The Concept Of “Non-Zero Days” Cured My Lack Of Discipline

6 months ago, I was the most ill-disciplined person ever.

Someone who could never stick to their goals.

Since we are about to go into 2024, I think it's quite a fitting topic to talk about.

This post is meant to be a cure for anyone else who feels the same way.

I came across a Reddit page that taught me a concept called “Non-zero days”

In essence, the idea is never to let a day go by without doing something towards your goals.

The reason why it spoke volumes to me is because I'm the kind of person who gets a notepad out, writes 10 goals and tries to complete all of them, every single day.

While I’ve got good intentions behind it, it's an easy and expedited path to burnout.

But what I realised is that for someone who is ill-disciplined like most in my generation, the last thing you want to do is create friction between you and the goal you want to accomplish.

That means not putting everything on your plate at once.

So a non-zero day means every day you wake up, you try to do the smallest of tasks that move you towards your goal.

It could even be turning on your laptop and just sitting there.

Of course, if you are capable of doing more than the minimum I recommend continuing on but this is mainly to assist in developing the habit of starting a task and making it second nature.

If you learn to continually do something, eventually that something will compound into bigger tasks and then you'll start to reap bigger rewards from those efforts.

So for the ill-disciplines like myself, we must learn to break down the big goals into small chunks.

Even if it means opening up a spreadsheet and putting one thing in there, you will thank yourself. And you will also move further towards your goals.

JR