I seriously need advice, I’ll take anything.
I’ve realized that I’m not really getting anywhere in life because I lack discipline. Maybe it sounds stupid but I can’t for the life of me do shit that needs to be done. I really want to move on from certain bad aspects of my life but it requires a lot of discipline and hard work, and I’m stuck in a loop.
Does anyone here have any advice or methods that helps you do the things you’re too lazy to do?
Edit:
I got a lot more responses than I expected but I’m going to read everything when I get home from work! You guys are awesome, thanks so much for all your advices!
34 comments
Start small. Are you organized with your paper files? The best thing I ever did was get a small plastic file bin from the Office store and label Manila folders for all the categories in my life; health care, birth certificate/passport, bank , apt lease, work contracts etc etc. it’s a small thing but it helps set me up for success.
Depending on your age, join the military if you can’t discipline yourself. They’ll straighten you out. I know a few guys who lacked discipline, joined the military and turned out to love it because that’s what was missing in their life, and they were on a downward spiral before joining.
boyscouts, military camp, school, and then seek revenge on them all for wasting your youth. That determination will get you straight in life
Make a daily and weekly routine and stick to it.
eg.
**Daily routine, weekday**
* Up at 6:45, get ready for the day
* Walk the dog if it’s my day
* Grab breakfast and lunch and head to work
* Read emails, make a mental to-do list for the day and get cracking.
**Weekly routine**
* M/T & TR/F are gym days.
* W/Sun are cardio days
* Sunday is grocery shopping and lunch prep
* Friday/Saturday morning are for vacuuming and deep cleaning as needed.
I make calendars which list everything I need to do for the next few weeks. Being able to look at it and see what I’ve got coming up makes it more difficult to just put stuff off until tomorrow, cos I can see I need to use tomorrow to do things that need to be done the day after tomorrow.
I am 23, I dont have discipline at all, everything I did so far was due to pressure, I am about to finish a Master of sciend in economic(supply chain management) all exams and projects being done with couple of days in advance.
Yes I do fear was coming
Spreadsheets and later to a personal self hosted wiki.
Id plan out my goals and daily / weekly tasks and then track them.
The secret to solve lack of discipline is discipline. Get disciplined! I know I sound like some motivational speaker! The problem about discipline is exactly how to be disciplined in daily life? that’s hard answer since people are also different.
Some people talk about turning things into a habit. (When it is a habit you won’t need to think about it, you will do automatically, you will be disciplined)
Some other people talks about accountability – when you need to be accountable for something, you will do that. That’s why so many people get work done, if it wasn’t for that, no one would finish their job and be on Reddit all day. Here you can find a coach (real coach) or someone you respect to be kind of mentor and you can be accountable about your goes. You also need to be clear about your goes, set realistic ones, etc, etc… some work there to do.
There are some people that talks about passion and purpose, and the lack of it is the reason so many people won’t get disciplined. Meaning, if you don’t like it you won’t get motivated about it and won’t do it.
Some people will say: Just do it. Those are the people that work well with to do list. They need to accomplish something to mark on the to do list.
I’m not an expert or coach or anything, and I don’t even know if what I’m saying will help, but i know there are many books out there that maybe one will be the one for you, for example, out of the top of my mind: the power of habit, the 7 habits of highly effective people.
I hope that some part of the text I wrote could help.
I had the same issue, but not because of laziness, but what I later found out was ADHD causing it. After therapy and medication my life completely changed
3 simple words. Just. Do. It.
Nuns with a yardstick. Well, it started with a ruler to the knuckles, the graduated to the yardstick or pointer.
Helped a lot with personal organization and discipline.
My dad’s belt disciplined me lol
It starts in the morning with making your bed. It continue through the day as you clean up and tidy everything that you touch.
Leave everything in your path better than you found it. Make it a rule.
You need to fall just hard enough to really feel the consequences that comes with this mentallity.
In certain situations people do not have the luxury of slacking unless they want their lives to fall apart.
If you are a single guy then I highly recommend martial arts and the gym.
I got kicked out of my house so I had to learn fast to survive 🙃
To grow one must suffer
Make a daily schedule. Make a list of tasks and write down when you will do them. Start the day with something productive like making your bed. Also reward yourself when you accomplish a goal.
I was gonna say I got my rear end beat, but I realized you wanted something else…….
My dad was ex military and I was raised in a pretty structured environment. I just learned that if something needed to be done, you just got up and did it.
Stop thinking of discipline as all or nothing. Do I cook most nights, work out regularly and keep up with my job, yes. Do I stress out and get mad at myself because the dishes piled up, or the grass got too long, or my car is dirty, no. Focus on what’s most important to you, be disciplined about that. Let the small stuff slide and deal with it on an as needed basis.
