ˈdɪs·ə·plən

[jpanarra]

I'll be honest, I've been having a tough time for awhile, this is for the people out there that are having a tough time as well. When you're in a rough place its easy to start thinking and saying negative things such as doubting yourself, frustration or even blaming others.



I noticed with my work ethic, I produce in waves, some days/weeks/months pick your time frame… I'll be pounding out and finishing things so fast that your head will spin and other days I'm getting nothing done. It’s the bottom part of the wave that hurts me and others.



So I told myself, no matter what I'll get one thing done a day no matter if I did nothing all day. If the clock turns to 11:45pm, and I didn’t do anything, Fine go online find a potienal client and schedule a email to go out tomorrow in the morning. Its all about patterns, sometimes it just takes one to get the wave to go back up into the "super-productive mode"



This part is from a reddit thread I read awhile back,



Be greatful for the "3 you's"



-Past You

- Present You

- Future You



Be grateful for the past you, he did all of the work to get you to where you are today. The skills you have are due to him, so be happy and thank him every day. Now the present you is indebted to the future you, In bed with an alarm going off and you don’t want to get out… "this is for you future you" and get the F*ck out of bed and do something.



Being grateful also means forgiving yourself and understand why you did what you did so you can better avoid or control your time. I'll admit I love video games, it’s a nice escape and can entertain me for hours. So I use it as a token to myself when I achieve something. For example, I'm a sucker for real time strategy games like starcraft2 so If I do something positive and productive like a sale, I'll treat myself to 2 matches but I'll never do more than 2 matches a day. Now If I break that rule, it's my own rule… so I need to forgive myself and just move on and go back to following it, its easier to go "this rule is dumb its not doing its job" than to go "I f*cked up, tomorrow I'll do better"



I'll just say this but this is already embedded in me, but I can see how it helps on the basic level is reading books and exercising, I play soccer during the week and weekends in pickups and leagues and I read 30 mins before bed and after I wake up. The weeks that I don’t read/exercise I just end up sluggish and not so productive.



All of this sounds easy as hell, but if you're just starting out just try to stick with it for 3 months… if you fall off the wagon, that’s fine just get back on it again and try again.

 

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[Dylan in Africa]

This reminded me of something I read this week in The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman.

Here are some key takeaways from his section on Guiding Structure:

• The structure of your Environment is the largest determinant of your behavior.
• If you want to successfully change a behavior, don't try to change the behavior directly. Change the structure that influences or supports the behavior, and the behavior will change automatically.

I can personally attest to the effectiveness of environmental change in habit reconstruction and discipline. Growing up, I was once addicted to video games as well. Transitioning from life in the United States to Tanzania over the past few months, bad habits have disappeared simply by removing temptations. As you mentioned, having good lifestyle habits to turn to (like exercise) can also have a great impact on entrepreneurial productivity, but why not make things even easier on yourself by making it inconvenient to make unproductive choices?

Throw the video game console up in the attic for a month and see where things go.