Day 542 Record Keeping (52)
Day 511 Fixed Meditation (80)
Day 457 Bodyweight Exercise (6 typewriter pushups - 65)
Day 384 Writing (53)
Day 557 Eating (65)
Good sleep, ok wakeup. Depressed.

How Mastery Can Adversely Affect Habit
I’ve lately been noticing how my once absolutely rock solid superhabits have become torn lose by pushing for mastery. But what’s even more interesting on closer inspection is how day-to-day the techniques I use to push mastery interfere with the solidity of habits.

Take for example my recent run. I’ve been meditating every morning after getting up from bed, and after my recent hiatus from recording, I’ve got this as my daily SRHI for fixed meditation:

Looks awesome at first. I continue with my normal course of meditating right after waking up. So I’m scoring perfectly. Mid-way through the week I decide to switch up my schedule. Why? Because I’m pushing writing, and after I do my meditation, I feel drained to really do my writing habit.

It makes sense, from a mastery perspective, to switch up my schedule to do writing first. But as you can plainly see, this has caused turbulence in my SRHI scores for meditation later on in the week.

If I look into the actual SRHI test, I notice that it’s the automaticity questions that are really getting me. I can’t honestly say it’s automatic, because the habit has been pegged to the mornings. When I do my writing, THEN meditate, there’s something off. It’s not automatic, I have to think about it.

This is all ok at this level - my meditation has only gone down a few points, and I”m sure it’ll level out. But for other less solid habits this can cause serious problems down the road.

My writing habit, which was incredibly strong, has fallen a part specifically because of hard knocks from another vector - just pushing the habit. Eating has always been unstable because it’s not pegged to anything, it’s a floating habit.

I have a feeling that skillfully dealing with these protuberances are at the heart of success in this entire project.

Another way to “fall in love” with the process is through ritual.

Ever feel just …GOOD with doing something ritualistic? I love how rituals and traditions do that. They allow you an excuse, an entrance point in order to access greater sensory perception and joy of what could be a mediocre experience. It’s connoisseur-ship that makes the event “sticky.”

I feel that ritual can be an entrance point to being in the moment. I understand how you can do that with tea or wine, but how do you apply that to writing? Or marketing? How do you view a task in the now without heavily eyeing the future?

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/the-power-of-ritual-conquer-procrastination-time-wasters-and-laziness.html

Lifehacker seems to agree with me on this - the above article, The Power of Ritual, is on the right track but there’s very little in the article to distinguish it from a habit.

http://writeitsideways.com/writing-rituals/

This article gets into the differences between the two, specifically with writing. In it the article outlines a three part structure to ritual:

Anthropologists Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner observed that ritual has three phases:
Separation from everyday activities.
Transition to an unstructured or “liminal” reality, where the participant becomes a walker between the worlds, a traveler at the threshold. (The word “liminal” comes from the Latin limen, meaning “threshold.”) Writing is the ultimate liminal reality.
Reassimilation into normal life, but more deeply than before.

Obviously there are a lot of examples of ritual - There’s even a book on it

http://www.amazon.com/Daily-Rituals-How-Artists-Work/dp/0307273601

The question is: How do I create my own so it emphasizes living in the moment and “falling in love with the process?

Day 542 & How Mastery Can Adversely Affect Habit

The Dark Night Part IV: Ritual