To be disciplined is to do things consistently no matter what, so even when it stops being fun, when you aren’t in the mood, when you don’t have the energy or there is short term fun to be had elsewhere, you get up and do it anyway especially when there is no motivation.
The only thing that allows me to do this is focusing on a target or a goal. I want something.
Whether that is a summer body, a new job, the ability to make the perfect special fried rice, I want something more than the current comfort of not having it.
Background information i’m lazy and it’s easy for me to slip into negativity so the battle is 24/7. If i slip up for a few days I don’t beat myself up. I allow it and start again. I also make a shit tonne of lists and have a very competitive nature.
Good luck
Little bits at a time. Start with some simple stuff.
Always put your shoes away, or your clothes directly in the hamper. Never go to sleep with dishes in the sink. Stuff like that, it gets you in the mind frame of taking care of the immediate.
For time commitments, start things early in the day and commit to doing things for short periods. It’s easy at the end of a 15 minute session to decide to keep going. I call it motivational inertia.
Once you get that stuff down, you can start with longer-term and more committed projects. Make lists, try your best, prioritize. The longer you go, the more habitual it becomes, and the less there is to do.
Clean your room, make a simple schedule wake up time bed time lunch, you know basic stuff, then add to it little by little
Belt, wooden spoon, whatever was handy
I was raised that way, so I literally don’t know how to be anything else. But what I’ve observed is that it’s a balance between two forces: emotions and intellect. Laziness is a myth…there aren’t lazy people. We all have laziness and discipline in us. It’s about changing the ratio of what drives us.
You’re yielding to your emotions for your decision making instead of making decisions with your head most of the time. Discipline is really just choosing specific times to override your emotions and use your head make a decision.
One of the keys is that *you can’t do it all the time*. Discipline is like a muscle–it has limited capacity before you wear it out. If you overwork your discipline muscle, you will fail, so start slow. Pick one thing to be disciplined about and strengthen that muscle. Even for someone like me, there are times where I’m like, “I just can’t do it” and I don’t beat myself up about it because I get the big stuff right. Why? Because I prioritize my needs and use my discipline selectively.
The other thing that undermines people’s discipline is the inability to tolerate discomfort. If your making emotional decisions, you’re almost always choosing what feels good in that moment. Doing something disciplined is about delaying gratification, which doesn’t really feel that great in the moment. If you can’t sit in a negative emotion without grasping at something to make it go away, you’re gonna struggle with discipline. Not a simple answer to this most times, but it’s also a muscle you can strengthen.
Discipline will come when you absolutely need it in my experience
Well, our parents beat it into us
He was a drill Sergeant.
HED WAKE me by pulling me out of bed by my toes. Wed go across the street, and cleaned up the vacant lot.
I’ll tell you, he
Knocked me. Out. TWICE! Later on he got nicer.
You gotta remind yourself that the world is actively against you. You will get nothing out of not doing anything, but when you fail at what you want then you also achieve nothing AND feel worse.
Continue to do nothing, because nobody gives a shit, why should you?
I have a 3×3 white board on my wall that I use to plan things out as they come in
1. Get 3 quotes for carpet
2. Call insurance about better rates
3. Work for an hour on paperwork or filing
4. Scan documents
5. Etc.
It doesn’t need to be fancy or super strict with deliverable dates but if it’s always there in front of me instead of on my phone or computer where distractions are a click away I find it helps.
If you don’t have a whiteboard use a piece of paper and stick it on the wall. Figure out the top 2 or 3 things you need to get done and get them done. Doesn’t even have to be in the same day.
It can be overwhelming if there are 3-4 big things and 30 little things that peck at you, but sitting down and spending even like 30 mins making a plan will make it way less stressful and achievable.
Good luck dude, feel free to drop me a line if you need anything
The trick is to make it worse for you to not do the thing you need to have done. Or make it seem so easy that you laugh about it.
Let’s say you have the most cluttered home imaginable, stacks from the floor to the ceiling, and you have a halfway path through it all, it is in other words totally impossible to ever get sorted out, no matter what. This can be done so easy for you that you almost enjoys it!
Instead of thinking of it all at once, do instead split your home up in small squares that you can manage, i.e. 2 foot by 2 foot and start in a place you see all the time, every day.
Now start by cleaning these 2×2 out and when finished over some days, can you clearly point out what you have done, be happy about that square. The only extra rule is now that this square has to be kept empty, so drop your new clutter elsewhere.
In a month or two have you maybe taken 3 of these squares, and you can see that you get somewhere, that you have managed to keep them empty. 🙂
As for discipline I agree with the other commenters saying create a routine. But for going somewhere in life, start by continuing to learn and taking online classes for something you’re interested in. Tech is really easy to get into, and it doesn’t have to be coding. Photography or any kind of art would allow you to express yourself.
