SUMMARY: I recap the lessons learned from 2009's Groundhog Day Resolutions process, month-by-month. I also unveil the "brainstorming kit" that I started working on last night.
SUMMARY: To develop the waking up early habit, I theorize, the trick is not to focus on the WAKING. Instead, focus on the SLEEPING.
Summary: Having completely forgotten about doing the October 10 GHD Resolution Review, I cram it all into this relatively (for me) short November 11 Review. I summarize what I got done since last September, and what the cost was (hint: 0 revenue = lots of free time), and reflect on the framework that is now in place that has given me clarity and direction.
SUMMARY: In the 8th “personal goals” review of 2009, I reiterate three guidelines and two mental stances that together, I believe, will be at the core of my ongoing pursuit of personal fulfillment. And, I am finally able to “productize” what I like do in terms that I think the general public will understand.
SUMMARY: It’s the 7th review day for my New Year’s Resolution system, which starts on Groundhog Day instead of January 1st. The salient observation this month is that there’s a difference between “just doing” and “just being”. By just being, I’ve attained a level of self-comfort that is helping me find my groove.
Yes, it's July 7th, the official mid-year Groundhog Day Resolutions review day. It is also Tanabata, the Japanese Star Festival, when you get to write down your wishes on streamers of paper and hang them on bamboo trees. It's time for some wish review.
Last month I had distilled my goals down to two basic activities:
These activities spawned a set of tasks:
Looking back at the last month, I can't say that I made a lot of progress, but then again I didn't create dates and deliverables for them either. I trusted instead that natural energy would flow. This was generally successful, given the number of meetings and shower thinking sessions I've had. However, it doesn't feel entirely successful because I can't point to anything that is finished. That violates the principle of create and show stuff that is the unofficial bedrock of my personal philosophy. This is the natural enemy of talk and hand wave, an approach I despise, but have apparently sunken into. Damn.
I've continued to test the Task Cards as a project memory device, and I've noticed that they tend to fall into the following categories.
I'll split these up into different groups while refactoring:
I have purposefully left out all the "fun" things that I do, such as meeting with friends, riding the scooter, and writing this blog. Perhaps it is a mistake to leave these out, not because I should "make sure I have fun", but because they exist outside the system and are above the law. That creates problems for the rest of the system.
I've been starting to delve into the inner workings of my scooter's 2-stroke engine. Unlike its 4-stroke cousin, the 2-stroke engine hacks four distinct phases of combustion into a couple of blurry states of exploding more or exploding less. That it works at all is kind of amazing, and by analogy I identify with this more. 4 stroke engines are quieter, more consistent in power delivery, and pollute far less in the process despite their added mechanical overhead. Part of me aspires to that kind of orderly efficiency, but it could be that I'm a buzzy oil-burning 2-stroke by nature. 2-strokes seem more impatient about the process of generating power, so they get it done in a hurry, without apology to the environment. But I digress.
As impatient as I am, I need to make some progress. Now that I have my tasks sorted into index card form, there's no reason not to apply some focus to get them done. CricketB noted in a comment on yesterday's post that adrenaline is required for generating focus, which was news to me. And here I was trying to calm myself down so I would be in a state of peacefulness before I start. I wonder if the calm approach works for other people.
I'm also thinking that I can apply some of that crunch time methodology from yesterday's post. Here it is again:
Combining this with the generation of adrenaline might be very effective. At least it will be fun to try.
Additionally, for the 8/8 review I'll want to be able to point to things that definitely got done and are generating energy by themselves, without my direct intervention. The idea has always been to create generators and concentrators of energy. Blog posts count, because anyone can read them at any time without me having to get out of bed. Software counts. Downloads count. Online stores count. Websites for my friends count. Those are all tangible and visible, and they create energy in the form of connecting great people with (1) other great people or (2) great ideas; here I define greatness as that which inspires passion-driven acts of creation.
Although I grow tired of constantly reporting a lack of major progress, I am certainly getting to explore a lot of different approaches to wasting time :-)
Last week I was feeling rather pleased with myself, having successfully rebooted the "going to sleep early" habit. I was well on the way toward creating a framework productivity-enriching habits...
But suddenly, a shot rang out! The maid screamed! And a project emergency loomed over the horizon, promising darkness and tragedy if certain drastic actions were not taken...
Yes, I ended up breaking my carefully-established sleeping schedule to pull a few all-nighters. The result: my optimal energy management plan completely went out of the window. And you know what? Instead of resenting it, I loved it.
