10 Ways to Remain Self-Disciplined Using Technology

Self-discipline is the key to personal and professional success. You can do that better using technology. Find out how!

​​​​​​Self-discipline refers to the willpower to control yourself. Whether you want to be more productive in your professional life or wish to build healthy habits in your personal life, self-discipline can play a vital role in both.

However, becoming self-disciplined isn’t hard. All it needs is the appropriate use of technology and effort from your end.

1. Start a Day by Completing Small Tasks on Time

The first step towards being self-disciplined is to start small. There’s no point setting up impossible goals. Instead, keep your targets small but achievable. That'll help you complete bigger targets later.

For the first week, pick some small habits. Once you can successfully complete them, don't hesitate to move towards bigger goals. Remember The Milk is a to-do list app that you can utilize to remember the tasks you want to perform in the morning. This tool will remind you to do your scheduled tasks using the notification feature of this app. It also lets you prioritize the tasks and use tags.

2. Find Out the Purpose Behind Each Task

Every task you perform to become more disciplined has a bigger objective. When you know the actual goals aligned behind, you will get more motivated to complete it.

You may not want to quit smoking. However, you’ll be able to quit it if you know that a smoke-free lifestyle will have a positive impact on your lungs, heart, and blood pressure.

Follow the OKR method to find out objectives and the initiatives you should take to reach those goals. Perdoo is an OKR app that will help you manage your personal productivity goals. You can track and visualize the objectives and get inspiration to become disciplined.

3. Stay Away From Distractions and Stop Procrastinating

Your procrastination and distraction habits can prevent you from being disciplined. Whether you’re at home or at the office, avoid distractions at any cost to develop good habits.

To avoid procrastination, you can follow strategies like giving yourself a fake deadline, rewarding yourself after finishing the task in time, dividing the task into small blocks, etc.

Cold Turkey is a focus app that you can use to regulate the use of websites. This app also lets you whitelist vital websites and block the rest.

4. Discover Actions That Make You Undisciplined

There’ll always be some actions that lure you into becoming undisciplined. It could be colleagues who invite you to have unhealthy snacks after office hours or YouTube playlists you watch, causing sleep deprivation.

You need to be careful about them and try to avoid them at any cost. Find out the pattern and put yourself into situations that’ll force you into self-discipline.

5. Meditate Regularly to Remove Temptations

Temptations are everywhere—sometimes, it’s the social media notification coming from the smartphone. Or it could be the cookie jar you kept near the workplace. All these will tempt you to skip self-discipline.

To avoid this situation, make sure to have fewer temptations around you. Keep your phone in silent mode during deep work. Stop meeting your smoker friend if you’re trying to quit smoking. Don’t keep any food near your workspace.

Apart from these, practice meditation to keep your mind focused and peaceful. Meditation app Insight Timer can help you achieve peace of mind with thousands of free guided meditations.

6. Develop Productive and Healthy Habits

You may want to grow healthy and useful habits to have a disciplined life. Focus on doing one task every day until it becomes a habit, then, move on to the next one. It may sound daunting, but getting a friend, coach, or trainer to accompany you on the habit-building journey.

If you don’t have a habit partner, you can take help from any habit-building app. Habitify is a personal habit-building assistant for developing healthy habits and tracking them. Besides its huge list of habits, you can also add any unlisted habits and track them using suitable metrics.

Related: How to Track and Build Your Habits Using Habitify

7. Interact With Positive People for Motivation

We all have that one relative or colleague who does nothing except demotivate. To have a self-disciplined life, you need to cut that person from your life, or at least stay away from them as far as possible.

All you need now is to surround yourself with positive people who can motivate you to form habits for self-discipline. For inspiration, you can talk to your friends and colleagues who have a disciplined life or successfully grew good habits in recent times.

You can join relevant Discord channels to interact with motivating and positive people from all over the world.

8. Set Goals and Work to Achieve Them

Find out the areas where you need improvement and set goals accordingly. Thus, your goals will be realistic and help you achieve a disciplined life.

Have a proper outline with an objective and timeline to get motivated to achieve your goals. You can also take help from goal-setting apps like Joe’s Goals. This free app allows you to set professional and personal goals for a better life.

9. Practice Self Care

To become self-disciplined, you don’t have to deprive yourself of happy moments. You need to take care of your physical and mental health side by side to have a healthy lifestyle. Have a fixed time for your professional life, so that you can spend enough time to develop personal relationships.

A calendar app will come in handy as it lets you arrange your schedules properly. Google Calendar is a free app that lets you organize your office work and meetings so that you can get enough time to pursue your hobbies.

10. Track Progress and Reward Yourself

You need to monitor your progress to understand whether you have succeeded to stay on track for becoming a disciplined person. You can set measurable goals and track after one week to see how well you did. Also, don’t forget to reward yourself after reaching each small milestone.

If you have slept and woke up in time for two weeks, it’s okay to go to sleep late once during weekends.

You can use MeisterTask to create your personalized board where you can enlist all the tasks and habits. This flexible tool lets you add and organize unlimited tasks for keeping track of their progress.

Positively Regulate Your Behavior

The above-mentioned points help you to utilize technology in every stage of self-discipline. You can easily plan your approach by implementing some of these, depending on your work.

By regulating what you do and how you do it with strong determination, you can efficiently balance work and personal life.

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