The Science of Self-Help

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Ratcheting Specifics

On my trip to Dallas I’ve done pretty well, but because my food choices have been poor, it’s once again led to thinking about the specifics of daily minimums when traveling -  as well as ratcheting.

Here was the list in my own head about ratcheting structures for current habits:
Fixed meditation: anchoring and tantric transformation –> vipassana and jhana
Bodyweight exercises: 2 pushups –> 2 typewriter pushups
Writing: 50 words –> 200 words
Dynamic meditation: 20 minutes –> 1 hour

What’s left out is a clear minimal for eating, marketing, and if it’s possible to have a daily minimal for recording. And this is important, because I’ve noticed that not having a clearly distinguished line between failure and completion is an anathema to this project. You never know when you’ve won, and things just start to break down.

For marketing I’ve gone back and forth between doing a time or just one actionable task. I don’t like time requirements - they feel harder to grasp onto. An actionable task could be reading about marketing, doing research, or just doing one thing - lately that’s been folded into my writing editing for tasks needed to launch my new website.

Eating is really hard. I think any line drawn in the sand is better than none. If it’s just one meal a day that’s clean, so be it. That could be minutely increased later to one clean meal and one glass of water instead of a bar drink, then two clean meals, etc, etc.

I have a friend that became vegetarian. What I like about him is that he just owns it. He doesn’t eat meat, period, whether or not he’s traveling or not. Why can’t I work up to that as well?

Recording can be ratcheted. I think a note at the end of the day even if it’s not fully taking the SRHI could be one. Another could be learning to take it from memory, like I’ve discussed before.