Category: Habits Checklist

Daily Habits Checklist (February 27 – March 19): Controllable time and The Sovereign Individual

The last three weeks were very good, after almost two months of crappy scores. If you saw my earlier checklists you’ll understand the reasons for this swing: in January and February my time was spent on business projects and business travel, and in March I shifted back to working for myself.

Working for yourself is one way to maximize the amount of time in a typical day that’s under your control. Let’s call it “controllable time”. I’ve come to realize that having many hours of controllable time is almost essential if I’m to maintain the habits that I consider necessary for a good and fulfilled life. Like the habits listed above: Writing and publishing. Exercising and meditating. Socializing and exploring.

Above money, above fame, sometimes above even love and intimacy, I value having large amounts of this controllable time. A big piece of what attracts me to a writer’s lifestyle is this almost pure expression of life freedom. You can choose to spend each day, every day, exactly as you wish. Much of the time it’s wasted, but it’s wasted wilfully. It’s not perfect by any means, as each day is a kind of mental torture. As a friend elegantly put it, “you have to constantly outwit yourself to get anything done.” This might seem strange or selfish to some. For others it may feel like an indulgence or a luxury best enjoyed in small doses. For me it has slowly become a necessity. I crave it and I look forward to it, each and every day.

Current book: The Sovereign Individual. A rare book which is living up to its buzz within tech circles. Forecasts and describes a future where individuals gain increasing sovereignty at the expense of nation-states. Because technology empowers the individuals who know how to create and exploit it, and because organized violence – the state’s most effective and reliable tool – is increasingly outdated and ineffective. There was no Kindle version, but I managed to find a PDF and then convert it to mobi. If you’d like a copy, email me.

Current quote:

The best lovers do not have the best bodies. They are not the best-looking, and they do not have the largest respective body parts. What they do have is the best attitude: they are completely enthusiastic. – Lou Paget

Why do I track and share this stuff? Click here. Thanks for reading!

Daily Habits Checklist (November 7 – 27): Travel is the opposite of habit

daily-habits-checklist-nov-7-27

Writing of the Habit Driven Life continues. I have no idea what I’ll do with the finished draft. Just want to prove (to myself) that I can write 200 more-or-less related pages. It’s almost entirely a mental battle.

Writing at Ueshima Coffee

Didn’t reach my personal goal of 80% in any week. Traveled a lot. But travel is almost the exact opposite of habit. Maybe that’s the point?

Oh, and if I want to do something hard, I must do it in the morning. Meditation and running are two prominent examples. If I don’t meditate or run before noon, the chance of them being done drops by 50% or more. The afternoon and evening can be productive, but I don’t have the same discipline / grit / willpower. Which makes waking up early even more important. Am I just getting tired as the day unfolds? Or is something else going on?

Thanks for reading! Here’s an explanation of how and why I track my daily habits. And here’s a starter template if you’d like to create your own. You can download it in Excel, PDF, etc.

What habits do you monitor? Which habits would you like to develop? Email me anytime.

Daily Habits Checklist (October 3 – 16)

Daily Habits Checklist October 3 - 16

If you’d like to start your own checklist, here’s a simple template. You’ll notice that I use a green letter x in addition to a green colored cell because, from what I know, you need some content inside a cell to “count it” in Google docs. Hope it’s helpful. If you change it, improve it, personalize it, let me know, I’d love to see.

Notes for these 2 weeks:

  • Overall, a solid cycle. Both weeks surpassed my 80% goal. But I still drink too much. Most major slips, if not due to travel, are due to alcohol. The hangovers. The hangovers.
  • for October’s Giving Habit, I donated to Dan Carlin and to Coin Center. I’m an active listener of Dan Carlin’s podcasts Hardcore History and Common Sense, and a big supporter of bitcoin as a technology to democratize finance and increase innovation in money
  • My evening routine now looks like: tidy the house, wash the dishes, choose tomorrow’s outfit, and write tomorrow’s goals. This doesn’t include existing habits like flossing and reading. I’m testing whether a more purposeful, planned pre-sleep routine will increase my ability to wind down from the day, decrease time-to-sleep, and improve sleep quality
  • I removed the daily habit of “publish something”. Usually this means a blog post. For some time now this hasn’t seemed the right metric to measure my content production. Instead, I’d like to write longer, deeper, less frequent content
  • Meditating for 15 minutes a day, despite being just a five minute increase from the old goal of 10 minutes, has been harder to sustain than a larger bump in daily writing time, from 1.5 hours to 2 hours. Perhaps not surprising that relative time matters as much as absolute time, in the same way that an hour with a loved one feels like minutes and a two minute sprint feels like hours. Meditation is flat out hard. No way around it. But the effect is enormous, too. At this point it’s almost a cliche to say how powerful the practice can be, but after 3 years of experience, my faith has only grown

Thanks for reading! Here’s an explanation of how and why I track my daily habits. And here’s a starter template if you’d like to create your own.

What habits do you monitor? Which habits would you like to develop? Email me anytime.

Good Habits Checklist: June 20 – July 3

Good Habits Checklist

Two good weeks. Were it not for a 14-hour Monday flight to Taipei, I would have reached my target of 80% for both weeks. I don’t expect this kind of performance to continue. There’s usually a boost that comes from travel, from being in a new city. Like the start of a new relationship: extra energy, extra promise. But the grit and grind of reality hits us all.

Singing is my least consistent habit. When I take weekly voice lessons, I can sustain 30 minutes of daily practice. But without that accountability, I soon stop. So, the fix is simple: resume lessons!

Thanks for following along. What are your habits? How do you grade yourself? Email me anytime.

Daily Habits Checklist: March 7-13

daily habits checklist, march 7-13

  • This was my best week yet (don’t worry, I don’t sustain this pace. March 14-20 is much worse)
  • I’m reminded again of the need to spend at least one hour on an activity if you want to improve your performance and create a habit
  • The daily checklist has improved my performance. Probably common sense…it ups the stakes, it becomes a public commitment, and a continual reminder. Yes, maintaining the checklist takes time and effort and can feel a hassle, but so far has been worth the investment
  • Each of my habits has one reliable trigger. When I fail to setup the trigger, the habit usually fails. For example, my singing trigger is to take a singing lesson. Seems obvious but is quite effective. When I take a lesson that week, I practice a lot more (before and after the lesson). With writing, my trigger is a quiet morning. I also must start to write before working on anything else, like emails. If I create that calm morning environment and begin writing, I can almost always write for an hour. For challenging habits, I need to identify these triggers. For example, how do I reliably wake before 8am??Struggling with that one!

Why do I track all this stuff? Click here. And here’s my performance last week.

Thanks for reading! What are your habits? How do you track them? I’d love to hear from you.