I was so excited to come up with the content of this article! And it was sort of by accident. I have uncovered what I think might just be the ultimate discipline trick – the best technique, free of drugs, hypnosis or behavioral conditioning, to cut out slacking.
Okay, so, you’ve been doing a piece of work for quite a while and you’ve made some progress, but now it’s become particularly boring and/or unpleasantly difficult and you just want to quit. I’ve written several articles on motivation and self-discipline and this one will be by far the shortest: just because there isn’t much to say about this technique. It’s just a trick.
The Trick
Set yourself the rule that when you’re not working in your work period you’re not doing anything. All you allow yourself to do is rest – sitting in your chair, lying on your bed (only if you’re confident you won’t fall asleep) or just walking a little around the room to stretch your legs (so you’re resting mentally though not physically).
So, why is this the ‘ultimate discipline trick’?
This technique doesn’t require you to do anything – in fact it requires you do nothing, and when it comes to effort it’s always easier to do nothing than something. If you really just want to quit because the work is getting tough/boring then you’re not too likely to try psyching yourself up or using positive visualization or whatever. You just want to stop.
The problem is that you usually when you stop working you move on to something else: TV, a video game or a YouTube binge, for example. Once you’re immersed in something else there’s no way you’re going back to the work any time soon due to an increase in ‘play’ momentum, a total loss of focus for the work and the chance to procrastinate with other activities.
From doing nothing but rest you’ll actually want to get back to the work sooner than you might think. This is because doing something is always less boring than doing nothing. And if you stopped working when you didn’t really need to, it was because you were bored. And when the only alternative is not doing anything, and you engage in that for a while, you’ll soon find – just for the sake of alleviating boredom once again – you get back into the work.
In a way this trick hacks discipline: rather than forcing yourself to sit there at the desk and ‘just keep going, just keep going’ it lets you anti-slack. You stop working to slack off only to find the slacking off actually just makes you want to get back to the work again – because with this trick there are no alternatives.
And then you’ll find yourself working again because you actually want to, which we all know is better than when you’re forcing yourself to.
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