habits checklist

Daily Habits Checklist #106 (August 5 to September 1)

The 5-day gap in week 2 is hard to explain. I simply forgot to track. Think I was too “heads down” working on stuff, which is good and bad?

The last 10 days of the month was spent in Finland / Iceland on vacation, but found some time to exercise / work / habit. Somewhat unusual, as more commonly, any sort of travel – especially international – takes a wrecking ball to even my most consistent routines.

Look forward to getting back on track!

Daily Habits Checklist #104 (June 3 to June 30)

I’d give myself a B grade for these 4 weeks. In areas like meditation and reading, I wasn’t as consistent as I’d have liked.

I want to make some big changes to the checklist. In particular to concentrate more on helping other people, instead of just self-improvement and self-generative activities. For example, daily volunteer work would be great, but probably impractical. If I did it weekly, how should I keep track? And what kinds of social or philanthropic work could I do every day?

Also – I’m spending a lot of time in Vietnam now if you’re ever in the broader SE Asia area :)

Also also – I’d highly encourage you to watch the new Korean movie Parasite. A heart rending genre bender. Director Bong Joon Ho continues to evolve and amaze.

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.

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.

Daily Habits Checklist: February 29-March 6

Daily Habits Checklist February 29-March 6

Another solid week, although I still didn’t sing enough (I resumed voice lessons on Friday and this habit should improve)
I’ve noticed that some habits are linked. For example when I exercise, I also take a cold shower after. And when I wake early, I complete more habits than on other days. This is similar to the concept of keystone habits
I used to target two hours of writing a day. Now I aim for one hour of writing (of the open ended variety), and spend the extra time to blog, sing, and write music lyrics

Why am I doing all this crazy tracking? Read this. And here’s last week.

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