discipline

The Habits of Annoyingly Strong-Willed Bastards

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Okay, that’s a harsh headline. Have a read of the much more softly-worded 5 Habits of People With Remarkable Willpower over on Inc.com but I tell you, the first one is probably the best:

Eliminate as many choices as possible. We all have a finite store of mental energy for exercising self-control.

The more choices we make during the day, the harder each one is on our brain–and the more we start to look for shortcuts. (Call it the “Oh, screw it,” syndrome.) Then we get impulsive. Then we get reckless. Then we make decisions we know we shouldn’t make, but it’s as if we can’t help ourselves.

In fact, we can’t help ourselves: We’ve run out of the mental energy we need to make smart choices.

That’s why the fewer choices we have to make, the smarter choices we can make when we do need to make a decision.

Say you want to drink more water and less soda. Easy. Keep three water bottles on your desk at all times. Then you won’t need to go to the refrigerator and need to make a choice.

Or say you struggle to keep from constantly checking your email. Easy. Turn off all your alerts. Or shut down your email and open it only once an hour. Or take your mail program off your desktop and keep it on a laptop across the room. Make it hard to check–then you’re more likely not to.

5 Habits of People With Remarkable Willpower – Jeff Haden, Inc.com (undated)

Read the full piece.

Three years of checks and balances

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I’ve mentioned this before but I’ve realised more about it. One of the key things I recommend you do is to check your bank balances every day. That’s it. It keeps you focused and, moreover, it keeps you really aware of how what you do pays off.

Now, that’s not to say that you can or should only measure your productivity and worth by how much money you earn. I’m a writer, I’d be insane to do that.

But it is a measure you can see and now that it is so easy to check our accounts online, it’s a really fast and handy measure.

The reason I’m telling you this again today is that I’ve now been doing it since 2011. Today is my third anniversary of checking all my accounts every single day: I have checked without fail 1,095 days in a row.

And this is what I have just realised: while I might want those balances to be healthier, the fact is that whenever I doubt I’ve got the discipline to do something, I can now look to 1,095 days in a row where I did.

The 5am anniversary

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Today is the 250th day I’ve got up at 5am to write. That doesn’t feel like much given how long I’ve been a writer and it will feel feeble if you’re a farmer. But I want to mark this little anniversary in some way.

I only just thought of that this morning as I lurched very slowly out of bed. Yesterday I fair bound up out of there, today was tougher. Perhaps I should’ve kept a record but very broadly I think the 240s have been some of the hardest since the very first 5am starts.

It definitely goes in cycles, though.

There were patches even during the 20s and 30s where I would bound upright and not think about all this. There were times somewhere around 80 mornings in that I would come close to turning over.

I don’t think you need my sleep diary, if I had one, but the 5am start idea was difficult for me and I don’t think that even I can find a way to say I’ve failed at it. So there is discipline, there is effort, there are lessons.

But most of all there are results.

That’s why I do this thing. I’m not advocating getting up early as some kind of health advice. Look at me: I don’t know from health advice. And I’m not even recommending that you get up at 5am per se. What I did before all this began was to experiment with looking for when I wrote the best. Also the most, I was on various deadlines so most was an important issue, but chiefly the best. When did I write the best and preferably not have to rewrite quite so much.

It’s just an astonishingly awful thing that the answer is 5am.

But, okay, at least I know.

And now, 250 mornings in, I know these things too:

1) Bribery and threats
For the first 180 days I used my own Brutal £1 Pot Trick (as covered in my book, The Blank Screen, UK edition, US edition) to trick me into getting up. (The short summary is that I did bribe myself each morning but I also threatened. There was a treat for doing it but also a very big penalty for not.) I’d probably carry on using this, I had intended to and lately I’ve wondered whether it would help to try again, but it’s an expensive kind of thing and I wanted an iPad.

2) Alarms
I love my iPhone but there are times I hate my iPhone. Specifically at 5am. Or rather at about 6:30am when I’d wake up feeling great, feeling refreshed, feeling amazed that I could be so renewed and reinvigorated by a night’s sleep that was ending at 5am. And then seeing that my iPhone’s alarm was going off.

The alarm has to be very quiet so that I’m the only one it wakes, being right on top of it and able to switch it off quickly, but it does have to make a noise and sometimes it doesn’t. Not because I’d turned the volume down too low, not because I’d switched some setting.

Just because.

Yes, I had a moment of worrying about deafness. There was the screen with its Snooze button on that white alarm banner, but no sound.

After this had happened a few times – I have no idea what caused it, there’s no pattern I could see – I gave up setting an alarm for 5am.

Instead, when I’m going to bed, I ask Siri to wake me at 4:59am. And then to wake me at 5:01am. Two alarms. Many days they both work, just once or twice neither has. And for the rest of the time, one of them has and that’s enough.

kount3) It’s worth counting
I often forget until hours later, but just tapping a + on a counter app is a little bit satisfying. If it’s a choice between the satisfaction of a tap and the joy of another hour in bed, the bed wins. Let’s be clear there. But as it’s really a choice between bed and all the benefits that getting up early bring, the counter wins.

4) Do something. Have something to do
It’s like laying out your clothes the night before. Have something that you are going to do first. You won’t always do it. Right now, I’m not doing it. I had a plan for what I need to do and instead I’ve come to you. But this isn’t about the discipline of making plans and sticking to them. I get up at 5am, that’s discipline enough for anybody. It’s about using this Stupid O’Clock time and making it count.

Doing anything is fine. But it must be done. Easily the worst mornings of this whole 250 run are the couple where I had nothing to do. I had plenty I could do but nothing that was vital, nothing that made me ill with worry.

It was truly, deeply, insanely awful.

There is just little so stupid as wasting time at your desk at 5am. You don’t even spend some time deciding what to work on, you start checking emails and reading news.

So if there is not a particularly pressing deadline already, I will choose something the night before and make it the thing I will work on first. The aim is to get straight to the keys, to do the fastest shower in Christendom (I often re-shower later), get some tea (I definitely re-tea later) and start writing.

Today for example, I made a note in OmniFocus that I would finish a short story I’ve been commissioned to do. Hello. This is not a short story. This is you and I talking. But it is me writing and that is the sole aim of getting up at this time.

It’s a simple aim but it works for me and I find it very difficult. So, nuts to it: today is my 250th day of getting up at 5am to write and I’m proud of myself.