home most of the time so it is even worse. I am trying to concentrate on something I do not want to do right now. My attention deficit disorder is making me antsy today; all I want to do is surf the net and play World of Warcraft.

But I know I cannot do those things because then I will feel really bad, and I need to make a conscious decision to goof off like that, but hey, I’ve got some laundry to do, and those shirts need folding and putting away, while I am here I might as well make the bed. Yeah, let’s go make the bed, I haven’t made the bed in a few days and the sheets are becoming all tangled up. You know, while I am here making the bed I will change the sheets and pillowcases too. Wow, will you look at the dust down the back of the bed; I had better get the vacuum cleaner out.

Well what do you know? It’s 4PM already and I haven’t had lunch and whilst I haven’t gotten done what I originally set out to do I’ve been busting my arse all day taking care of stuff around the apartment, I deserve a break, right?

By changing my location, by removing myself from the mental clutter and the thousand other tasks clamouring at me, and three cats wanting attention, and a girlfriend (who also works from home) who, you know, just wants to talk for a bit because well, she’s kind of bored of what she is working on too… by changing location I am able to refocus my energy and my mind on to the important task.

For my writing, I take my laptop and iPod to a local coffee shop. When I go to this coffee shop, and I only ever go to this one coffee shop for this one specific purpose, I enter my "writing club." It is a club with a membership of precisely one. By doing this, by putting myself in a different location I am able to focus on what needs to get done for hours on end. At the coffee shop I spend two hours there doing nothing but writing.

I picked this particular coffee shop because the WiFi is not free so if I want to log on I have to make a conscious decision to pull out my wallet and type in my credit card information. I made a conscious decision to change how I work.

I routinized the habit so that I do not have to make a decision of where I should work, how long I should work for, or when I should work. The decision is made for me. I made myself get stuck in a rut so that I can get my writing work done. Very rarely do I show up at the coffee shop and have no will to work. If I am there for 15 minutes and just cannot get in to it, I quit, I leave. The writing club is not a place for surfing the web, chatting with the person at the next table or texting friends. I cut my losses, I cut class, and I head home.

By doing this I also know that, for today, I failed. I can log it in my journal, analyze why I felt that way, what went wrong, and figure out how to adjust my behaviour so that the next time I am there I can work on preventing it from happening again. This analysis helps me stick to my goals with valuable feedback.

Feedback

Getting feedback, positive or negative is a perfect benchmark of achievement. Do not be concerned with negative feedback; it is a valuable character-building tool, you just do not want to take it personally. When I talk about negative feedback, I really do mean something constructive. "You suck" is not constructive, but being able to tally up the number of days you did and did not attend the gym is valuable. If your feedback is properly constructed then all feedback is positive.

The two pitfalls many people fall in to when gathering feedback is that it is either arbitrary, i.e. touchy feely, non quantifiable, or that the feedback measures too much.

Let’s say your goal is fitness. You want to attend the gym, you want to lift weights, and you want to do some cardio work too. Many people will fall in to the planning pitfall where elaborate systems of measurement of achievements are kept. how many miles were run, how many crunches were crunched, how many reps were uh, repeated.

So you set out to measure all these things, and then one measurement falls behind and you feel a twinge of failure. A little later you fall behind on something else, and another pang of disappointment and pretty soon, like wearing out your hit points in a role-playing game, you are hoping the Dungeon Master subscribes to the "zero hit points means unconscious" rule rather than the "you are dead, give up" rule. From the very beginning you are trying to measure all of your statistics like some grand master goal setter when you have not even grasped the basics of how all the pieces of your life move.

Concentrate on one single measurable thing first. Get that as part of your routine, then start measuring other things. Reduce your variables. So what do you do when you get to the gym? Lift some weights, run for a bit, hang out by the women’s locker room hoping that the entrance hallway is not built so perfectly that it prevents you from sneaking a peek inside?

Measure those goals later, your goal right now is get to the gym, so that is what you measure, get feedback on that. A simple calendar with a big red X through each day you are supposed to go indicating that you attended is all that matters when starting out to measure things. I personally suggest you try using Check-off Grids which I have written about in the past.