This was very surprising. Thoughts follow.
Now, I still like waking up early and experiencing the first kiss of sunlight as I sip coffee outside of Starbucks. I really like being able to predict how many hours of sleep I'll need every night. Contemplating the ruins of my habit, though, it seems that the greatest advantage was just having so many elements in synch with each other. First of all, I'm in synch with the sun. I L-O-V-E the sun. And everyone else local I know is synchronized with the sun too: people, work, restaurants, stores, and social gatherings.
The second advantage of waking up early, as I noted in my recent summary, is that it gives me time to start up. It's a luxurious feeling, waking up early enough that I can take time to do all those other things in the early morning, and still have plenty of time to get to the real work.
What I find surprising is that losing these advantages did not freak me out, make me mad, or lead to a prolonged period of grumpiness. There's something else at work here.
I had to do a lot of on-the-fly graphic design and familiarization with a program that I haven't used extensively, InDesign CS3, to meet an impossibly aggressive timeline. When things look that bad, it's time to go into crunch time. Going back into crunch time reminded me of grad school and game development, and while I wasn't looking forward to it I nevertheless knew how to prepare myself for it. There are several stages that I practice:
It helps when I have other people crunching with me, and in this case I was lucky enough to have such a person who had the right attitude to get things done, putting the project ahead of personal stuff. The constant feedback that someone else was in the room working kept us both going.
Admittedly, crunching is a terrible way to work for sustained periods of time. There's an article called why crunch mode doesn't work, with many fascinating historical citations, posted on the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) website. In my vicariously-derived experience, crunch mode sucks for family life, but it ceases to be a problem during extended crunch periods because you won't have a family anymore. It's really that bad.
The one saving grace of crunch time is that something gets done and delivered. And this is probably why I'm not mad about having destroyed my sleeping pattern in a matter of days. However, as the IGDA article notes, crunching is the single most expensive way there is to get the work done. That isn't very productive at all! Is there some way to combine the positive elements of getting something with having good habits?
Taking a step back, let us consider why I started to reboot the sleep habit in the first place:
... [to establish] a sequence of habits that I believe will be conducive to greater productivity; it's a framework for maintaining a working store of time and energy.
In other words, these serial habits (sleep, exercise, drinking water, regular meals, regular chores) are supposed to create the conditions where productivity can flourish. I was trying to convince myself that these habits are mandatory overhead for managing my life, given my current resources. It's hard to argue, however, that crunch mode working bypasses all that stuff and just gets stuff done. Sure, the aftermath was a couple of days feeling dazed and unfocused, but what had 3 weeks of early waking accomplished? Not all that much, in terms of cold hard finished tasks. I had been busy, but not productive. Nevertheless, that busy-ness took care of a lot of lingering crap that would have eventually built up to stress-inducing levels.
It is frustrating to not be able to be the way I want to be, which I think is a sentiment shared by many productivistas seeking to become model machines. If only I was more disciplined and focused. I happened to hear a fragment of the solution on NPR over the weekend. It was about how breaking an addiction is difficult because our mind is wired to select the most salient experience available to it at a given time. To break the hold of a bad habit, you have to rewire your brain to desire a better habit at a very fundamental level. Without this rewiring, it's impossible. Finding something more salient than the bad habit is the trick. I have friends who only give up smoking if it's for their children or for a loved one; for them, the emotional bond and commitment outweighs their need for the cigarette. For other people, though, the neurological hook is so deeply embedded that they can't break it at all; it takes individual will coupled with a positive feedback social network to provide enough energy to break free.
If I come right down to it, the reason why I'm not productive (in the "task finishing" sense) is that I prefer conversing with people about their interests over working in isolation. As a freelancer, this is a real problem. The way I push through is by constructing scenarios in which I'm drawing conclusions from the work that can later be turned into a new product, blog post, or business opportunity. In hindsight, all these tricks fall into the category of converting work into conversation.
If I put my "waking early" experiment into this context, I can see that the entire reason it works in the first place is that it gave me the opportunity to spend more time working on blog posts, synchronizing with friends, and being able to meet people for coffee under the guise of "business development". Perhaps what I need to do is transform the nature of my work from production to conversation, which is an example of the strategy of embracing so-called faults and turning them into strengths. I can do the technical production work too, but at a vastly lower efficiency. This suggests that management is a course of action that I should pursue, or perhaps as a producer that works through other people.
