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Just saw this article on varying practice for progressing in music mastery. The article is by Noa Kageyama who’s blog, Bulletproof Musician, focuses on research-based tips to tackling everything related to music, from stage fright to efficient practice.

The article lists three tips:

1) Distributing practice - taking small chunks and practicing throughout the day
2) Variable practice - practicing a passage in different ways
3) Interleaved practice - take a few bits that need practice, and cycle them

This is all really interesting in the context of this project. A long long time ago, I discussed Distributing Practice under the guise of Pavel’s “greasing the groove.” I also touched on Interleaved Practice, but I called it “Microcycles” (here, here, and here).

Back then I was trying to attribute Distributive Practice to habit formation, and Interleaved Practice to regimentation. What’s interesting is that it really didn’t work for me. But I never thought to instead apply these to Mastery like Kageyama does.

The article recommends two books - The Talent Book, by Daniel Coyle, and Making it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, by Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel, two books I’ve already had on my to-read list.

Day 552

Day 552 Record Keeping (68)
Day 521 Fixed Meditation
Day 467 Bodyweight Exercise (6 rounds tabatas - 68)
Day 394 Writing (66)
Day 567 Eating (73)
Ok sleep, good wakeup. Talked about why I missed Day 547, then got busy and didn’t record Day 549 despite doing all the habits. Decided on daily minimums and next shelves for all my habits - will write about them soon. Writing is getting good now that I have established my daily minimum in my head - it is really getting automatic. Often times I’ll sit down and bring up my work files when not really wanting to. This is really good and a big thing in my writing practice - will write about this more in detail as well. I did a Tabata today, and I’m curious how this will affect my regimentation tomorrow.

Day 427

Day 427 Record Keeping
Day 396 Fixed Meditation
Day 342 Bodyweight Exercise (FULL 25 lb KBell Tabata)
Day 269 Writing (editing)
Day 442 Eating
Day 77 Dynamic Meditation = 78 (1 hour)
Day 24 Marketing = 73 (action + research)
Great sleep, great wakeup.  Excellent meditation, bodyweights. Cheat day for eating, and low will for marketing and writing. I think my threshold has been bad on days I do a full Tabata - I think I’ve naturally been cheating on those days, which is completely fine. I felt very low control with marketing which really really depressed me - that and writing. I think it’s really necessary to write out a list of tasks in a planner so I don’t have any question of what the next task is. Without a metric it can feel like I’m lost - working but not feeling like I’m progressing. That’s what I’m hoping the planner will counter.

Dynamic Med Notes (1 hour 10 min):
x7 shoulders
x6 fidgeting
x2 anger/irritation arising
innumerable arisings of fear and frustration and depression

Day 369

Day 369 Record Keeping
Day 338 Fixed Meditation (brought up negativity, quelled it. HARD)
Day 284 Bodyweight Exercise (2X5 typewriter pushups - HARD)
Day 211 Writing (editing & submitting - HARD)
Day 384 Eating = 75
Day 141 Work = PAUSED
Day 19 Dynamic Meditation = 67 (1 hour)
Good sleep, good wakeup. Finally back after my three day hiatus after 1 full year of recording. Actually felt WORSE trying not to do these habits. Also ended up DOING several of the habits like meditation (fixed and dynamic) and writing. I’m focusing on making sure that every time I do a superhabit that I’m putting effort into it - hence the “HARD” in all bold next to several of them. I felt that I was entering a plateau on several so I’m pushing it. Looks like my work habit is on pause indefinitely. Which is great because it frees me up to work on my other habits - especially writing which needs to be kicked into higher gear. Also felt horrible in my eating the last couple days - it’s really the stick that has got my scores up in this - eating badly noticeably makes me feel horrible.

Dynamic Med Notes (1 hour):
x8 fidgeting
x2 negative arisings
Notes: I’ve boiled down my points as negative arising and fidgeting/shoulder rising. I think this might help clarify the points I need to work on.

Thinking about trying different tactics to prevent the arisings. Say, one day absorption, another day trying to imagine myself as a confident, worry free person (a la vajrayana), another day focusing on a state, another day practicing certain exercises. Not really too necessary now as it’s not even a habit, but something to think about in terms of regimenting the exercise in the future.

Day 246 & "Moduling"

Day 246 Record Keeping
Day 214 Fixed Meditation 
Day 160 Bodyweight Exercise  (3x8 burpees)
Day 87 Writing = 70 (60 words)
Day 260 Eating = 71
Day 17 Work = 66
Great sleep, great wakeup.

“Moduling”
Yesterday I talked about regimentation and about 4 phases of any given skill in this project. I want to talk a little bit more of what I’m calling, for lack of a better word, “Moduling.”

I find that a great deal of my stress and anxiety comes from worrying about the project as a whole. So instead of being precise and regimented, I worry incessantly about my writing habit or meditation habit throughout the entire day. I worry that I’m not doing enough. I imagine a time when I’m decent at writing or meditating or exercising and realize that I’m nowhere near there yet. So I fret about doing more.

This only leads to me losing the willpower and endurance that will get me there. It’s like seeing an impossible task as a whole, rather than seeing it as made up of manageable bits.

The reason I do this is because I’m worried about my moduling. Is what I’m doing today the proper dose that will make me grow? Do I have a schedule already mapped out of what that will be tomorrow and the day after?

Being assured of that proper scheduling allows me to not think about the task later in the day and to fully focus on it while I’m doing it. It’s the glue to regimentation. IF regimentation is the ability to do multiple tasks at their alotted time, then modulation - figuring out what to do in that time in advance - makes it emotionally possible.

Focusing on this mentally in general - focusing one task at a time and throwing it away for the rest of the day - is making me feel energized. And to keep that ability I need proper modulation.

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.

Day 7, Batman and Regimentation

SRHI=33

Couldn’t sleep last night…caught a couple ZZs after it got light outside.

I was thinking about Batman since I’m a huge Batman fan. A lot of people say that he’s not a SUPER hero because he has no super powers. But that’s not exactly true.

His super power is self discipline.

Not only is he able to practice skills across many disciplines over and over across time past setbacks, thereby displaying willpower, endurance, and grit, but he’s also able to keep these practices separate. He’s able to, at 5 pm, workout, and smoothly shift to, say, working another skill at 9 pm.

And more importantly he’s able to separate these things mentally - he’s not worrying about his 5 pm workout after his scheduled time. He just does it, and leaves it after the slot for the day is done. This is a different skill - regimentation.

We learn a lot of skills because they are forced upon us. In the military or in school there is no choice, and we become very good at certain tasks because we have to do them at a certain time and then leave them. But this becomes very difficult in transitions like going to college. High school athletes who were once very regimented suddenly gain weight, and many, no matter their attempts, can’t seem to get back on course.

And I think this is an important aspect of this project - to figure out how to self impose discipline and grit and regimentation so that  you can automatically do tasks over time without the psychological gobbledygook that gets in the way of skill acquisition over the years.