Discover the power of discipline and the best apps to keep you on track and earning more!
In today’s world of social media, we get distracted incredibly easily. With the help of TikTok and Instagram reels, we’ve become creatures with an attention span of less than a couple of minutes, and more and more often, you hear about people here and there complaining about having to watch a 5-minute-long video, calling it ‘long’.
A video that lasts more than an average reel is nowadays considered long. Let that absorb for a second. People’s minds have become so littered that any normal activity that doesn’t provide easy dopamine seems frustrating and tedious. Sure, cheap dopamine from a 15-second TikTok does feel great for a bit, but only in the short-term perspective. As soon as you scroll, that feeling is gone, and you’re left lazy and weak, with nothing but a constant hunger for more stupid, useless information that you’ll likely forget in less than a minute.
For this exact reason, we must implement and start practicing discipline in our lives as early as possible. A force of habit and self-control, discipline helps us improve our work performance, better our relationships, and generally achieve any goal we set for ourselves. Many things are widely known to be connected to creating self-discipline and helping you improve your organisational skills, one of the most popular ones being the famous To-Do List. With the amount of information that passes through us daily, it is effortless to forget a comment or a task without taking note of it somewhere. Of course, you can always say - oh, I’ll just put a few words down on one of those sticky pads and attach it to my workplace - and while we do agree to some extent, aren’t you tired of having your laptop and table fully covered in those neon notes? It's kind of straining the eyes if you ask me.
The solution we are talking about is a list containing important errands you must complete by the end of the day. At least once, try writing down everything you ideally have to finish today, sorting the tasks from most important to least important. Then, as you go along your day, tick off the boxes as soon as you get something done. You’ll see how, in no time, you will significantly reduce your anxiety and slowly grow confident in your organisational skills. Finally, it will be time to forget about all the unnecessary stress of thinking you forgot to do something meaningful - all of your tasks will be neatly listed in your phone’s notes or your notebook, ready for you to go through them whenever you’d like to reassure yourself once again that you’re staying on top of your work.
We’ve prepared a selection of a few apps and websites that can be of great help to you in planning and organising your work:
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Todoist https://todoist.com/
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The app’s language recognition will automatically filter anything typed into the task field.
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tasks automatically sorted by their deadlines to prioritise the most important
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personal, work, and team tasks all visible in one space
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Trello https://trello.com/
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keeps all tasks of all team members in the same place
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It is easy to track who has anything outstanding that is yet to be completed
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sorts cards by categories “to-do”, “doing”, or “done” to track each task’s progress
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Remember the Milk https://www.rememberthemilk.com/
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Tasks can be filled with details such as due date, priority, repeat, tags and more
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allows you to share your personal lists with selective people
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reminds you of your tasks by email, text, Twitter and mobile apps
Still, with all these tips and tricks on achieving good self-discipline and staying organised, it is also crucial to keep your work/life balance and maintain it in mind. Keeping up to date with your work is always good, but when given too many responsibilities and too little time, you risk overworking yourself and ultimately burning out. If that happens, all the hard work and effort you’ve put in so far will be pretty much useless as you will exhaust yourself mentally to the point where you won’t care about anything anymore, let alone work progress. To prevent this from happening, it is necessary to take certain steps to ensure your work doesn’t damage your personal life and health. Take frequent breaks and give yourself small rewards when working on a long and demanding project. Allocate some time to exercise and, most importantly, spend time with your loved ones. Make it your mission always to remember that all of your work achievements are worth nothing if you don’t have your friends or family to discuss and celebrate them with, and allocate the time to your work and personal life accordingly with where your true priorities lie.
