The Science of Self

It’s not that self-discipline, habitualized behaviors, and intentional and analytical thinking are useless endeavors. No, these are some of the best changes you can make to your life. But you won’t b…

The truth is that to-do lists often don’t take context into account. Q1 and Q2 thinking solves that problem by forcing you to understand the difference between urgent and important. Most people don’t…

Focus on a few main principles for lasting motivation: visualizing in detail our goal, getting comfortable with being uncomfortable, and allowing our future selves to advise and guide our present sel…

Another way to improve your to-do list is by using categories: immediate attention, in progress, follow-ups, upcoming, and ideas. This allows you to again sort by priority and make sure that you are …

The irony is that simply having a little faith in yourself will start to shift things for you! As we’ve seen, gratitude, responsibility, honesty and allowing others to hold you accountable are great …

Focus on a few main principles for lasting motivation. These include not waiting for a right time, taking baby steps, working from intrinsic motivation, avoid temptation outright, cutting distraction…

A to-do list hastily written on a Post-It might be one of the most ubiquitous tools for self-discipline and avoiding procrastination. It works on our psychology by manipulating dopamine, and this is …

• Have a healthy attitude toward control—though there are things in life we never have control over, we are always in charge of our own reactions and actions. Try the Stoic exercise to help you ident…

For example, every day you could commit to walking for thirty minutes. You’re not committing to running a marathon or losing fifty pounds. All you have to focus on each day is walking thirty minutes,…

Unscheduling is the radical opposite because it takes the focus off of work. In some ways, it is more realistic, because it dictates that you fill in your schedule with all of your nonnegotiables and…

Have a healthy attitude toward control—though there are things in life we never have control over, we are always in charge of our own reactions and actions. Try the Stoic exercise to help you identi…

• This kind of self-reflection allows you to see exactly what areas you need to work on and see whether your efforts are resulting in progress.

• Depending on which aspects you identify as und…

• A schedule can be just a schedule in the way that a hammer can be just a hammer. But why not use it to its greatest potential instead of as something you only take out for passive purposes? Schedul…

• Willpower is a limited resource that can get depleted on the many tiny stressors and tensions of daily life. Lower your overall life stress and you free up more mental bandwidth to spend on what…

Working with the limitations of your own brain requires an honest appraisal of where you are and how you’re functioning. Make it a habit to routinely assess yourself on the following aspects, on a sc…

The second set of instructions comes from Hungarian writer Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi and his flow theory. Flow is about moving and working effortlessly, to the point that you lose track of time and are…

Self-discipline is a means to reject the traits of reaction and retreat. It gives you something to actively work on every day and forces you to make decisions and take actions based on what you reall…

We’ve gone through some of the psychological beasts that underlie the feeling of “lazy” and it turns out that we are beset by barriers, rather than a preference to be sloths. So what can we do with t…