Self-discipline is an ability that’s always going to be needed during your life. When you have to wake up to go to school or work, you’re using your self-discipline to avoid being late. Whenever you have something planned and don’t feel like doing it, it takes some discipline not to procrastinate on the task.

People are becoming successful after massive amounts of efforts to sustain their discipline. Distractions are all over the place, and they bother us; they make us unproductive, and they need to be eliminated as quickly as possible.

When you’re a student, you have to learn a lot of information. During this process, you come across different setbacks, overwhelming times, and challenges. Ignoring them isn’t a good solution; therefore choosing to go on a different mindset route is the key to developing better cognitive skills (memory, structuring ideas, quick thinking).

Here’s how learning is quite difficult:

a) Internal Issues
Some people can’t retain much information in short periods of time. They need longer times to process what they’re reading and have a tougher time with structuring their ideas.

b) External Issues
Focus and time; these are the most important factors that can influence your learning productivity. If you manage to keep your attention on one thing and spend enough time perfecting it, you’ll come up with great results.

Fortunately, the self-discipline skill can fix both of these issues. That is why I emphasize again: develop your self-discipline aptitudes and become an efficient and fast learner.

Here’s how you can develop self-discipline skills. Remember, without taking action, these ideas are worthless, so you’d better save yourself some time and stop reading this article. If you’re truly serious about your personal development, pay close attention and follow these strategies:

1. Make Specific, Actionable, and Accomplishable Goals

When you’re planning to build your self-discipline, you’re basically looking to stay committed to something that you’ve previously planned. That’s why you need goals before even thinking of focusing on the discipline aspect. Check out this awesome resource that explains why setting goals is important for our success.

Take a piece of paper and start brainstorming. You should choose one big goal according to your deepest wishes. If you want to understand a complicated concept from your computer engineering classes, you should write down what exactly you want to be able to do. It doesn’t matter if it’s huge, that’s the whole point – keeps you motivated.

2. Split Them into More Sub-Goals

After you have selected your goal, start splitting it into more pieces and establish clear deadlines for each of them. A good tip would be to be extremely specific and detailed about what you want to accomplish. Here’s an example.

Peter Larson, HR and social media manager at Assignment Masters, suggests that instead of saying “I want to know more maths by the end of the month”, you should use “I want to perfectly master Pitagora’s formula by 27 February 2017”. This should give you some boost to do what you’re supposed to do because the result is noticeable.

With the first (and the wrong) example, you never know when you have actually made some progress; there’s nothing concise, so you’d better avoid that type of goals.

3. Make Commitments

Make a commitment to stick to everything that you’ve planned; this commitment could even be written down on a piece of paper, printed as an image or even a quote. Place it on your door, so

every time you get out of your room, it’ll remind you to stay focused on the larger goal.

Having a pre-commitment process like the previous example is a great way to stick to your plan.

4. Take action

Nothing’s going to happen if you don’t take action. All the plans in the world won’t make you a better learner and accomplisher if you’re not putting up the actual work. Ever progress starts out of ideas. Then there’s the plan, the organizing, and ultimately, the deciding factor, hard work.

Take consistent action. When you fail, take it as a feedback and try a different approach. Don’t stop, and never give up!

5. Adapt

Adaptability is a great trait to have. It’s highly complementary with the self-discipline skill, as you should have some from both. Self-discipline doesn’t mean staying fixed on certain things. Being flexible allows you to change your plans and actions and adapt them to your daily lifestyle. You can become a better learner if you know how to adapt to new situations and still be disciplined at the same time.

Mary Kleim is a creative writer and a digital expert. She is working on writing good content for different resources. To have a look on other her writing you can find on her blog.