“Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishments”
Jim Rohn
One of the most important life skills to develop is self-discipline. Just by mastering one skill, it essentially becomes a domino effect that helps you elevate other areas of your life as well.
By applying self-discipline to my life, I was able to start exercising more, staying on top of my classes, starting a side hustle, and even reading one book a week. Through self-discipline, I was able to keep my life organized and accomplish more than I ever have in my life.
Developing self-discipline is crucial, yet many people struggle with where to begin. This guide is designed to help you take those first steps.
What is Self-Discipline?
Every defines Self-Discipline a little differently. BetterUp, for instance, explains that “discipline encompasses training people to adhere to certain behaviors and rules.” Although this is certainly true, I also believe that discipline involves doing things you don’t want to do and it is absolutely good for you.
Going to the gym, for instance, is a perfect example of how self-discipline can be implemented. Often, there are days when you feel extremely motivated, perhaps you listened to some motivational video that gets your blood pumping.
However, 2 days later, you feel extremely unmotivated and you just want to lie on your couch. This is where discipline comes into play, where you know going to the gym has tremendous health benefits and it is important for you to overlook your temporary emotions and get a workout in.
Improving your self-discipline is just as easy as doing the things you don’t want to do more often.
How Self-Discipline Can Improve Your Life
I believe self-discipline is a foundational skill you must develop to improve any aspect of your life. Think about any areas in your life that need improvement. For example, health, business, relationship, fitness, or career.
The underlying skill that is needed to push yourself over the edge is self-discipline. With it, you can turn your bad habits into great habits that boost your own life as well as those around you.
The most important aspect is this simple fact: You accomplish more. With self-discipline, you can quickly accomplish your short-term and long-term goals.
How to Develop Self-Discipline
1. Recognize and Evaluate
How do you solve any problem? You have to recognize and acknowledge it first. By doing so, you are already halfway there.
If you want to be more self-disciplined, you have to understand your daily habits. That means understanding how long you are doing a task, where you are doing the task, and who you are with while doing the task. By understanding these factors, you can pinpoint the exact areas in your life where you need self-discipline.
The best way to understand your life is to create a simple chart in your notebook as follows:
Tim’s Weekday Routine
| Activity | Start Time | Finish Time |
|---|---|---|
| Wake up/Breakfast | 07:00 am | 08:00 am |
| Commute | 08:00 am | 09:00 am |
| Work | 09:00 am | 01:00 pm |
| Lunch | 01:00 pm | 02:00 pm |
| Work | 02:00 pm | 05:00 pm |
| Commute | 05:00 pm | 06:00 pm |
| Dinner and Shower | 06:00 pm | 07:30 pm |
| Kids | 07:30 pm | 09:00 pm |
| Netflix/Social Media | 09:00 pm | 12:00 pm |
As you can tell from this example, Tim’s life becomes much easier to understand after he has written it down. I don’t care if you have the best memory in the world; writing your daily tasks will not only help you acknowledge but also help you reflect. This is Tim’s weekday routine. Let’s take a look at his daily life during the weekends.
Tim’s Weekend Routine
| Activity | Start Time | Finish Time |
|---|---|---|
| Wake up/Breakfast | 10:00 am | 11:30 am |
| Netflix | 11:30 am | 02:00 pm |
| Lunch | 02:00 pm | 03:00 pm |
| YouTube | 03:00 pm | 06:00 pm |
| Friends | 06:00 pm | 12:00 am |
These charts are easy to make for anyone and any age. There are no limitations; feel free to add more columns (who you were with, why you did what you did, where you were at the time, etc.).
With this format, now you have created a really easy way to see where your time has gone and you can see which areas lack discipline.
To quickly summarize the chart, Tim has spent about 40 hours on activities that otherwise could have been used to improve his career, fitness, or any other aspects of his life.
That is exactly how writing your tasks down helps you recognize and evaluate areas in your life where you need self-discipline. Tim needs discipline to manage his time online and to not hit the snooze button. What about you?
2. Set Self-Discipline as a goal
Another important method to develop self-discipline is to set it as a goal
Let’s create a goal of limiting Netflix. It will look something like this:
“Spending nearly 3 hours a day watching Netflix, I will limit that time to 1.5 hours a day by next month. My weakness in this goal is not knowing how fast time passes when I indulge in this kind of activity. To combat this, I will set a 15-minute timer that will disrupt my attention on the world of Netflix. Today, I will avoid going into my room because I know Netflix will follow. If I think about everyone who doubted me and called me a failure, it will help me gain motivation. To ensure I complete my task, I will give 5 dollars to a friend for every hour I spend on Netflix. I am doing this to live a more productive life.”
Benefits of writing goals like this:
The reason you limit your Netflix and don’t completely remove it is that you want this goal to be a long-term goal. Completely removing Netflix in one day will make you crave it more next time. We will dive more into this later in the section. By writing this goal, you also created solutions for obstacles you may encounter to remove decision-making. You gave yourself a punishment for no completion; you even stated your ‘why’ which will motivate you more in the long run.
Writing goals will help you stay on track to becoming more disciplined when those days of despair come.
3. Keeping Progress of Your Self-Discipline Journey
This is what I think is the most important part of self-discipline. When you start a goal, you are GUARANTEED to progress. That is not my opinion, that is just logical reasoning. You don’t believe me?