Another reason I'm not mad is that I believe I can get my body back on schedule fairly easily. I've noticed that no matter what time I go to sleep, I seem to wake up after 8 hours. And If I get out of bed immediately, then my mental clarity is fine.
If there's anything I learned from this experiment, it's that the body has its own memory and momentum. It takes a few days for a new behavior pattern to set lightly, holding its shape delicately like a newly-poured bowl of Jello® that's been in the refrigerator for only a couple of hours. If I plan for this, and stay generally in the range of hours that I prefer to maximize sun exposure, I think the habit will reform more naturally. We shall see in the next week. The emphasis, though, will be to pursue the salient qualities that I like about waking up early, not merely conforming to the schedule. Set schedules have their place, but the level of "hard set" perhaps can stand to be varied. Marina Martin has a great rant/post about why you should not wake up early tomorrow that is filled with great reasons why you should wake up whenever the hell you feel like it. I think the common principle is that different people have different priorities, energy sinks, and energy sources. Either habit by itself doesn't guarantee success.
I suspect that sifting through the ruins of broken habits can yield justifications for why they broke: there's some force offering an experience that's more salient and more immediately accessible to you. You can try to fight that force through sheer willpower, knowing that it's going to take much more energy, or you can run toward it and make that force a strength. In some cases you'll have no choice to fight it; in which case, you must seek comrades and bind your destiny together.
A second direction to pursue: learning to apply the crunch time methodology in non-crunch time situations. For some reason, I've only applied it when the stakes seemed very high. I have to convince myself that the stakes are high ALL THE TIME, so I can enter that mental flow state.
So with that, I'm calling the WAKING UP EARLY experiment done, but I'm not giving up on the sequence. The next one up is GOING TO THE GYM. What's going to help is a challenge I accepted with my friend Angela, which is to be able to run (Or jog. Or walk) for eight miles to her gym by August 3rd. I am not a runner by any stretch of the imagination, but I got some instruction and think I can take it slow IF I recondition my cardio-vascular endurance by going to the gym. It hasn't degraded as much as I thought, but regular cardio sessions at a prudent level of exertion should be beneficial. We shall see!
If you're interested in the other articles about rebooting the "Waking Up Early" habit, check out the following links:
This is week 3 of "rebooting" a habit that helps me maintain a certain level of productivity: getting up early. This is one of a series of habits that I am planning on starting, but am doing one at a time on the advice of The Power of Less.
Getting up early requires extra effort, particularly if you like to stay up late and sleep-in as much as I do. The life of a freelancer is very flexible (which I like) but this comes at a price: there's a tendency to lose touch with your friends and family. The primary reason I want to wake up early is to help me stay in sync with everyone else, an increasingly important requirement for me. A major side benefit, as my friend Robert points out, is that I also have a lot more time to goof off in the morning. While I might use a more marketable phrase like providing adequate time to marshal one's creative energies and ramp-up for a busy day, it is an accurate statement. I tend to lumber down the runway of productivity like an antique cargo plane, fueled only with the best of intentions. With a good tail wind at my back, a cup of coffee in my hand, and the Grace of God as my copilot, I somehow manage to lift my creaking body into a sky filled with possibility. If my energy holds I might actually get somewhere before falling back to earth. In short, the act of takeoff requires a lot of effort from me, and I need a commensurate amount of runway (e.g. time) to assure that I don't crumple back into the ground before achieving liftoff. Getting up early is an essential part of the formula, because it gives me the runway length I need for a productive day.
Anyway, here's the short list of what it takes for me to stay on track, roughly in order of dependence.
Motivation! The key to everything! My motivation is to maintain sync with my friends. Otherwise, I tend to cycle on a 28-hour day, which has me looping in and out of people's lives like a wraith. When I'm out of sync, I spend a lot of time in "vampire mode", sleeping during the day and working at night. Sometimes that's OK if you just want to get things done and don't care about or need people. Your motivations will probably be different.
When I first tried this, it was for the sheer novelty of the experience, but I learned a lot of things about the early morning that I got to like. This has given me extra motivation to get it going again.
Behind every successful action is a supporting action. In this case, I need a certain amount of sleep (8 hours) which means I need to make sure I'm asleep by a certain time...
I have a natural tendency to seek intellectual stimulation, which contributes to late nights. I like to look up things on the Internet. I get drawn into a line of inquiry or design experiment. I get sucked into a magazine article. I might be halfway through some project work. If I don't stop that mental activity by 9PM, I am not going to be asleep at 10PM. I have had to learn how to turn off my brain, which requires (somewhat ironically) some mental effort. I don't like to medicate myself, so enforcing the habit is an exercise in just saying no to myself; even though I'm not a Dad, I end up having to take care of my inner child.
