The last year was more about honing and applying a lot of the this project’s productivity framework as outlined in my old post, The Elements of Change: A Grand Unified Theory of Self-Help. Here are some of the highlights:

Habits
-Created a Planning Superhabit

Personal Records, Challenges, and New Highs
-Successfully completed a 90 days of clean eating challenge
-Completed a 90 day no alcohol challenge
-Started a 90 days of tally clicking cynicism challenge which I’m in the midst of (second month).
-Finished rewriting my proposal (my third)
-Went to Disneyland and meditated on every ride I went on (and I tried to go on them all)
-Applied for a grant
-Hit day 2000 of recording in this project
-Hit 2000 days of meditation
-Hit 1000 days of mobilizing

Publishing
-Published an article on horror and meditation for Tricycle
-Got articles commissioned in 3 top tier outlets (my first) - to be published in the next year
-Worked on consistently pitching and following up on top tier U.S. outlets
-Collected, printed out, and pinned all of my rejections in an attempt to shoot for 100 rejections

Theories and Experiments
-My crown jewel this year was uncovering A Better Way to Write, a system that applies all of this behavioral science to writing, joining elements from the process theory of composition, the elements of change, advertising agents, the Poynter Institute, books, articles, courses, and a decade of writer’s block. It has utterly changed the way I write and is a true game changer.
-Theorized about intentional imperfection and planned mediocrity in long-term goal setting
-I started experimenting with overcoming the task switching cost through watching short videos
-Tested out a rudimentary ego depletion recuperation test

Learning
-Went on two long seminars/retreats with a Tibetan meditation group - one on Chöd and the other on the Bardo
-Attempted the faster EFT meditation
-Started going to a rock climbing gym

Attempted and Failed
-Attempted to dip my toe into Strong Lifts - but failed to continue. It’s something I want to get into this next year
-A lot of my semi-permanent vice removal strategies fell a part, though only after a lot of tangent issues - sickness, travel, holidays, etc.
-Started experimenting with fasting
-Fell of the wagon with exercise and mobilizing recently during the holiday season, mostly because I hit a massive plateau with weight loss.

Travel
-Traveled to Grand Rapids, Austin, Dallas, and College Station
-Went on a road trip to West Texas and then on up to New Mexico
-Went on a massive road trip and camped for the first time and visited 4 national parks – Grand Tetons, Redwoods, Yellowstone, Crater Lake

Miscellaneous/Application
-Got a beautiful 110 year old tally clicker
-Had the best 40th birthday anyone could have
-I got a glimpse of what true control looks like on a trip to College Station while continuing along my no beer and clean eating challenge. Despite mourning a friend and having an intense series of social interactions, I ate clean, drank very little (and no beer) while every emotional trigger discharged. With proper structures of behavioral buttressing in place, remarkable amounts of control are possible, even by someone (like myself) with very little natural self control
-Used my planning habit to completely plan 3 trips (a first for me)
-Used planning to almost finished a second proposal while working on outputting my first
-Experimented wth hacking culture to create my own tantric Christmas ceremony
-Started compacting my routine - meditation between writing sets, writing while at the rock climbing gym
-Used mobilizing, using Lydia’s mobilization glove, to heal a hand tendon injury
-Took several blood tests to track marked Improvement from eating and drinking challenges

Putting Myself Out There
-Fielded some good questions on starting meditation
-I got two people on my tally clicking bandwagon, and another guy from Australia apparently heard about it from a friend and got a tally counter.
-Helped Lydia through a flawless 90 day eating challenge - she said that for her and her issues with food, it was almost easy
-I’ve started to become a more positive person to the people around me, specifically my family and Lydia
-Attended my first writer’s conference, which was eye opening
-Joined meetings in Houston - Stoics, Tibetan meditation, the Theosophical Society, The Houston Occult Society, a maker’s space, and the Oddfellows, among others.
-Joined online groups on writing, and fielded questions on the writing process
-Started my email newsletter

This has all been really great. The training of the mind especially heralds a lot of fundamental changes that I hope come to fruition in 2020.

In the next year I’d also like to focus on:
-Tally clicking more emotional issues like reinforcing optimism and countering depression and jealousy
-Making my routine more efficient and compact
-Creating a balance between hedonism and asceticism with respects to vice removal
-Advancing meditation even further by applying more behavioral science to the practice
-Sending out another book proposal and working on another one
-Figuring out a smooth cadence with writing and pitching to continuously have writing magazine work
-Dip my toes back into travel writing
-Dip my toes back into travel, but in a more meaningful, project and subject oriented way
-Building a robust and consistent social media campaign
-Attempting to figure out how to behaviorally “love what you do” - something I think is pretty common advice, but hasn’t really been concretely explored in productivity

photocred: fireworks by Kumar Appaiah