As I mentioned in The Inclination Methods, disciplining yourself to get through a task is an effective way to get it done. It’s also damned hard to do. Fortunately there’s at least one technique that can help:
Using self-discipline to save your life
I once heard a story of a man who, lost in a tundra, had to wade through snow for an absurd length of time, fighting hunger, exhaustion and the cold, in order to get where he needed to go to survive.
Faced with that sort of agonising adversity the will to live probably wouldn’t serve as sufficient motivation for many, and it probably didn’t for this guy. So in addition to the good old ‘I wanna live’ source of motivation he used self-discipline to make himself keep going – and to help with his self-discipline he placed imaginary markers on the snow off in front of him. He would look at the place he wanted to reach and say, “I want to get there within the next twenty minutes. I just have to get there in the next twenty minutes. That’s all I have to focus on doing.” When he reached that marker within his time limit he would set the next one and the next one and so on.
I don’t know if he used twenty minute time frames and those probably weren’t his exact words – but essentially this was the thinking that led the man to reach his goal of leaving the tundra alive: not through fear, not through motivation – just through self-discipline and the application of a method that drew upon his self-discipline to channel his mind successfully.
How the markers method works
Ever found that no matter how fed up you may be with something if you’re really close to finishing it you’ll stick with it for that extra minute or two – just to get it over with? If you were only halfway through you’d be less likely to put in that extra 120 seconds. But when all that’s all it takes to finish the task you’re bound to stick it out.
This is the principle behind markers: the two minutes of work probably won’t be any easier whether it’s the final two or the first two of the task – it’s your perception that’s different, and it’s perception that makes any task pleasurable or unbearable.
By using markers the man lost in snow was able to make the distances he had to cover emotionally endurable, and thus he covered them. If you think of the next fifteen minutes as the last, if you think just of continuing for those fifteen minutes, you’ll probably complete them.
How to place short-term markers
I was using the markers method before I heard this story and it occurs to me, looking back on it, that the man was using what I call ‘short-term markers’.
Short-term markers are good for when you’re only perhaps halfway through a task and feel the urge to quit coming on (knowing that it would be best if you didn’t).
To place a short-term marker mentally break the task down into measurable units and place a marker on the next unit to complete. Tell yourself that when you complete that unit you can quit.
For a piece of written work one unit could be writing a hundred words. If you’re revising for an exam then a unit could be re-reading one page of the textbook. If you’re doing the washing up then it’s washing one more dish. You get the idea. It should only take a second or two to divide it up, depending on the task.
Complete the unit. After that you’re free to quit if you want to – the exercise will have meant you’ve completed one more unit than you would otherwise have, so you’ve succeeded in making a positive difference through self-discipline.
However, you may well find that you’re happy to set the marker for the next unit, complete that one and see how you feel about quitting then. If you complete enough units you may even become enthusiastic about the task and happily work your way to completion.
How to place ‘no-turning-back-now’ markers
This next marker you place on a unit that’s well in advance of you reaching it. Place it fairly close to the end, but not that close, maybe at the point of 70% or 75% completion. So, for a 1000 word report you place the marker on 700 words. Now get to work. You’re free to quit whenever you want to but when you hit your marker you have to stick it out until the end.
I still study kanji (Chinese characters used in Japanese) and most of my study of them takes place outside the mandatory work I have to do for them for my degree.
I made studying kanji a routine some months ago and I got a lot done in three months. There is, however, still more to do (a student is expected to take eight years to achieve adult literacy in Japanese – not that I intend to take that long). For my latest kanji routine, just like with the last one, there are odd days when it’s hard to avoid quitting a memory drill partway through and doing the rest in the afternoon or evening - not good given it’s best for me to do the whole thing in one sitting in the morning.
I use a computer program to list the kanji I have to revise each day and there is a counter in the corner of the window that counts down the remaining characters to do. On such days I place my no-turning-back-now marker on my favourite number: 37.
This marker is only applicable on days when I have forty or more characters to revise, of course, but it’s only really on these days that I need self-discipline to get through them all.
So I work my way through them and it’s one of those days and I’m restless and/or ill and/or cold and/or hungry and I just want to quit and continue it later on. I look to that counter to see how many I have left to do. And I’m at number 34. I’ve passed my no-turning-back-now marker. I’ve got to get to zero now, that’s all there is to it. And I do and, of course, I’m all the better off for it.
Self-Discipline Markers – the easy-to-use aid for completing a task early or just leaving an Alaskan plain on foot.
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