There are four other factors that affect the success of my sleep schedule:
Getting to sleep on time is half the battle. NOW IT'S TIME TO GET UP! If you aren't required to wake up early by an external force (like a job), then you will need a compelling reason to get moving. Otherwise, you'll just fall asleep again. Here are the things that I look forward to in the morning, which helps me get out of bed.
I can remember several very productive mornings at Starbucks that sadly, took place in dreamland. I once cycled through this three whole times, each time dreaming I had looked at the alarm clock, jolted out of bed, showered, and gotten to the door before realizing I was actually still asleep.
There are three countermeasures that work for me, though I don't deploy them all at the same time:
I set multiple alarm clocks. Loud ones, from different sources, at varying positions and distances from your bed. If they don't have a standard position, your body won't be able to perfect the slam-and-snooze maneuver automatically. Don't overdo it, though; if they are too far away you just might learn to sleep right through them. To mix things up, I sometimes use my cell phone's alarms, set at 6AM and 607AM. The regular alarm clock is set at 6AM, and at 615AM my Voco Good Morning Sir Clock (yet another awesome present from my delightful sister) reminds me that I have important gentlemanly affairs to tend to. It's a little too quiet to serve as a primary alarm clock, but the quiet authority of Stephen Fry challenges me to be my best.
I force myself to immediately open my eyes, keeping them open for 30 100 seconds. This is the minimum-effort action I can take without having to shift my entire body, though it is surprisingly difficult. Once my eyes are open. For extra credit, I look toward the window and try to determine what the weather is. This sometimes requires additional body movement. If I keep my eyes open for long enough to look around the room, that seems to start the mental processes going. It's sometimes helpful to position interesting things within eye's glance the night before. Maybe something to do? Something to remember? And if I get tired of counting to 100 seconds, I can always just get up :-)
I drink 16oz of water before I go to sleep. The amount of water varies, but when I'm serious about waking up I drink enough of the stuff to ensure I have to go to the bathroom. I believe this is an old soldier's trick for waking up in time for their watch. A full bladder is plenty of reason to get up. If I drink TOO MUCH water, however, I end up getting up in the middle of the night, and that kind of defeats the purpose.
Two weeks is about the minimum time it takes to establish a habit, though for this habit I have decided to go for three weeks. The extra week gave me time to confirm the theories I had regarding habit maintenance. Some rules of thumb:
It took about 3 or 4 days before I was waking up just before the alarm clock. Frankly, I was surprised at how quickly my body adapted to the rhythm. The prepwork helped, I think.
After about a week, my body developed an affinity for staying to the schedule, and this built up a kind of sleep equity that I could "borrow against" for unusual circumstances. If I stayed up late with friends, for example, my body would still wake up early because it had been conditioned to do so. However, it would become important to adhere to the schedule the next day, otherwise I would start to slip back into a later waking cycle. I have actually been a recovery mode for the past three days, due to some ill-advised late weekend nights. However, because I have been identifying the root causes of the slippage, I know what I need to do to correct my mistakes.
During this third week, I am realizing that I need to apply the same rules to the weekend. When the weekend rolls around, I implicitly give myself permission to do anything I want, which means I stay up really late. After two days of this, my Monday and Tuesday is pretty much shot. This weekend I will try to relax the schedule a bit but still maintain a regular waking time. We'll see.
I'm either going to do the Gym or Drinking Water. Probably the Gym, as I've done this before, and I actually have discovered that the noon-time workout is a nice break from the early morning work I do writing and emailing people. Juggling TWO new habits will be a new experience in itself...we'll see how it goes.
Last week I wrote about restarting habits one at a time, based on the insight that my previous attempt to restart them all at once wasn't working. Thus, I outlined a sequence of habits that I believe will be conducive to greater productivity; it's a framework for maintaining a working store of time and energy. The habits are:
The common wisdom is that it takes about two weeks to form the foundation of a habit, assuming you are practicing it diligently. Armed with this belief, I have been working on reclaiming my early-morning routine. I have a tendency to be a night owl, which I had previously assumed was just the way I was. However, I've found in the past that the early morning routine has many benefits: not only do you stay in sync with other people, you also have more time to goof off and still get a lot of work done :-) Not to mention that I'm finding that the early morning is a magical time; I've grown to love the sun more in my old age, a change from my youthful preference for the stillness of the night.
