DAY 1000 !!!!!

Day 1000 Record Keeping
Day 972 Fixed Meditation (DID NOT DO)
Day 846 Writing (1 round/30)
Day 386 Rowing (DID NOT DO)
Day 127 Mobility/Stretching (neck stretch with mom)
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Eating
Day 224 Pantry Check (DID NOT DO)
Day 222 Food Recording (DID NOT DO)
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Early to Rise
Day 155 Water (DID NOT DO)
Day 155 Sleep Recording  (DID NOT DO)
Day 126 Bedtime Curfew 66
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Great sleep. Traveled back home to Texas, arrived over the weekend. It’s been a 1,000 days of recording! I’m very proud, and very bitter.

I’ve been trying to get my mom to start recording as a base for a solid meditation habit - yesterday I emphasized creating a solid recording habit, because, oddly enough, just recording your recording makes a huge difference in sticking to any routine. So more than anything, I have to take pride in that - that even if today’s behaviors weren’t all accomplished, despite a lot of travel and a lot of interruptions, I recorded.

But I wanted my 1000th day to be smooth - a perfect day of a perfect set of flowing routines. Today was not that. I had difficulty starting my writing, I didn’t have time to exercise. Pantry check, food recording, water, sleep recording - all of that was thrown out of joint today. And the jet lag has made everything just a hair more difficult to focus on and do.

The day started well enough - traveling this direction naturally has me up early. But I wanted to talk to my mom, so I was less focused. I offered to drive her downtown, which took hours (since it’s Houston), and I hung out at the kitchen table afterwards, inviting a great conversation with my dad - to the detriment of my writing.

I don’t regret those things. And perhaps that’s what I learned the most, through the anger at the inability to force circumstances towards habit completion: That these routines are my tool - to be used, or, like today, to be dropped for greater goals -  like reconnecting with people after a year and a half abroad.

My mom said that being driven was really appreciated; it relaxed her on a day when she needed it. That’s got to count for something.

Day 617 & NaNoWriMo

Day 617 Record Keeping (25)
Day 586 Fixed Meditation (60)
Day 459 Writing (58)
Day 3 Rowing (35)
Day 632 Eating (50)
Bad sleep, great wakeup. 

NaNoWriMo
This month I’m doing NaNoWriMo specifically for this project. It’s been really exiting going from the very beginning and seeing how much I’ve progressed. I hope to be able to see exactly what information I need with what I’ve covered in the blog, and what I can do to fill those missing bits in.

This is the first day I’ve managed to record from my huge swatch of missing habits. But hey, that’s a part of the project just as much as staying on track. I’m really pushing writing right now, so I’m interested how that strain will affect other habits that I’m trying to recover. I’m also interested to see how fast the habits will “snap back.”

Day 538 & Current Status (I’m Back!)

Day 538 Record Keeping (55) 
Day 507 Fixed Meditation (84)
Day 453 Bodyweight Exercise (3 typewriter pushups - 74)
Day 380 Writing (59)
Day 553 Eating (66)
Bad sleep, bad wakeup.

Current Status (I’m Back!)
In the last several weeks I moved to Spain. Dealt with finding an apartment. A week later, just when I was acclimatizing to the time difference, I left for India. Adjusted to the time zone there and after 10 days returned to Spain. Dealt with paperwork for residency. It’s been a week and I’m finally back!

Needless to say, this has recked havoc on my habits. I had very spotty internet in India, and somehow regularly got into a quadphasic sleep pattern, sleeping for four hours twice a day, which was incredibly discombobulating.

My record keeping is shot. Bodyweight writing, shot (the next article on my list was one I needed to do some heavy internet research for). Eating, shot - there really wasn’t much choice as to what to eat there. But surprisingly my basic bodyweight exercises have been pretty stable, AND my fixed meditation has been incredible. Made some real progress there, and got a perfect score on the SRHI today.

Not too shabby despite extreme circumstances.

I took stock today, and decided that what is best for me is to just nail my habits this week. I’m back to my basic minimums:

-2 typewriter pushups for bodyweight training
-basic meditation. I can regularly get to 3rd jhana, but I’ll settle for quality timed durations (starting with 20 minutes) of first.
-basic writing - that is 50 words on an article for work or any amount of editing

I’ll start pushing next week. On that note, today a few points came up:

-I can feel vortex forces ripping at me - I want to do everything NOW. One possible solution would be to push one habit and change what I push the next day on an alternating schedule. Lydia has done something like this and it seems to work by preventing those psychological forces from ripping apart her habits.

So, instead of selecting on thing, say writing, to push for a few weeks, I would push write on day 1, bodyweight exercises day 2, and repeat.

-Writing is a real problem right now - it’s always been tenuous - I think I went too far too fast. The step up from writing x amount of words to writing x amount of a work-related paper was too much. I didn’t sufficiently form a “ledge” like I did transitioning from pushups to typewriter pushups.

One way around this would be to treat doing x amount of work-related words as “pushing mastery”.

Also I can switch up my habit order, doing writing as soon as I get out of bed.

I’ve recently been doing meditation, which is great, but today I pushed it hard and was utterly exhausted. Depressing and frustrating in the moment, utterly forseeable in hindsight.

I think it’s really really important to make sure I know where I’m at, and what the next ledge is at all times (and I feel this should be emphasized when improving upon Timothy Ferriss’ DiSSS protocol). Having adequate metrics and a pathway to the next ledge prevents stagnation, and I feel that I’m having severe problems with that nowadays, even despite the chaotic moving/travel situations.

There’s a lot of talk on Reddit, Quora, and random online articles about all this. But what I have to remember is though the advice being given is good, it’s all about one habit. I’m now entering that intermediate stage of this project of dealing with the dissonant harmonics of trying to level up multiple habits to mastery, and that’s no easy task.