How to Maintain Discipline in your 20’s.
When starting a business or working at a job in your 20s, one will face many challenges that will seem daunting or insurmountable. We might want to give up, quit, and worst of all, accept the lie that “we are not good enough”; however, like every problem we have faced throughout our life, we ended up where we are today.
When interviewing business owners, who had started their company in their early 20s, about the challenges they faced early on in their career, I found that there were many parallels. The most mentioned problem between all of these entrepreneurs was maintaining discipline.
Discipline
Undoubtedly, discipline is one of the hardest attributes people in their 20s will have to adopt when starting their own business or starting a job. Maintaining a strong work ethic at the same level we had when we first started, consistently, is not something that comes naturally for most. It is a skill people have to make a conscious effort for. Just as there are days when we’re productive and learning, there will be days that we will draw back to our old habits and procrastinate.
So, how do we overcome the struggles that set us back? And how do we maintain our initial discipline over a long period of time?
Setting Goals
First of all, in order to help maintain focus and discipline, it is of utmost importantance to hold oneself accountable for successes, failures, and performances. A great way to hold oneself accountable is to create SMART goals. These are goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.
It is important that our goals contain these attributes. Specificity helps with clarity, attainability helps with belief, and deadlines helps with urgency. The combination of clarity, belief, and urgency is extremely powerful, and the key to meeting our goals.
Another great tip is to create sub-goals. For example, when we write our end goal of making, let’s say… $75,000 in profit this year, create sub-goals stating how much we need to make daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly in order to achieve the end-goal. This process is called chunking, and it is vital for successfully accomplishing goals.
Lastly, as we start hitting our goals, it is very important to reward oneself. This will motivate one to accomplish the next goal and will build accountability for when we do not reach them.
Daily Efficiency
Removing daily routines and tasks that drain brain power, and consume energy and time will also help us maintain discipline. A good way to do this is to track our daily routine from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep. This helps to find any activities that are not promoting a healthy and productive lifestyle.
By doing so, we’ll soon notice how we are spending hours on our phones checking emails, messages, unimportant calls, and social media, or how we’re watching too much TV. We’ll even notice how something as small as picking out something to wear or eat can take a long time. These actions steal our focus from our priorities and keep us from being productive and accomplishing our goals.
When we are finally aware of these productivity-killing activities, there are many ways we can change the processes. Here are some of the tricks that help maintain discipline:
Mise En Place
Mise En Place is a culinary term that translates to “set up” or “everything in its place”. It also translates perfectly from the kitchen to our everyday life. The process that has made cooking extremely efficient through preparation and organization can be used to make our morning routine decision-free and efficient.
Every night, before we go to bed, we should prepare our breakfast, lay out our outfit, and have everything in our bag ready for work, so that we’re prepared to tackle the day the next morning. Removing these decision making tasks will save brain power and energy so that we can focus on our priorities.
Mise En Place can be applied at work as well. Before we head home from a long day at work, make sure everything, especially our tools, are where they need to be for the next day. This saves us from searching and digging around at work the next morning.
By tracking our routine, we’ll begin to notice the inefficiencies, and this will help us know what to prepare for the night before.
Screen Time
We all fall victims to our screens. Our phones are sacred to us. We can sometimes forget to call our family or friends, pick up the groceries, or perform any task, but we never forget our phone. This is positive in some ways, as it is our form of communication with everyone else, but in reality, our phones are more of a productivity killer than anything else. In order to maintain discipline, we must learn how to control ourselves and put our phone down in order to accomplish what we want and need. So here are some ways that we can control our urge to pick up our phone throughout the day:
- Look at your phone ONLY to turn off the alarm in the morning.
Make a concious effort to turn the alarm off and nothing else. Also, add a few minutes of meditation and breathing before you get up in order to wake up refreshed, concentrated, and productive.
- Allocate times for reading and responding to emails and calls.
Allocate designated times throughout the day to check your email, missed calls, and other notifications. Respect the times that you have set and do not read or respond to the emails unless it is of utmost importance.
- Use the Screen Time feature on your phone to reduce time spent on apps.
This is a new feature on the iPhone, and it has been great for me and so many others. Go to Settings, then Screen Time to set it up. It will help limit your use of social media and other applications in order to boost productivity.
There is so much to becoming more productive through changing our habits and routines, but the most important characteristics for actually changing is self-awareness, accountability, and discipline.
For more guidance on maintaining discipline, read the HBR article How To Spend the First 10 Minutes of Your Day by Ron Friedman.
Remove Anchors
Lastly, the most important and hardest thing to do to maintain discipline is to remove the people and things from our life that are holding us back. No matter how much we have invested into them, let them go for our own benefit and their benefit as well. I know it is hard to let go of something or someone we’ve held on to dearly for so long, but everything we have invested is a sunk cost; if friendships and relationships have costed us our productivity and happiness, don’t hold on to them and incur more individual costs. What we’ve invested in them is in the past, and the only thing we can change is how much more of our dreams and happiness we spend on them going forward.
Now, if they’re great friends but just not on the same page, we don’t have to remove them from our life entirely, just don’t keep them as our everyday and inner circle of friends. Make sure we reserve those spots with people that will only help us improve and grow in every aspect.
I know that I may sound like a broken record, but surrounding onerself with like-minded people will help us stay focused on our goals and dreams. The best decision I’ve made was to surround myself with other creatives, brand strategists, and brand developers through The Futur Pro Group. It has helped me scale my goals and my agency, Overscore. Most importantly, it’s helped me maintain discipline and grow the drive I had when I first started designing.
Big thank you to Chris Do, Brian Harper, and Jay Dugan for all the help and mentorship.
