A while ago I promised myself I'd nurture and develop myself as best I could manage. It meant learning how to do that, the skills and concepts, and to understand the methods and practicalities of applying the skills in ways that would see me perpetually improving upon who and what I was the day prior; daily improvement.
Small gains made often amount to larger gains and with enough in a row I knew I would leap forward and hit the mark; that is, the goals I set and re-set as I went.
One of those attributes was to be constructive every day and I often broke it down to parts of the day, morning and afternoon for instance and often even smaller increments. I found that focusing on being constructive kept me from being destructive - doing things like wasting time, procrastinating, splitting my focus, allowing interruptions, taking long lunch breaks and giving people that did not deserve it my precious time just to name a few.
Part of my drive towards being constructive was my rule of learning something every day.
I convinced myself that if I did not learn something of value and import that day it had been a wasted day. It wasn't always a totally wasted day of course, that thought was just the motivator to make me actively search out those nuggets of gold I could collect with the plan being that I'd use them tomorrow or the next day or at some future point to help me become even more constructive.
I'm certainly not perfect and do many things wrong however a habit of being constructive has helped me reach forward more confidently and I feel much of my success has stemmed from that habit alone.