A Simple Value System to Motivate Self-Control, Accountability, and Clarity of Goals

How prioritizing time as if it were Gold improved my self-discipline

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Self-discipline is one of the most challenging aspects of my life. Over the years, through books and podcasts, I had the opportunity to learn various aspects of self-discipline. On one hand, this did help me improve, on the other, it made me realize that reading is much easier than following advice. Getting pumped up by self-discipline content, I would tell myself: “From now on, perfect self-discipline. I will follow what I have read to the T”. Again, this is easier said than done!! Why?

• I find it hard to maintain enthusiasm when things get chaotic
• Being constantly aware of all the advice is overwhelming

Recently, I looked back on all the times when self-discipline came to me naturally and found that giving the highest priority to how I spend time in my value system, intrinsically drove me to follow all the advice.

Valuing time promotes self-discipline

This is a continuation of my previous article [1]. Here, I show how considering time as my most valuable asset naturally addresses the challenges of self-control, accountability, and developing clear goals.

1. Self-Control

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This is the fundamental self-discipline skill. I have noticed that lost self-control requires much more time and effort to regain. Exhaustion is the enemy of self-control. This is true, especially during the evenings when I habitually followed passive leisure activities by watching online videos. Despite knowing that I must keep updating my technical skills regularly to stay relevant, due to exhaustion, I could never make myself do it. Eventually, I became aware of the days and weeks passing without progress. This made me notice that I had already lost a lot of time that I valued. Moreover, awareness of wasted evenings broke my belief of not having enough time to study daily. The turning point came one evening when I switched to studying despite being tired and not understanding much of what I read. Over the years, I have finished many technical books by chipping away one hour every evening, helping me grow in my career.

2. Accountability

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Another very influential aspect of keeping us on track. This is fundamental to developing new habits because it creates real consequences of failing to follow up by losing something we value. I found that valuing time enables us to use our natural tendencies as accountability buddies.

• We are closer to ourselves than anyone else and can develop solutions based on firsthand experience.
• This accountability buddy is free.
• The accountability metric is already there: percentage of time spent productively.
• This metric is limited: We are all given 24 hours daily.
• This accountability buddy can keep us on our toes: As time keeps slipping away perpetually, getting distracted has a palpable cost.
• Finally, the most fundamental aspect of accountability is the sting that comes when we fail to follow through. We all naturally experience regret in becoming aware of wasted time: not giving our best effort, not taking that chance, not paying attention when the time was right, etc. This is expressed very well by the following quote:

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me
— William Shakespeare

I have found this sting of regret to be a great motivator for keeping me from repeating the same mistakes.

3. Clear goals

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I have noticed that not having clear goals increases the challenge of self-discipline, creating self-doubt that keeps me from giving full-hearted effort. By valuing time, I became aware of the time spent staying in my comfort zone of casually surfing medium articles and how it was preventing me from starting to write my own. This pushed me to brainstorm ideas and helped me to converge on a more specific goal of providing an engineering perspective of understanding and improving the human condition [2]. We all know that the path to the goal is not straightforward, but moving forward by creating specific incremental goals is time better spent than hesitation and avoidance. Valuing time will automatically lead you to this strategy.

Final thoughts

In my experience, time seems to have a lot of characteristics that we can use to our advantage by driving us to make good decisions and constructive progress in all situations. Moreover, it simplified practical aspects of self-discipline by enabling me to leverage my natural tendencies for guidance in the context of self-discipline.

References
[1] https://medium.com/new-writers-welcome/single-most-powerful-way-to-drive-self-discipline-d975c854f45c
[2] https://medium.com/@kpgemusha/how-to-handle-frustration-41f9aacc2b07

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