Once I accepted that focusing on one habit at a time was OK, I decided to also not beat myself up when I wandered from my ideal sleep pattern: 8 hours of sleep a night, up at 6AM so I could be at Starbucks at 7AM. Every time I didn't get to sleep early enough to get 8 hours of sleep, I would still try to wake up at 6AM and note how successful (or not) I was; it was enough that I was really mindful of it regardless of actual outcome. This had the unexpected side benefit of provided me with a collection of excuses that I could analyze for patterns. For example, I became aware of some common-sense rules I hadn't been following:
When I didn't go to sleep by 10PM, this had an impact on the success of the next day. This feedback helped reinforce the habit, especially since I could identify the cause and effect relationships.
After about a week and a half, I found that my body had started waking up at 6AM even when I went to sleep later than I should have. This indicates to me that there is some wiggle room in the pattern; so long as I'm mostly getting to sleep at the right time, there is enough "momentum" in the body's imprint that it starts to maintain itself. Cool!
Toward the end of the second week, I'm also noticing more the benefits of waking up early in the form of increased socialization, because I have more time during the day to meet people.
I'm also "pre-testing" the next few habits I'd like to develop, such as the morning planning ritual and going back to the gym, but am deliberately NOT trying to practice them as habits. In the past I would have been tempted to start both these habits at the same time as I was establishing my sleeping pattern once it started to take root. That would have been too early, I think. It's possible that one huge advantage of One Habit At A Time is that the successful day is achieved more easily: I either got up early, or I didn't. The diagnostic evaluation is really simple, and still satisfying. If I had been also trying to get back to the gym and the planning habits, a successful day would have required three inter-related evaluations, which is tougher to cleanly diagnose. Not only that, statistically the odds that you will pull off a 100% successful day are correspondingly grimmer because there are more ways to fail. You could beat the odds, of course, but it requires greater fortitude and energy...if you have the time, why make things harder? I'm trying to make this easier for myself, after all.
The habit forming experience reminds me of a concept in software development: for every "front-end result" there is a successful "back-end supporting action". In terms of software development, the "front end" is the visible part of a piece of software. It's the user interface. It's the functional benefit. It's the result you like when you press the button that says DO THIS NOW. The "back end" is all the stuff you don't see that makes the magic possible: the algorithms, databases, graphic assets, libraries, glue code, and other stuff that people who use the front end couldn't care less about. And so it was with waking up early.
By analogy, waking up early is my desired change. It's the shiny part of establishing a new habit. When I wake up early, without drama and muttered curses, I immediately reap the reward that I've been seeking! However, as I found out with the supporting habits, I had to do a lot of boring things to make it possible. For example, going to sleep early feels like a punishment because I can't indulge my whim to keep going until I drop from exhaustion. And NOT READING in bed? That sucks too, as reading in bed is one of my great pleasures. However, the whole reason that I'm doing this habit thing is because I'm chasing that work-life balance, and I am testing the theory that having some tuned systems and habits in place will lead to me getting more done. Somewhat counter-intuitively, I've had to learn to relax about not doing everything I want, a necessary focusing of energy. My boring "back end" actions are making the front end change possible, a necessary re-engineering of long-standing practice. I may decide later that waking up early is not all it's cracked up to be, but for now my working hypothesis is that it is a Good Thing.
A few months ago I received a review copy of Leo Babauta's book The Power of Less, and promptly lost it under a pile of magazines that had colonized the northeast quadrant of my dining room table. The pile grew majestically in size over the next 3 months, absorbing small electronic gadgets, mail, balls of cat fur, and exotic Asian cookie boxes, until one day I had need of something I thought might have been in there. So, I started disassembling the pile, and that's when I came across the book package from Leo's publisher. It was fortuitous timing, as I'd been feeling under-productive in my creative and business endeavors since finishing the Holocaust Museum project a few weeks prior. Leo's site, Zen Habits, had been on my mind because I'd noticed a trend from my periodic visits: the number of readers seemed to double ever time I looked. And it seemed to me, after doing a brief dive through his sitem that it was due to his focus on delivery quality thoughts consistently with an honest humility. It was quietly inspiring. After reading through The Power of Less, I was impressed anew by the straightforwardness of the writing. It's not a flashy book. And it is not even a radically original book--an acquaintance of mine, with all the authority his 20-odd years of experience on Earth could muster, declared on Facebook that it was a book that merely contained stuff we already knew, which I found deeply insightful and amusing. What I like about the book is that it concisely details a number of habits that have led to ongoing, purposeful achievement, the story of Leo told from his personal perspective.
