Daily Minimums

To continue from my last post, I’m going to set forth daily minimums for each habit:
Record Keeping: Don’t take the SRHI, just record if I did the action or not
Fixed Meditation: 10 minutes of meditation
Exercise: 2 typewriter pushups
Writing: Opening up my next project and writing one word.

When I look at all these, these are all very do-able. To be more accurate, the key is to make them so ridiculously small that you can’t NOT do them.

I think about the hardest of these right now - writing. It might too minimal, but honestly that process of just opening up my next project takes me so much effort to do. If I’ve done that, I often do a lot more. I have to ask myself - on a completely depleted day, could I do it? The answer is yes in this, and with all the other minimums.

UPDATE: The writing thing is working really well. I’ve always had a severe problem starting writing. With my “50 words of anything” in the beginning of the writing habit, I busted past that initial starting fear. This resulted in me on some days busting past 13,000 words a day and finishing NaNoWriMo in a week instead of a month. 

Great.

When I switched to “doing a bit of work related writing” as my minimum I stalled out bad. If I analyze it in the micromoments, I get up, and I  feel fear. I feel like I don’t want to do this because I’m thinking of how much I need to catch up on and do. I hinge it on my entire career and life. It takes an immense amount of energy to get over that initial hurdle to just start. It’s like getting up the energy to leap a chasm where you think you might not make it to the other side.

Now with this new minimum, I still wake up with that fear and dread and the desire to not do it. But as I feel that in my mind I’m automatically going to my workspace, opening up my files and starting.

That chasm gets smaller and smaller. And that’s really the key of TinyHabits - it makes that chasm get smaller until it isn’t a problem anymore, it’s just automatic. 

And this specific TinyHabit is making that automaticity occur like it’s never occurred before. 

The last thing I’ll say is that this is so hard to do.  It’s hard to see doing something so small as being successful. You WANT to do more. But the key isn’t output, it’s fighting that chasm. If I had worked on this years ago, I might’ve been at a different spot now, because it’s that workflow that’s the key to eventually getting that output.

Strategies Towards Skill Mastery

photocred: Alexandre Keledjian

I’ve been struggling a lot lately with Skill Mastery.

I have no problem creating a habit. But moving forward with skills is another story. 

It all started when my mom talked to me about why I didn’t try mastering one skill and then just moving on. It stayed with me….why aren’t I doing that? And what should I be doing? Should I be focusing on one thing or should I be expanding to encompass the full complement of what I think of as basic habits?

On one hand, basic habits back each other up. Writing and marketing are great complements, as are eating right and exercising. Some habits just need that - habits with no skill mastery. But on the other hand I can’t shake the sense that I’m not progressing enough. I see a friend who got into weight lifting and is now ripped. Another who is into writing and is now publishing a lot.

My conclusion is that I need more than one habit. The point of this project isn’t to do one thing and then move on. It’s to do many things at once - so how can I strategize to move forward in skills.

I’ve talked about this in a recent post, but I believe it’s about strictly maintaining all habits to daily minimums and dialing up one skill. I envision it as a line of attack…like Go, skill mastery, habit acquisition, and regimentation involves multiple fronts and battles.

Strictness is important - regimentation becomes incredibly hard when Endurance and Willpower are leaking out, even in tasks that are easier or addictive. I enjoy meditating, and I often do more, but when I get to my skill I want to really improve - in this case, writing - I don’t have the energy.

So here’s my overall daily minimals:

Fixed Meditation: One bout of single pointedness

Bodyweights: 2 typewriter pushups or bridges

Dynamic Meditation: 20 minutes

Marketing: 1 action-oriented task

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.