{"id":792,"date":"2015-11-26T06:15:37","date_gmt":"2015-11-26T11:15:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/bearz\/?p=792"},"modified":"2015-11-26T06:15:37","modified_gmt":"2015-11-26T11:15:37","slug":"discipline","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/bearz\/discipline\/","title":{"rendered":"Discipline"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A few weeks ago, I was visiting a lab at my undergrad university.  On one of the walls in the lab was a sign.  The sign read:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Don&#8217;t rely on motivation for anything. It is fleeting and unreliable. Discipline, however, is unyielding. Force yourself to follow through. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Since then, I&#8217;ve been thinking a lot about that sign and its message.  As far as Bearz Repeating goes, this month has been dreadful: I&#8217;ve written one post when I should have finished four, and that one was both late and fairly content-light.  Thinking back on the past month, it&#8217;s clear that I&#8217;ve been running low on motivation this November, and that I&#8217;ve lacked the discipline to make up for it.<\/p>\n<p>So what&#8217;s the solution?  To be honest, I don&#8217;t fully know.  But I think this post is a good start.  It&#8217;s admitting that I&#8217;ve screwed up, but also giving myself permission to move on.  That doesn&#8217;t mean I have to be happy about the fact that I didn&#8217;t deliver on my promises to you, my readers.  But I can&#8217;t change the past.  Acknowledging that it happened, and figuring out how to improve, are far better than avoiding the truth.  (It turns out there&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/lifehacker.com\/5912713\/want-to-stop-procrastinating--just-forgive-yourself\">science behind this<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<p>Plus, writing feels good.  Reminding myself of that is important, too &#8212; even though this emotion falls under the category of motivation, rather than real discipline.  Even so, in spite of its somewhat difficult content, I&#8217;ve enjoyed writing this article.  For the first time in a while, I have more thoughts and more words than I need, which means I get to select and deploy only the best, choicest sentences and ideas, saving the others for later, in a post where they are better suited.  This is an enviable place to be in, and it makes me very excited for the future.<\/p>\n<p>For now, my focus is building better discipline.  If you have suggestions about this, let me know!  I&#8217;m all ears.<\/p>\n<p><p><img  style='float:right'  class='lems-mtg-cardimg' src='http:\/\/gatherer.wizards.com\/Handlers\/Image.ashx?size=small&type=card&name=Mental Discipline'><\/p>Having reflected on my own habits, one strategy I want to employ is focusing on particular projects on certain days of the week &#8212; and actually maintaining that schedule consistently.  In spite of writing about it earlier, I haven&#8217;t been doing a great job at separating <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/bearz\/task-mastery\/\">urgent tasks from important ones<\/a>.  That&#8217;s resulted in my choice of what to work on being fairly haphazard and highly dependent on what happens to have my attention at the moment.  While this sort of &#8220;bursty&#8221; work pattern is acceptable for some projects, it&#8217;s not sustainable in the long-term.  It also makes it difficult to predict when I&#8217;ll finish a project, and it doesn&#8217;t work well for tasks with strict deadlines (like Bearz Repeating).<\/p>\n<p>So with that in mind, I&#8217;m re-committing to the goal of finishing Bearz Repeating before the Wednesday deadline &#8212; on Mondays, specifically.  Even though I&#8217;m apprehensive about failing again, it feels good to set a specific goal I can work towards.  So I&#8217;m already looking forward to this coming Monday.  And if you know me on Facebook, feel free to be my &#8220;accountabili-buddy&#8221; and ask me how things are going!<\/p>\n<p>See you Wednesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t rely on motivation for anything. It is fleeting and unreliable. Discipline, however, is unyielding. Force yourself to follow through.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"language":[],"class_list":["post-792","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/bearz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/bearz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/bearz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/bearz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/63"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/bearz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=792"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/bearz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":797,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/bearz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792\/revisions\/797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/bearz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/bearz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/bearz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=792"},{"taxonomy":"language","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/bearz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/language?post=792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}