Do something new.
Start with you health. You need to feel good and energized to be able to do other things. Eat better and get some excercise. You don’t need to belong to a gym. Go for a walk or run. Do some push-ups, plants, find a you tube video to follow. Then get some sleep. Regular sleep, going to bed and waking up at the same time each day including weekends. Eventually you’ll start to feel more motivated and realize how much more time there is in a day. Avoiding or at least limiting your time on social media is also important. It sucks you in!
From there, get a hobby or create a project. Painting, working out, reading, hiking or anything you enjoy and can look forward to. Schedule time in your day to do this.
After that you will start to feel more motivated. Make a daily list each evening of what you want to accomplish the next day. Make a list for the week, or the year of big picture goals you want to accomplish. Review those lists every day. It keeps you motivated and accountable.
Good luck!
First things first. Look around your house. Is there clutter? Is it organized? Is it dirty? Now, ask yourself, “Does it make me uncomfortable?” Odds are, it does-and that makes it emotionally draining. How many times you’re going walk by a dirty sink and not get down a little.
Start with Small steps. Clean house. Clean garage. Clean car. Etc. Keep going.
You’re draining more energy than you think, by not doing anything.
Start small and just start. Easier said than done I know… but they say it takes 21 days to build a habit so I usually focus on that and before I know it, what I’m doing is second nature. But like I said… easier said than done
Hey man, former Green Beret here. A few random thoughts.
Pure ‘will power’ is overrated and often doesn’t work. Setup systems to cultivate success. Specifically, you have to make a lot of small changes here and there that have a larger cumulative effect on whatever you’re trying to change.
In most cases, good emotion management will help you get things done. The typical procrastinating or choosing to eat junk rather than exercise – your body & brain are choosing relief instead of effort. Gotta do a lot of self-examination to find out why. Look into mindfulness, and if you can afford it, therapy. If you can’t afford it, there are some youtube vidoes or ted talks.
Be kind and patient to yourself. A lot of people are very hard on themselves. My sister was beating herself up over not doing chores, while she was getting her master’s degree and raising two kids. Keep things in perspective.
Making big changes in your life is more likely to succeed if you time it with a change in location or a calendar event. Yes, New Year’s resolutions really do work – some 30% of people who start something new with the New Year stick to it. Most people will look at that and see that 70% fail, but we’re talking about *new life changes.* So 30% succeeding is a huge number. Changing your environment by moving to a new home or city, or starting on a Monday or the 1st of the month or on a birthday (or similar event). Plan it out and don’t let up. If you break the habit, which only take missing the task 1 time, don’t beat yourself up. Just start over and do it again. Again and again. It will get easier.
Track your progress. Don’t bother setting ‘goals’ as they don’t really work anyway. Instead try to work incrementally in a direction you want to go. You want to learn Spanish? Don’t commit to 20 minutes a day…instead surround yourself with anything and everything spanish-speaking related – movies, music, literature, etc. Change your environment. Spend a little time here and there. Track your progress, track your progress. Don’t arbitrarily set a budget (it won’t work), instead track every dollar you spend and the awareness will change the way you think and become its own motivation.
The reason most people fail at starting something new is because it takes a lot of small wins over a long time period before you can see effective change in anything. So you’re working for long periods without noticeable returns. There is no logical reason why this *would* work. This is why I said willpower doesn’t work.
For example: Want to put on 20 lbs of muscle? You can do it in 12 months but you have to diet religiously and work out regularly with few/no misses. This is expensive, time consuming, and puts a ding in your social life (no drinking). Way easier said than done. The way you track this task makes all the difference in getting the feedback the brain needs to stay motivated.
Here’s my biggest tip: lie to yourself. I lie to myself all the time. If I am in a rut and struggling with something as mundane as say, doing the dishes, I’ll tell myself: “I’m just gonna wash one fork then go watch tv.” Sometimes I do just that. But most of the time I just clean it all up – because I’m already here doing it, why not finish?
There are no self-help books or shortcuts I’d recommend. Really get to know yourself and be honest. Balancing self-compassion with accountability is a hard thing to do correctly if you’re not used to either. You know that old saying ‘early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy wealthy and wise?’ That shit really is true. The keys to success are self-compassion, eating healthy, regular exercise, and good sleep. Your life will be 100% easier if you can tackle these things.
I used to work for Amazon, and while the pay was fantastic, the hours were long, my sleep was shit and I was miserable. So I quit and took a lower paying job and I was much, much happier. Sometimes you gotta give up a good thing to get a better thing.
Okay that was a lot of random shit but I hope at least one thing in here was helpful to you. Good luck broski.