Practicing Self-Discipline

Let's reiterate:

You are perfectly capable of doing things well, and everything should have gone well...if it weren't for your philosophy of getting things done at midnight...or never getting things done at all and putting it off later. how do you practice self-discipline in real life, or, more specifically, fend off procrastination and unethical/unreliable decisions?

Yes, this is fairly short, but it's the darkly forum.

*reiterate




Anyways, be asian. Or be supervised.

Reward yourself - finish x, get y \o/

Dan Dan said:

Reward yourself - finish x, get y \o/

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start x, realize that you really would rather do y, do y, come back to x later, get distracted from x thanks to z, waste much of time you could be doing x on z, finally convince yourself to stop wasting time with z, come back to x and finish because of time crunch.

so... you still finished x and got y................ just not in the right order

Alan said:

start x, realize that you really would rather do y, do y, come back to x later, get distracted from x thanks to z, waste much of time you could be doing x on z, finally convince yourself to stop wasting time with z, come back to x and finish because of time crunch.

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Generally how my days are spent. The easiest way for me to manage my time is to pick hours of the day when I know I won't have class or be burnt from academics, and fit all my homework in there. For example, on Mondays and Wednesdays I have class from 9:30 - 2. I know when I get home at 2 the ONLY thing I'll want to do is make some lunch and unwind in front of the TV or my laptop, regardless of what else I have to do or how pressing it is. I give myself an hour for this, then say "okay, from 3-5, you ONLY do homework, and after 5, you're off the hook (unless there's a test or paper or something)."

It works well most of the time, it just takes a while to get into the habit of not starting a video game at 2:59 and saying I'll just check my mailbox but then clearing my quest log.

In my experience there's no trick or secret to it, just be interested in what you do. I was the laziest student in high school and just coasted by with doing the minimum work possible, but now in college I'm actually studying stuff I enjoy doing instead of doing bs required courses and I'm one of the hardest workers I know.

Snunch said:

In my experience there's no trick or secret to it, just be interested in what you do. I was the laziest student in high school and just coasted by with doing the minimum work possible, but now in college I'm actually studying stuff I enjoy doing instead of doing bs required courses and I'm one of the hardest workers I know.

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I hope to become you.

Minwu said:

*reiterate




Anyways, be asian. Or be supervised.

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Like th is?

a good question-based system imo that i use is , in flowchart form:

are you on the computer? ---> if yes ----> get up and do your work

if you automatically think this every time your fingers touch a keyboard, it will be annoying enough to prevent internet time wasters (if you care)

I usually reach the "don't even touch the computer, man" stage when I have, like, a huge assignment I KNOW I need an entire day for, or something else extreme. If you manage that for every little thing you need to be doing, I salute you.

usually when i have a huge assignment due, i start out procrastinating and when crunch time comes, usually I just justify procrastinating more with "its ok if I turn it in X days late - he wont mind..."

i have a problem lol

Relevant.
My school life in two squares.

And Snunch's got it covered. Man.

Ill come up with a witty joke for this thread later

I schedule in my hours of productivity, hahaha.

I'm such a procrastinator at heart that I totally fall off the wagon sometimes, but generally speaking it works out well.

I'm also somewhat of a perfectionist (ie, I won't turn in work/assignments/anything unless it looks perfect), so setting a schedule up where something is "due" by a particular date (ie, I set up meetings and whatnot to review the project and/or set up a date that a friend is going to proofread something) which really keeps me in line.

Honestely dude I'm the biggest procrastinator ever and I work on it every single day as best I can. I work 40 hours a week, go to college 17 credit hours, and have a very active social life. And in my free time, I'm terrrriiblee with staying off the computer, downloading music, reading about more interesting things and worse of all facebook.. Self-discipline is basically forcing yourself to quickly stop and do what you know is more important when the time comes.

For example, i usually only have 2-3 days a week i can do homework at night . between like 7pm and whenever I go to bed. I have class starting at 8 am. So I immediatly sit down at my desk and start working. My laptop is usually involved for most work.. or just sitting by me... From this point I sit down I won't let myself eat or drink until I've finished my assignments. or sleep. So I may lax off and spend the first entire hour on facebook alone honestly.. But I know I want to be in bed before 11, or sooner if possible. I can usually evaluate how long each assignment will take. Like 2 page papers for comp II give an hour or more. So if im lazily working on everything else and its already past nine, I know i need to get finished asap and start on that, or I basically realize at that point on I'm chosing to deprieve myself of sleep when i have a big day of school and work and I'm agreeing that Facebook is more important than me feeling like shit tomorrow. Usually once I think about that, I can catch myself everytime I start to linger onto facebook just by thinking to myself STOP what were you just saying? lol. Plus I'm usually hungry by now too lol. Eventually motivation kicks in.

I figure eventually I'll have conditioned myself to just quit getting on other shit and do my homework when it needs done.

Right now is 7, so I've got plenty of time before I need to get serious with working on my research paper haha.

I procrastinate all the


In all seriousness, the tumblr comic describes me perfectly. Except replace tumblr with Tvtropes. Goddamn Tvtropes...


EDIT: Also, lparchive. If you ever want to read an LP by the most hilarious angry nerd ever, look up anything by The Dark ID.

I used to struggle with this, so I had to learn a lot of techniques to motivate myself.

My examples are all going to be based around practising trombone. But I found sometimes I could practice for hours and it would be easy, and sometimes it was a struggle to do 10 minutes, so I just worked out what situations made it easy and what ones made it hard.

I found that playing computer games in the day before I finished practising was a definite bad thing to do. And playing RPGs at all was not a good idea..

Watching dragonball z and spending time with other musicians on the other hand, tended to help motivate me.

There were other things like, committing to the idea that if you ask yourself "should I practise now?" you would always answer "yes" helped, but it also led to some things like, catching myself thinking "you mustnt consider practising right now or you will have to do it". Brains are sneaky. Having a schedule and always sticking to it will help a lot too.

Self discipline is definitely something you can learn. Though it may not be particularly easy..

in high school, procrastination is a good thing. it will callus you to the pressures of life later on, where you have more work at once even when you didn't procrastinate (or so I'm guessing, still in high school here). in my experience, having procrastinated all through freshman-junior year, now that in senior year there is a ton of inherent pressure, I gained self-discipline out of necessity. as a former procrastinator, I am handling the new workload far better than my goody-two-shoes peers.

I wouldn't worry too much about self discipline unless you're in college/university. Once you're working on something you enjoy or you realize that you actually need to work hard, it will hopefully kick in.

Being responsible for something that affects other people can also help. Like something in the local community, umpiring a junior sports team etc. I'm an assistant teacher right now so if I don't do my work properly I end up screwing over both the kids and the teachers so that's some damn good motivation for me right there.

I have really bad self-discipline...
If I'm not doing something I want to do then I'm not apt to do it at all. I always have to make myself do things I don't want to do, but once I'm doing it I'm usually fine.
The only 'discipline' I have is going to work, but even I've had trouble with that in the past and ended up getting fired...haha, oops.

full page and not a single masturbation joke

Snkz said:

full page and not a single masturbation joke

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i masturbate whenever i want, don't really see the problem???

It's kinda funny how I'm procrastinating by currently typing in a thread about procrastination. Does anybody know of any computer applications that forcefully bar you from certain applications/websites for a predetermined amount of time? I have been trying to look for one myself, but I keep getting sidetracked.

I have this: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gigmkhkildapllnjbnkfgknkkjeohkmo?hc=search&hcp=main

works well