Pick the simplest thing that can be measured and measure that, ignore everything else, and here is the important thing about feedback, if you miss a day, do not try and catch up by going an extra day the following week, say "screw it" and move on. Realise and accept that your routine got broken and that it starts again on the next routinized, scheduled day.

Thinking of attending toastmasters? Missed it on Tuesday night? Think they will hold two meetings next week for you so you can "catch up?" Didn’t think so. That is how life is. If you know you cannot catch up, and if you know that if you are not there, it takes place without you, you become a lot more committed to actually showing up in the first place.

Self-discipline, when applied consistently across the important areas of your life, is a huge driving force, more powerful than raw talent or innate skill.

When I was a child attending school, my academic results were lacking, to say the least. I did not enjoy studying, all I wanted to do was goof off and do my own thing, the amount of discipline I could bring to bear on my day to day studies were minimal at best. Even with special academic help and home tutoring, my lack of interest in studying, coupled with various learning difficulties, made any attempt to study an arduous task for my tutors and me. I was essentially wasting away my time.

Once I "graduated" out of high school with the minimum of results required, I bounced around aimlessly for several years until settling in to a real career as a video game developer. I had already been developing computer games on my own time for several years but societal pressure to “get a real job” drove me in to the workforce just like every one of my peers. Discipline in those earlier years would have helped me, but the frustration I felt with even the most basic of tasks did not instil in me the self-regulation to see that particular endeavour through.

Later in life, I returned to college by determining what qualifications I needed to pursue a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science. When I first decided to return to college, it was merely on a whim. A friend at the time wanted someone to go along with to find out what classes the institution offered. I signed up at the same time and for the first six months or so, we attended class together regularly.

I found I was actually enjoying the study, I was finding that the homework that was set was trivially easy, and not only that I was generally getting my homework done the evening that it was assigned. This never happened when I was forced to attend school and learn at the pace of everyone else. True learning, not just rote memorization demanded by someone else, became an eye opening experience.

My friend rapidly fell behind in their studies and eventually dropped out citing the fact that they had to work during the day so it was not easy for them to take night classes whereas, they opined, I did not actually have a job, not a real job anyway. Running two small trading companies that I operated, kept me busy for about six days out of the week, but did not actually count as a real job. When I started on the college course, a degree was the furthest thing from my mind. I knew I had no academic prowess, only one of my immediate family for three generations (and we are a large family) had been to college and gotten a bachelors degree.

Towards the end of the course, my lecturer asked me what I wanted to do afterwards and maybe I should give some thought of going on to higher education. With some encouragement from him and a few friends I had made at the college, I tentatively decided I should apply. I was in my early twenties at this stage.

I applied, the new college reviewed my application and after careful consideration rejected me based on my past school qualifications rather than my current studies. I talked to the admissions officer and some of the lecturers at the new college directly and they agreed that if I could get a passing grade in my current studies they would allow me to enrol, but I also had to maintain a certain grade point average at the new college. The demanded GPA was above the average GPA score for the class.

After getting myself the most basic qualification I needed to be accepted I went on to get myself a first class four-year bachelors degree, completing all of my required studies for it, in just two years, whilst earning $60K a year in a game development job at the same time.

I will not say that the work was not stressful but by applying discipline, by setting goals, goals I will admit I accidentally fell in to at first, without realising these were goals I wanted. By using the tools of discipline, scheduling, journaling, feedback, location, routine, I was able to move my personal life to another completely new level of existence that I was unaware of previously and when I became dimly aware of it, I believed I would be unable to attain it.

My earlier experiences coloured my decisions, I had pre-decided before ever thinking of the outcome, that higher learning was not for me. And yet, when I pushed myself, when I applied the techniques I had learnt, I found that the application of simple tools allowed me to be far more advanced than many of my classmates. Psychology shows that self-discipline is a better indicator of success in all forms of life than IQ, wealth or talent.