How to Be More Diligent

Source: Mircea, Flickr, CC 2.0

Imagine that your counselor emailed you between sessions to ask how you’re doing. Or that your friend promised to help you on Saturday at 9 and, voila, there s/he was. Or that your romantic partner remembered that you dislike cilantro and, when phoning for takeout, made sure that nothing had cilantro.

Diligence is one of those virtues that seem to have gone a bit out of fashion, along with duty, discipline, responsibility, and restraint. Yet diligence has always been and always will be at the hub of accomplishment and, among the discerning, of respectability.

But how to get more diligent? Ay, there’s the rub. Here are my best — but I fear inadequate — suggestions:

• Remind yourself that you'll feel better about yourself, you'll accomplish more, and sometimes get credit, even praise.
• Ask yourself whether it’s important enough to withstand diligence’s strictures to make yourself usually do what you “should” do. After all, you could decide that diligence just doesn’t matter enough: You’ll live and die like billions before and after you. So why not just dance? On the other hand, you could conclude that whatever meaning inheres in life resides in contribution: Every time you’re diligent, you’re at least trivially and indirectly making someone happier or, at least, more content.
• Does reflecting on past lack of diligence, whether yours or someone whose sloth has hurt you, motivate you to change, to think, for example, “Before more of my life is damaged, might I want to try to change, perhaps incrementally, perhaps even all the way?”
• Do you care enough about some person(s), your sphere of influence, or even society, to try to dredge up Mr./Ms. Motivation? I recall a client who was a self-described lifetime slug until having a child and wanting to be a good role model.
• Is there a role model you could invoke? Perhaps there’s a friend, family member, colleague, or even a famous person you’d like to try to emulate? After all, they say that role models do matter.
• Do you need to take the pragmatic approach of breaking into baby steps some tasks on which you might not be diligent, ideally baby steps that you’d find pleasurable or at least not anathema?
• Is something external at play: a substance-abuse problem, a soul-sucking job, a too-painful romantic partner or family member? Would changing any of those increase your diligence?
• Do you need a loving taskmaster, one who will demand that you adhere to a structure, at least until you’ve built some momentum and experienced diligence’s benefits, whereupon the human training wheels can be removed?

The takeaway

I feel sheepish writing a pontificating piece because everyone, including me, dislikes preachiness. But the alternative is to remain silent, and that would make me feel, well, not diligent.

I read this aloud on YouTube.