Day 240 & Back from Destroyed Schedule
Day 240 Record Keeping
Day 208 Fixed Meditation
Day 154 Bodyweight Exercise (1x8 burpees)
Day 81 Writing = 62
Day 254 Eating = 63
Day 11 Work = 24
Horrible emotional control today. Back from travels. Back from finally getting my computer fixed. Back from overcoming the inertia of not having recorded in 8 days. My schedule is totally shot from all of this, and I’m rather pissed off about it.
I think the important thing is to keep calm and keep going. Having done so it’s important to analyze what went wrong.
1. I didn’t have a solid implementation intention on how to travel and do my habits.
When I went to England, I thought that I could record and would have time to record. I didn’t. This time in Germany it was a lighter schedule and I had my own room. My computer died. The universe is trying to tell me something - don’t ever trust a computer when traveling - ALWAYS GO LOW TECH.
2. When recovering don’t get overwhelmed.
The process of recovering from time away can get incredibly emotionally claustrophobic. I felt like I had failed and I had 20 things to do. Don’t focus on this. Remember that restarting is the most important thing - the numbers will pick up afterwards. Also focus on one thing at a time - the task right in front of you. So it’s not “I have to do my exercises, my work habit, and my fixed meditation” it should be “I woke up…first thing is my work - let’s do that."
3. The process is key
It’s easy to think in terms of progress of numbers and the project as small bits - i.e. how fast can I master the habit and form a superhabit. The point of this project isn’t ONE habit - it’s all of them. In forming all of them, I have to realize this is a bigger task than what others before me have done.
One of the things I hated about Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit was that he essentially focused on one thing - not eating sweets at work. My latest read - Minihabits by Stephen Guise - the author essentially focuses on a few - pushups being the outstanding one that I remember.
A more robust treatment is going to be a lot more difficult.
A useful mental exercise I read once was to look at the trajectory of a process and take it out across time dispassionately. Of COURSE I’m going to fail at this - I’m going to mess it up when it comes to travel, and since I travel a lot this is something I will have to grapple with. Of course computers fail and mess ups are going to happen.
But instead of seeing these as steps back, I need to start viewing them as learning about the whole process - as failure giving me the data to step forward.
The key to this whole project is consistency. The ideal day isn’t one where I perform the best - with 1,000 words or 20 one armed pushups - it’s setting up a day where I hit my daily practice of habits automatically and as fluidly as possible in order to highly increase the percentage of success in anything in the future. And even though it’s what this project is based on, it is so incredibly difficult to focus on this type of process oriented thinking.