Day 617: Still have discipline issues

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Despite the fact that I’ve kept up my writing streak for over 90 days now, I’m still woefully lacking in discipline in other areas of my life, which is rather frustrating. I suppose I had hoped that if I can develop discipline in one area, then the discipline would come easier in other areas.

It does help that I have a daily checklist of things to accomplish each day. I have to check off my Japanese language study, my writing streak, and my blocking streak. I don’t have streaks going, but I also have boxes to check off for checking email, reading Regency novels to keep my head in the language of the time period, reading nonfiction for research, and also reading my Bible every day. I also have a box to check off for doing one task from my writing-related business To Do list, and also a box for doing 30 minutes updating my book catalog (it’s a huge project because it’s incomplete and out of date).

I don’t always check off on reading nonfiction for research, or doing a writing-related business task, or updating my book catalog. But lately I’ve been pretty good about checking off the other boxes. And it feels really good when I’ve been able to check off all the boxes for the day.

But last night I went to bed WAY too late because I didn’t have the discipline to go to bed on time. My bedtime has really been a difficult thing for me to keep at the same time every day. And when I go to bed late, then I get up late and get a late start on work.

So since my checkboxes have been working (mostly), I decided to also start a checkbox for my bedtime. It really seems kind of silly, but I don’t know what else I can do to develop more discipline in this area. It wouldn’t be something I bother about except that my wildly fluctuating bedtimes are affecting my work productivity, and I can’t stand that!

I also know that these checkboxes only work for me because of my achievement-based personality. That means that, for some weird reason, checking off those boxes causes my brain to fire off some dopamine.

But even though the checkboxes sound kind of dumb, I’m still hopeful they’ll work. I mean, I didn’t expect the streak thing to work and it’s been absolutely fantastic for improving my productivity and decreasing my stress levels. So I’ll give this a shot and hopefully have more discipline when it comes to bedtimes.

Regency series:

Editing: Time spent: 9 minutes

Writing: Time spent: 1 hour, 16 minutes

Writing: Total number of words: 710 words

Writing streak: 96 days

Blocking: time spent: 1 hour, 49 minutes

Blocking streak: 90 days

Hawaii series:

Outlining: time spent: 54 minutes

\My takeaway for today: Nothing else has worked, so I’m trying checkboxes to try to have the discipline to go to bed on time.

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