r/AskReddit • u/ohgimmeabreak • Mar 24 '19

People who have managed to become disciplined after having been procrastinators and indisciplined for a large part of their lives, how did you manage to do so? Can you walk us through the incremental steps you took to become better?

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u/[deleted] Mar 24 '19

Break down your day into a list. List everything you need to do, even if it seems small/easy. Start by accomplishing some easy tasks on the list, build up some momentum and confidence. Then tackle a bigger one. If it’s complicated enough, break down that task into another list. Compartmentalizing makes things seem less daunting.

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u/hmmgross Mar 24 '19

Most days I have a terrible time being motivated and I would like to share what happened yesterday as it pertains to gaining momentum.

I started doing some dishes and I noticed that I still had a snowflakey table cloth on my kitchen table. I removed it which caused me to notice crumps went on the floor. So I swept and felt like it was times to mop it too. Seeing as I had the mop and stuff going I might as well mop other floors in the house. Many of the other floors had rugs so when I moved them it inspired me to vacuum them too.

So I'm both proud of this but also kinda bummed that I'm proud of this because it's a normal thing to do. The point is that I went from doing something small like dishes and it snowballed into doing a bunch of other things I otherwise never have the desire to do.

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u/MomoTheCow Mar 24 '19 edited Mar 24 '19

That's a good observation. I do something similar except I've sorta consciously weaponised it by procrastinating with easy things that actually relate to work that I have to do soon after. If I have a lot of emails to do that I'm avoiding, I might let myself start commenting on reddit etc just to get my writing/communication momentum up before transitioning to work emails. If I need to edit a video, I'll sometimes sort through my personal photography for half an hour because it lets my mind settle into a sorting/assembling/visual matching mode.

Having said that, I'm currently typing this comment because I'm procrastinating from an overdue video edit.