In my recent article Taking the Easy Choice I suggested that the ability to make difficult choices was something that could be improved by training.
So I’d like to hear suggestions for exercises that would strengthen our ability to do this.
There’s one in my book Get Everything Done. You nominate one task you are going to do the next day. It can be something you need to do anyway, or it can be something completely arbitrary. Start with something easy. If you succeed in doing it, then you choose something a little bit more difficult for the following day. And so on day by day, getting a little bit harder each time. Whenever you fail to do the day’s task (no excuses are accepted), you have to reduce the difficulty of the task for the next day. The idea is that you build yourself up to the point where you can rely on yourself to do even the most difficult tasks when you say you are going to do them.
Can anyone think up some more exercises which would be as effective or even more effective? Answers in the Comments.