Think about it like this: Let’s say you have never exercised a day in your life, and one day you decide to jog around the block for 5 minutes. Those 5 minutes are your progression because you have never accomplished that EVER in your life before. Even though 5 minutes of running is relatively nothing compared to the average person, comparing it to YOUR own life, it is a major step up.
Similarly, if you want to be more self-disciplined in terms of using Netflix less, cutting it down to 5 minutes a day is an improvement for YOU.
By keeping progress on how much you limit yourself on Netflix daily, you start to get a visual sense of accomplishment. You can see yourself improving.
Just like you would take before and after pictures when you hit the gym, the same principles apply to using self-discipline to limit screen time.
Now, let’s see an example of a progress chart for watching YouTube:
| Date | Time Spent |
|---|---|
| 1/1/19 | 3.0 hours |
| 1/2/19 | 2.5 hours |
| 1/5/19 | 2.0 hours |
| 1/8/19 | 2.5 hours |
| 1/14/19 | 1.5 hours |
| 1/20/19 | 1.0 hour |
Important Note:
This is an oversimplified version of a progression chart for better understanding. The main point is that you VISUALLY see the progress. Feel free to make a chart or graph for better visualizations.
As you can see from this chart, Tim has progressed over time. Yes, some days he slacked a little. But judging him from start to end, he has saved nearly 2 hours a day and can work on something productive. Just by looking at this mini chart he made, he feels a strong sense of motivation because, in one month, he has achieved so much and now wonders how much more he can accomplish with that extra time.
Tip:
Spend 10-15 minutes a day (without a phone) to truly think about where your time is going. Then, think wisely about how to change it. Some questions you can ask yourself: What am I going to do with my extra time? Who do I look up to? Will that person be happy with how I’m spending my time?
4. Start Small
Self-discipline always starts with something small. For example, one cannot simply go from being a couch potato to adopting the work schedule of Elon Musk in one day. That is just not realistic and doesn’t last in the long run. Everyone has had one of those days where they listen to an inspirational speech and become extremely productive for that one day. Then, they go back to being a couch potato.
How does a beginner run a marathon? They start by running half a mile, maintain that pace for about a week, and then add 1-2 miles on top of that. After about 2-3 weeks, they move up to the 5-mile range. By repeating this process, in less than 6 months, they will be able to run a marathon.
It would be idiotic to try running even a quarter of a marathon on the first day. They would quit before completing the first mile.
In Tim’s life, instead of quitting Netflix all in one day, he should start with smaller increments. For example, he could watch one less episode of Netflix (20 minutes). Over the first 2 weeks, he would still get to enjoy his Netflix time. After he has adapted to watching Netflix for 2 hours and 40 minutes, it will feel like he has always watched Netflix for that long.
Repeat the process. By the end of the month, it will feel normal (as if he is not limiting Netflix at all). But in reality, he will have saved 40 minutes from when he first started.
Now, he has used self-discipline to his full advantage.
5. Consistency
When it comes to discipline, you have to understand that it will not be easy. But it will get easier the more you practice. Guaranteed.
What do we know? We know that humans are capable of developing self-discipline. Many people have done it in the past, and people will do it again in the future. And you can be one of those people. We also know that it is a guarantee. If you do something every day, you are guaranteed to be better at it. The same goes for self-discipline. The logic is simple; it’s like a winning lottery ticket, but you can only cash out several years from now. It is not immediate, but it is guaranteed.
Being consistent in that first month is key because the first month is the hardest to get past.
6. Non-Stop Reminders
Everything seems easy to do, but what happens is that when we start a task, we tend to forget when to stop. That is why we need reminders. Even if we accidentally scroll through Instagram, we need to be reminded to stop. Even the smallest glance at a picture can help remind us of things that happened in our lives. For example, looking at a video of someone breaking their ankles playing basketball may remind you of all the times you broke your ankles while skateboarding.
You lived through the experience, but you need that video to remind you of it. Crazy how our mind works, right?
Now, how can you remind yourself to stick to your discipline? You can:
- Put a post-it note on top of your phone.
- Change your background screensaver to your daily tasks.
- Change your computer desktop.
- Set 15-minute interval alarm clocks during the hours you watch Netflix the most.
- Get apps to manage time spent on Netflix.
The list goes on and on. One way to create your reminders is to set up something that gets your attention and makes you think, “I have to stop.” In my life, I use my computer a lot, whether it’s for school work or business. Because I am well aware of this, I created a custom web browser to remind me why I’m doing what I’m doing.
My actual web browser reminds me every time I google something.
7. Streak Keeping
Another key aspect of consistency is to never miss one day. Keep the streak going.
Similar to Snapchat streaks, you are motivated to send that streak and keep it going. Even if you come home late one night, you still manage to send streaks before you sleep. Just like some bodybuilders, who squeeze in even a 5-minute ab workout during the day because they truly have no time and they strive to never miss a day.
If you continue to limit Netflix every day, you subconsciously have that streak going on inside your mind even if you do not think about it. For example, if you have been limiting your cell phone use for so long now, you wouldn’t want to break that streak, would you?
Never missing a day allows that level of discipline to build greater than it ever was.
Frequently Asked Questions About Self-Discipline
The lack of self-discipline generally stems from a learning standpoint. For instance, it is not something taught in school, but rather something you experience yourself. Articles like this one, allow you to expedite that learning journey so you can master discipline yourself.
A self-disciplined person is someone with a strong mindset and can accomplish tasks despite how they are currently feeling.
Self-discipline can certainly be mental, but it is important to understand that it can be trained as well and is not something someone is born with