Don't Click Your Life Away, Take Charge of 2024
Frequent “refresher” courses in self-discipline? Yes, we all need them.
We don’t know what our smartphones are doing to us, but we are being changed, that much is clear.
~ Tony Reinke
Self-discipline is a life skill that sets limits on the heights or level of success any person can achieve.
Therefore, the development of self-discipline is of foremost importance if you are to take charge of your life’s remaining days.
What is self-discipline?
Self-discipline is the ability to stay focused on important pursuits and goals despite distractions. It is about commitment, resisting diversions, and staying focused on objectives that can improve your life.
When you are self-disciplined, you have control over yourself. You behave in a particular way without always needing anyone else to tell you what to do.
According to Adventist HealthCare, self-discipline is built on five pillars namely, acceptance, willpower, hard work, industry, and persistence.
As social media increasingly become an inseparable part of modern life, personal discipline is a course for which you need frequent refresher courses
Why “refresher courses” on self-discipline?
Because today is the first day of the left in this very brief life of yours. Won’t you rather make them count instead of frittering them away — one click at a time?
Without self-discipline, your best intentions and daydreams will never become realities.
Self-discipline is what guarantees commitment to daily following through on what you promised to do. Thereby, ensuring the likelihood of realizing your plans.
Living a life of self-discipline is fraught with ever-increasing distractions. Top on this list is social media's many side-tracks.
While some people have highly developed levels of self-discipline, others are more like rolling stones gathering no moss. But irrespective of your level on the self-discipline scale, you can always improve and get better at it.
However, self-discipline doesn’t work in a vacuum. When you combine self-discipline with passion, focus, determination, planning, and goal setting, it will catapult your level of effectiveness to heights you never imagined possible.
Today, the use of smartphones comes as a double-edged sword that is changing us for good or bad depending on how we use them.
According to author Tony Reinke, here are some ways smartphones are changing us.
Your attention focus diminishes as you get addicted to constant distractions.
You neglect or relegate healthy interactions with your loved ones and friends to the background.
Aliteracy — the unintended consequences of overabundance. The flip side of our infotainment overload is that many people lose their literacy or become aliterate. Too much of a good thing can kill you. Howbeit so slowly, you don’t even notice it.
Selfishness and harshness are often direct sour fruits of over-preoccupation with our mobile devices. Do you remember the cartoon of people who were rushing to take pictures of a drowning man instead of throwing him a lifeline? Well, we should let humanity reign over our craving for clicks.
Yielding to allures of destructive, comfortable secret vices. Appropriately used, technology enhances our lives — more efficiency, effectiveness, and more productivity. Using smartphones without discipline can make them counterproductive distractions.
Less inclination to acts of kindness (maybe). Unbridled use of smartphones at night reduces the number of sleep hours. People who did not sleep well last night are less likely to be disposed to being Good Samaritan toward less fortunate ones when day breaks.
Also, it won’t be out of place to state that people addicted to their phones are less likely to render acts of kindness to those in need.
Life has taught us that too much of a good thing often comes with disastrous setbacks. As part of your resolve to stop clicking away your remaining allotted time, here are some steps you can take.
Be intentional in your phone usage. Be purposeful when it comes to using any app. What do you want to do or achieve? Sign in to update your timeline. View a few of your contacts’ latest updates on Facebook. Take a snappy view of how your posts are trending and interact with your followers as needed. Then sign-off.
Turn off distracting email and app push notifications. Except for critical business or customers’ service needs, you may need to turn off more of your app notifications.
Alternatively, you can set your notification to come up at specific intervals. This helps to minimize streams of distractions while you concentrate on first things first.
Audit your device-installed apps list. Just like your friends, you may have clothes in your wardrobe that go untouched for weeks or even months, collecting dust and occupying space. Many apps on your phone are just like that. They take up space, slow down your phone, drain your battery, and eat up your data. Disable or uninstall such rarely used apps.
Jump off the “Doom Scrolling” train. Doom scrolling is the habit of endlessly consuming negative news via social media or the internet. It is a downward-spiralling self-defeating habit. Many of those caught in this deadly addiction are unaware of it. Compulsively, they want to be in the know, even though such negative news leaves them hassled, depressed, and worn-out.
Stop using the internet and social media for entertainment. Once addiction has set in, many users often lack the self-awareness of the long-term harm they are doing to themselves. Prolonged, aimless wasting of time will keep you far from achieving your long-term goals and life purposes. Reflect on this and start using your smartphone for more meaningful ends.
The acknowledgment of our weakness is the first step in repairing our loss. ~ Thomas a Kempis
“Without proper assessment, we would remain ignorant or in denial. If we choose to remain ignorant (i.e., not knowing how undisciplined we are) we won’t know exactly how much we can do and our possibilities will remain obscure even to us.”
“Successes and failures will be the product of external factors or the actions of third parties.”
Won’t you rather take charge of your life by stepping out of the “Doom Scrolling” train?
Thanks for reading.
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