This post is a summary of some of my modus operandi when dealing with stuff that requires discipline or that you're obliged to deal against your will.

These tips may not work for you, and that's completely fine! Each person's mind works in a certain way.

Let's start!

Get rid of useless distractions on social media

Disclaimer: I'm not saying that you need to go completely offline when you're working on something important (although that works for some people).

My point here is simple: we see a lot of shit on internet these days. You probably have like 300 friends on Facebook and 90% of them spends their days posting fake news, bad photos of their ugly faces, dated memes and political crap.

This kind of stuff is only a waste of your time and sanity.

You don't need to unfriend people who does this. Simply go to their profile and unfollow them (you can also do that straight from a post of the person). Doing so will not stop being friends with them in the network.

The same can be achieved with the "mute" function of twitter.

With Facebook, I also went a step further: I got this amazing browser extension that simply hides any of those "John Doe commented on this" and "Jane Doe was mentioned on this" from your newsfeed. Seriously, I don't need to get every crappy post the mother of some friend of mine on my screen just 'cause she mentioned him in a cat photo.

At the time I published this post, this extension is available for both Chrome and Safari (but there’s probably a similar one for other browsers). Unfortunately, I don’t know any alternative for mobile (if you do so, please leave a comment!).

Another great tip is to mute chat groups that are too noisy or that you are a member “just because” (and this also includes work chat groups).

After this, your social media experience will be a lot cleaner and less stressfull :)

Create a routine

This is a hard one, but give it a change. It's something that works amazingly well to make you do stuff that you're not exactly excited to do, like go to the gym or work on your thesis for college.

At first, it's a struggle to get motivated to do that task but, with time, you'll don't need to "find" that motivation everyday since your mind will simply think "ok, now it's that time of the day when I have to do X".

To make sure you're following the routine you stablished, a good thing to do is…

Add reminders for everything

Let's face it: you probably has a lot of things to do and you can probably list me a hole bunch of them. But do you actually remember that you have to do X when you actually need to do it?

Even if you spend your hole day facing a clock, you'll still have that moments of "damn, I should've done X thirty minutes ago!".

And that's why I add a reminder for almost everything. Need to talk with someone about some topic? There's a reminder for that. Gotta pay some bill? There's a reminder for that. And so on and so forth.

For managing reminders, I use the native Reminders app from macOS since it supports natural language input. So I can easly add a reminder like "Remember to buy milk tomorrow at 8pm" and ta-da! There's a reminder for that™. The "easiness" of adding new reminders is a killer feature and encourages you to use the app instead of thinking "nah, it's too hard to add this simple reminder".

Other good options are Google Keep and Google Calendar/Agenda. They're pretty straightforward and available on a whole bunch of platforms.

With e-mails, I usually use the snooze feature that some e-mail clients today have. With this, I can reeschedule e-mails to disappear from my inbox until the time I should really deal with them, ensuring that I'll not let that important e-mail opened at my inbox forever and forgotten. Inbox by Google and Polymail support this feature.

With this in mind, you'll not waste your time wondering "hmmm, I think I forgot something…" and certainly not actually forgetting something!

Deal with quick and/or small stuff as soon as possible

This one is kind of a philosophy and comes from a whole bunch of self-organizing books but hey, it actually is a good tip!

Assuming you have a whole bunch of things to do in your "pile" of things to do, deal with the ones you can deal in two to five minutes as soon as you have time.

This way you'll certainly not forget about them (they're so small that you'll probably not even care to add a reminder for it if you're in a lazy mood). You also won't carry the burden of having to deal with them for the rest of your day (you know, sometimes you just remember that you have to reply THAT e-mail and think: "oh shit, THAT e-mail. Oh man, I hate myself").

Face it and deal with small shit right away. You'll thank yourself later.