Very low selfdiciplin and very messy. But how to go from here?

[funrider]

I am somewhat succesfull in life. I have gotten a master degree (in physics) and have a wellpaid somewhat interesting job. I had a girlfriend, who finally got my wife, for a long time. But unfortunately she divorced me five years ago.

I have had just one one girlfriend, - for almost two years after my exwife left me.

I had ideas about why my exwife left but I am still a bit puzzled. On my job I had to take a personalitytypetest (NEO PI-R) just the other day. Everything was as expected except that "order" and "self diciplin" was VERY low. Actually I did except them to be low (together with the rest of the facets of Conscientiousness), but these were VERY low (ORDER is just 23) and that is even on a normed scale together with other men (but with a job though) (I suspect women to be more orderly than men, and unemployed, very young men to be the most messy of them all).

I was led to believe that basically you can't change your personality. What you can do however is to know about and apply your strengths and know about and find ways to aviod to have to apply your weaknesses. That is, to do the job in a way where you will get your power from somewhere else.

Thinking about it I recall my exwife (and my exgirlfriend as well) being unsatisfied with my order. My appartment is a mess, my hair is to long, my beard need a shave, my cloth has holes, I am not holding the fork right and so forth.

And I find myself in an appartment which is even more messy now. Since no one is here to help me and no one is here that requires or expects just a minimum of orderness in at least one of the rooms.

O.k. it seems I have isolated the problem. Extremely low orderness and very low selfdiciplin. But how do I get from here?
If the selfdiciplin was higher (and perhaps even more so if my openness wasn't so high) I whould be fairly easy for me to make some checklists.
But it just doesn't work for me.

So please help. No, I am not expecting you to come and clean up my appartment. But I would love some advices. How do I motivate myself to do it (and how do I learn to clean up. I never have learned that).

[Boreas]

To change habits takes time and work.

Do a little everyday to clean up your apartment and take care of yourself. Start with just 5 minutes a day, and then 10 minutes. But do it everyday.

Over time you will start to become more self-desciplines as a habit.

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/200...lf-discipline/

[Zukin]

Hi funrider,

I can understand where you're coming from. I finally just had to sell or give away nearly everything I owned before I could have greater peace of mind and start working towards getting more organized.

Have you ever read the book "Getting Things Done"? It's helped lots of people become more organized and disciplined.

Here's some good summaries of the GTD system:

Getting Things Done - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
GettingThingsDone - MineZone Wiki
Lunch & Learn: Getting Things Done

You can also use the pain/pleasure principle by learning to associate messiness with intense pain and discipline with intense pleasure.

Of course, sometimes messiness can be a good thing too, at least according to these authors:
Amazon.com: A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder--How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place: Books: Eric Abrahamson,David H. Freedman

[ellie]

Hi Funrider,

Just know you are not the only one and I'm a female. I would bet that I'm much messier than you.

It's frustrating as hell, I just have no motivation to be organised and I just can't or wont do it.

I think I need to read some of those books as well

[AtriumGuy]

Hi Funrider--

Acrually, Steve P wrote a good article on this...you can find it here:

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/200...lf-discipline/

Start adding order to your life with purpose! Make it your mission to be more organized and neat. It can do wonders for your life! Hope this helps...

[Christian223]

I strongly recommend you to try EFT, the link is at my signature, try going to the resources section and read "the palace of posibilities", it will help you to change your bad behaviour into a more productive/ordered/motivated one, it helped me a lot in this area too so i know it works, good luck!.

[backpocket]

I remember reading from this book "100 ways to motivate others" by Steven Chandler and Scott Richardson, there was one chapter that talked about this guy who was a productive worker but his house was in a mess.

He noticed that his problem wasn't that he was lazy, he just didn't have the proper habits. So what he did was spend 20 minutes everyday to clean a single area of his house. Like bedroom on Monday, kitchen on Tuesday, etc. Once cleaning up became a habit, he just does it on autopilot.

This worked amazingly well for me, and all it took was just 20 minutes a day. Try using the 30 day challenge for this and see if it works for you.