Cal Newport's articles are always interesting to read, but I find them to be less than encouraging. It's not that the advice isn't sound -- it's just that his recommendations generally require the reader to be extremely self-disciplined. I am constantly trying to practice this, but in truth I'm still all over the map. I do poorly in courses where I'm expected to be constantly involved in little incremental pieces (like the course I'm taking in Agile), and I tend to work rather well doing large chunks at once.
Most days I can't bring myself to do real, boring, challenging-but-in-a-sucky-way work. Then I'll realize I'm weeks behind and I'll hammer out everything I need to do in a couple of days. I had a twelve-week internship over the summer, and when it was almost over and I still wanted to get things done, I spent about sixteen hours a day in my office for a week. The reviews of the end result were fantastic.
I am somewhat under the impression that there are some people in the world who are great organizers, who have some record of everything they've committed to and planned for, and that I will never be one of those people.
Being in similar situation myself, I think it's not self-discipline. It's just that deep inside you don't see the point. Although sometimes extrinsic motivation becomes strong enough that you hammer things out, you're not generally interested in doing these.
What is needed here IMO is somewhat opposite of self-discipline.
You don't make something important or interesting by thinking that it's important. It must naturally be important for you, you need to be intrinsically interested in this. That state of affairs we normally don't verbalise or contemplate on.
I doubt that you can come to that with self-discipline. It must be something else. You need to trick yourself.
Possible ways might be introducing some short-term psychological reward, or—better—learning to enjoy the process. My opinion is that some high-achieving people might actually use some psychological tricks like these without knowing about it.
Thanks for the link. "Build habits for consistency" is exactly they way I view. I believed strongly in "discipline" for a long time, but never built any strong habits to reinforce what end goal or lifestyle I was trying to attain. Inevitably I would build this heavy daily schedule, work incredibly hard for a period of time, and then just completely break down from exhaustion. Afterwards I would feel guilty about not being able to accomplish even small portions of my daily schedule and then eventually give up all together.
Working hard is admirable; but, when you don't have the capacity to do so, you have to build that capacity first.
You raise an interesting point, and I agree that motivation is largely about what's important to me. This is likely an overgeneralization on my part, but I see life as full of things that I will have to do which don't really have a point. At least all the way through college it's been that way, always the hope that there's less bullshit at the next level and always the disappointment.
If you think about it long enough, it inevitably turns out that nothing really matters.
The bad part is that it's technically correct[0]. The good part is that once you know it, you have the advantage. Things stop being divided into things that have a point and those that don't. Hence your life stops being full of unimportant things, as ultimately they're all equally significant (or insignificant).
After that, my thinking usually goes the following order: 1) Why do anything at all in such circumstances, life has no point, etc. 2) Wait, I still might as well enjoy the process.
For some reason, the latter normally looks superior (if I'm in good shape), so I'm trying to learn to enjoy the process. Turns out it's not as simple as doing what is pleasant. For me, it's pleasant to drink beer and eat junk food, but it hurts the enjoyment part in the long run. The trick is more about ‘loving what you do’. I'm not really there yet.
I'm a dropout. I guess if I had come to above reasoning back then, I would probably finish.
Most days I can't bring myself to do real, boring, challenging-but-in-a-sucky-way work. Then I'll realize I'm weeks behind and I'll hammer out everything I need to do in a couple of days. I had a twelve-week internship over the summer, and when it was almost over and I still wanted to get things done, I spent about sixteen hours a day in my office for a week. The reviews of the end result were fantastic.
I am somewhat under the impression that there are some people in the world who are great organizers, who have some record of everything they've committed to and planned for, and that I will never be one of those people.