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In a comment to my post about the benefits of working from home, someone pointed out that one of the great difficulties of working from home is self-discipline, and asked how I approached that problem. That’s a very good question, and one that I myself struggle with sometimes, so I think it deserves a post of its own.

My own character is easily distracted. I don’t count myself as having a lot of self-discipline. Mostly, I’ll just do what I want and what I must. So anything that falls in the grey area of what I “should do” is likely to be missed. This obviously presents some problems when working from home, because now the area of what I “must” do has shrunk, and the variety of distractions available has ballooned up. If I don’t do anything about it, I end up doing only what I want. That’s nice, but it’s not always productive.

Because of my distractible nature, I’ve had to find many tricks to make myself do the work I should do. I don’t believe in constant application of willpower. As Steve Pavlina points out in one of his articles, raw willpower is something to be applied in moderation. It only works to set up conditions that make the desired behaviour the natural default choice, rather than as a daily endeavour. If your plan involves anyone making a daily effort of will, it is almost certainly doomed.

I think it’s fair to say of most people that they’ll rarely have trouble doing what they want to do. Similarly, they’ll typically manage to do what they must do. The high-level solution is clear: anything that you should do but feel like you might “forget” must be transformed into a want or a must.

Planning

One of my managers back in the corporate world put it very succinctly when he said that we needed to set up a “series of cliffs to fall off” so that the team would get things done. The problem with most really important tasks is they are fairly long-term things. They can be safely ignored for months with no apparent repercussions. Of course, when the Grand Canyon cliff finally looms up, it’s too late, and you fall, hard, with no way to possibly save the day, even with a short burst of amazing work.

This is one of the main reasons why plans are useful. They break down the long journey into many much smaller ones, each of which is a mini-cliff that you can fall off. Because nobody likes to fall off cliffs, people will work to meet the plan. So long as the plan is sound, this should ensure if not success, at least a good stab at getting pretty close to success.

In my view, good planning turns a should into both a must and a want. Depending on the form of your internal motivation, and on how public the plan is, you’ll either:

• feel compelled not to miss out on your obligations by your own sense of self-respect, or
• not want to lose face by failing to meet your commitments to others.

In its simplest form, you can have a “daily plan” - basically a task list. In its most complex form, a plan can span a very long time and be composed of many different thrusts. Be careful not too make your plan either too detailed or too high-level. The aim of what I would call a “work plan” is to break tasks down into chunks that last no more than 5 days and no less than half a day.

Anything less detailed doesn’t create enough cliffs to fall off. Anything more detailed will probably change on a daily basis, and so is only suitable for task lists, not for long-term planning.

Also, be aware that plans do change over time, and be willing to put in some work to track progress against the plan, as well as maintain the plan to make sure it reflects reality. A plan that’s fallen by the wayside and is ignored is useless.

External commitments

I’m not a morning person, yet in four years of working in the corporate world, I never missed a single meeting because of arriving late at work. I did arrive late on occasion (generally on Friday morning after a liver-punishing event the night before), but never if there was a meeting I needed to be present at.

In my last year, I woke up at 4am every weekday for a very extended period, because there was no other time that I could work, and I had made a commitment to my business partner and to myself to doing this work and communicating regular progress.

Similarly, since I quit, I’ve had morning meetings with our outsourcing company in Pakistan, often at 7am. Have I ever missed one of these meetings? Never.

The point I’m making is that I hate breaking my external commitments. I’m willing to bet that most people are like this too. Even those who regularly do break their commitments feel bad about it. Making external commitments is a great way to discipline yourself into getting things done without having to apply willpower on a daily basis. Basically, it allows you to turn a should into a must.

Visualising your goals

Finally, there’s one last method which I’d like to describe, which allows you to turn your should into a want. It’s fairly simple and easy to apply - only takes a few minutes.

Before you start your day, draw up a task list of what you’d like to achieve this day. Most likely, tasks will fall largely into two categories: things that will produce a positive return if done, and things that will produce a negative return if not done.

Go through these tasks, one by one, and for each of them spend a small amount of time (at least twenty seconds or so) visualising the reason for this task. If it’s a positive task, visualise how much better things will look if you do it. If it’s a negative task, visualise how much worse things will look if you don’t do it. Hold that picture in your head and make it more vivid, more important. Mentally tie it to the task that you’re considering.

There, you’re done. Now what will happen is that you’ll want to do these tasks much more strongly. There’s no external motivation involved. You’re simply using a little bit of very basic self-hypnosis to make yourself care much more about the task at hand. Try it, and you’ll be amazed at how well it works.

Final comments

There’s one final note I must add here. This may not apply to everyone, but definitely applies to me.

While I do reasonably often find myself being distracted from what I’m supposed to be doing, generally, that only tends to become a problem when what I’m “supposed” to be doing is not actually what I should be doing. So whenever I find myself having a lot of difficulty in getting something done, I try to take a step back and ask myself “is this worth doing? am I doing the right thing? is there a deeper problem that’s causing me to be demotivated?”

Quite often, feeling demotivated (and hence highly distracted) is a message from my subconscious that there’s some problem that I haven’t attended to and that’s rendering all the work I’m doing completely pointless. I find it very difficult to do work I believe to be pointless, even subconsciously. So if the tricks above are failing you and there are just “too many distractions”, ask yourself - why are you demotivated? Solving that problem might give you a much bigger motivation boost than any other trick.