Day 244 & More Thoughts on Regimented Mental Frame

Day 244 Record Keeping
Day 212 Fixed Meditation 
Day 158 Bodyweight Exercise  (2x8 elevated pushups, 1x4 extremely close set pushups, 2x3 straight leg bent knee inverted rows, 1x5 bkir)
Day 85 Writing = 67
Day 258 Eating = 67
Day 15 Work = 51
Great sleep, great wakeup. Trying to work up to diamond pushups again - elevated pushups aren’t very hard and just work out my shoulders more. Trying to work up to full bent knee inverted rows on the pullup bar.

More Thoughts on Regimented Mental Frame
Yesterday I talked about my objective of focusing on one task at a time and switching between tasks in a relaxed state with the idea that the less emotional I am the more ingrained a task is as a habit. This is basically Regimentation - something I initially talked about before. (And I just realized I have implemented a regimentation microcycle into my work habit by only doing 15 minutes at the beginning - so these random thoughts of mine eventually do come back…even if I don’t recognize it!)

Yesterday I went to bed and woke up this morning in a pretty bad mood. Most of my bad moods upon wakeup have to do with not getting enough done. Last night I had done all my tasks but started taking my mind out to the future, how much stuff I want to accomplish (much of it having to do with later stages of this project) and how small and almost miniscule my advances have been. When I get this way, I tend to lock up - when I wake up this way everything moves in slow motion - I’ve got gunk in my habit forming gears.

So I started thinking about other aspects of the project this morning. That focusing on these boring things day in and day out is exactly what distilled progress is. That’s not to say that progress can’t happen in leaps and bounds - but the percentage chance of me, say, being a published author, comes from a long hours working on writing - even just forming the habit of writing - day by day.

This is a very hard mental frame for me to get into. To quote one of my favorite bands of all time, Queen “I want it all…..and I want it NOW!”

Odd that most of us have no problems toiling away at a video game to level up - but I really think time is of a factor - it doesn’t take years to do it and the scale adapts - it’s easier to level up at first, and there is a psychological snowball effect. Sure it takes a long time to max out that last skill, but you’ve had tons of experience of knowing that if you toil away you will get rewards. And maybe that should be built in to this project - start with small easy to develop habits so you know the payoff of harder habits. I don’t know.

Today I managed to get back on track mentally. It’s something I need to really focus on as this project continues.

Day 10 and more on Microcycles and Regimentation

SRHI=45

Horrible night sleep - couldn’t get to sleep until it was light outside due to mosquitos. I have a mosquito problem here.

Today is the first day I feel remotely automatic about the action. In the previous days I “caught” myself. Today I felt groggy but it felt more like just going through motions, which to me is a marker of a habituation starting to coalesce. 

The more and more I do this regimentation microcycle thing the more it feels right.  It feels as though it hits two things simultaneously.

Benefits so far: 

1. It lowers the threshold to start a task, preventing procastination
2. It gets me “addicted” to a task - pulls me in yet I’m ripped away from it prematurely, instilling a desire for me to go back to it later.
3. It gives me a boost - there are good feelings from the beginning of the day, almost fooling me into thinking I’ve accomplished a lot because I’ve started and touched on multiple projects I would have just procrastinated on.
4. it legitimately makes me feel good, because some things really don’t take that long.
5. racing the clock initially (if for example, I set a microcycle of 5 minutes per task) kickstarts the addiction. I start my clock before any setup - so if I have to load an email it counts in that 5 minutes. This seems like a side issue, but for me, the beginning simple tasks - getting the email, downloading the document, loading up the writing prompt - are what triggers my procrastination - it becomes a hassle to do those beginning tasks. With a small window of time I’m racing the clock - I’m actually thinking to  myself “hurry up email, load!” - thereby viewing those beginning tasks as an easily surmountable obstacle to get out of the way rather than a hassle that prevents me from getting to the meat of the task.

Day 9

SRHI=41

Great sleep, but felt groggy in the morning

Microcycle Priming

I ran an experiment yesterday where I did a number of tasks - both  normal things I wanted to do and things that I had been procrastinating on. I did all these tasks for a short period of time to figure to figure out how hard it was to move from one task to another. The idea is that ideally regimentation is an additional skill I want to learn - the process of moving smoothly from one task to another with no emotional carryover.

One thing I found is that even with a short amount of time doing the task it felt “sticky” - addictive - I found it hard to tear myself away from the task. I think this is a  good thing that should be explored because addiction is what runs gamification - gamification uses addiction to make skill acquisition…well…addictive.

Something that bears more experimentation.