This past week I've been following one of the habits that had jumped out at me: work on one habit at a time. I knew that the productivity-inducing habits that I'd adapted over the past two years had disappeared as I had gotten caught up in the last weeks of museum project, and my attempts to restart them all at the same time were going nowhere. This week, I decided to just focus on a chain of habits that I wanted to redevelop, one after the other, to bootstrap my way back to the place I once was.
Working on one thing at a time is a powerful concept that's been detailed many times by other writers, so I believe in it. My greatest hurdle in adapting this idea is two-fold: having faith that it works, and being able to maintain focus to completion.
Having faith, for me, is probably more about stemming the negative thoughts: You know what I'm talking about, that slippery feeling that time is slipping away, which leads to thoughts of oh no I'm falling behind to I need to be faster and better to omg I'm not good enough to do this followed by this thing I'm making is sucking crap crap crap. It's not a good place to be, and its self-defeating. It's understandable, though; our society puts a huge premium on speed and instant gratification, and as uninformed consumers we tend to expect that the creative process should be just as fast. I should know better, being skilled with a number of arcane digital media production methodologies, but I still fall prey to this kind of thinking because, well, I want to be awesome :-)
To implement One Thing At A Time, I remember that I value craft and design, and that such endeavors take time. It's ultimately worth the wait, I believe, if it's done right. There are some situations where speed is more of the essence, but I am making an executive decision to not seek those situations. Still, it's important to carve out just enough time to not be rushed, yet not dawdle. "Do not hurry. Do not wait": this is a lesson I'm learning anew. I am also taking inspiration from John Carmack's game development philosophy when asked when his next gaming work will be available: "When it's done". My corollary to this philosophy is that taking time to learn is going to be part of it.
Maintaining focus to completion is probably the harder task. Certain tasks lend themselves to focus; writing and graphic design are like that for me. Other tasks that involve a variety of media and mental hats (e.g. developing interactive multimedia, establishing a design business) tend to become diffuse because they call on different parts of my brain to pay attention to different parts of the world, scattering my focus by necessity. Additionally, I've trained myself to see every interaction with the world as a jumping off point for investigation, so keeping unintended flights of inquiry under control is a challenge. The various Printable CEO forms are, in some sense, attempts to create systems that naturally attract my attention so it's harnessed to the desired task at hand. They've also helped solidify certain principles of productivity over time, which is perhaps the greater payoff. What I need is to maintain discipline.
One means to maintaining discipline is to require less of it. The statement goal is to "maintain focus to completion", so defining meaningful intermediate deliverables is helpful. It's also good development practice. Most importantly, being happy with smaller steps to begin with is a key mental outlook, otherwise I'll always be dissatisfied. The perspective I'm cultivate in myself these days that when anything happens at all, that's pretty damn incredible. You can interpret that statement as being extremely cynical or really positive, so it is compatible with a wide range of moods :-) I choose to celebrate the small achievements, most of the time.
This week I've been focusing just on waking up every day at the same time. From my prior experiments in waking up early, I know this habit has led to feelings of well-being and productivity. I've been doing it for about a week, and the habit is still pretty wobbly, but I'm noticing how each violation of the sleep cycle has discernible effects on the following day. This encourages me to maintain the habit. I'll do another week of this, and with luck the habit will be set firmly enough that I can move to the next habit on my list: returning to a regular gym schedule.
This is the chain of habits I'm trying to recreate, roughly in the order I'm thinking will work:
Each of these habits, I am thinking, will take two weeks minimum to establish themselves. I'll only move to the next one when I am convinced it's sticking. I may break up the gym habit into the three stages and interleave them with the other habits so it's not so massive.
I also need to figure out are the recovery protocols for when the habits are disrupted. The gym habit, for example, tends to fly out the window when I'm away from home or have a lot of work to do. Creating an at-home workout that I like, that doesn't require additional gear, will be helpful. Adding fun physical challenges that can be met only with conditioning will help too. I'm pretty clueless when it comes to sports and stuff like that, so it will be a whole new adventure.
Implicit in this list is the idea that these are prime directives for supporting a high quality life. I am hopeful that working the "discipline muscle" will trickle into other aspects of my life, as my friend Senia [describes].
There's a different list for establishing a good design practice and social life, but I'll address that some other day.
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