Monday mornings are never easy, but once you get into the groove it can feel great to be positive about everything you’re going to achieve with your new week. You’ve had the weekend to process the successes and challenges of the week gone by, and perhaps set yourself some new goals and strategies to help you excel.
While this is a great start, it can all come to naught if your willpower does not match your good intentions. By Tuesday afternoon, it becomes easier to take shortcuts with your work, clock out the moment five o’clock rolls around, and just do the bare minimum to keep your head above water.
So if you want to make the most of that Monday morning manic feeling, you need to employ some specific techniques to discipline yourself. A great one to start with is to visualize the results of your good efforts. Remind yourself constantly what the eventual rewards will be for all this slog, and your brain will respond by giving you a bit more oomph.
If there’s a particular part of your job that tends to derail your flow, something that you really don’t enjoy doing, try pairing it with something more pleasant and you may find yourself more willing to get right on with it instead of procrastinating. Ask your boss if you can take your laptop to a café when you need to update your spreadsheets, or buy yourself a fancy coffee to drink whenever you have to make a difficult call from the office. Do this regularly enough, and you will soon come to connect these unpleasant parts of your job with the nice things you get to do while working on them.
And if you find that working from home means you’re constantly drifting from your ideal work schedule, try finding a co-working space to take your computer. Surrounding yourself with driven people can actually make you more driven; you can encourage each other and watch out for each other’s lazy habits, arresting them before they become another bout of procrastination.
This new guide to improving your self-discipline is packed with such tips. Apply these ideas to your workflow, and you are sure to see your professionalism remain at its peak from Monday through to Friday.
14 Ways to Improve Your Self-Discipline, courtesy of CashNetUSA
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