There are strategies that tend to have better success rates than others—and to be clear, I think this blog post gives good advice—but I'm suspicious of any "successful" strategy that is merely the most recent in a long line of attempts.
I think people change slowly—much more slowly than we usually assume. Every time you try something to fix your life and you fail, you actually make a little bit of progress on yourself, just not enough to switch your behavior into something recognizably better. When you try a new strategy and succeed, there is a strong chance that you would not have been successful had you not made all of that incremental progress on yourself from all your failures. That's why it's important to never give up on yourself.
I've had "breakthroughs" that were basically just me trying the same thing I tried (and failed at) years earlier. The difference was that I'd gotten stronger in subtle ways over that time. Then, 6 months later, I'm back to my old habits. This is depressing, but when I remember that this is the first time I was able to stick with something for months instead of weeks, I realize I've actually made progress on myself.
Even though this isn't strictly about productivity, I think the best lesson from OP is that things get easier as you practice them. This seems obvious, but when we talk about building skills, we often frame it as us rising to the challenge. I.e., there's this very hard thing we want to do, and we need to become stronger to be able to do it. This isn't wrong per se, but I think it's bad for motivation because it frames progress as doing as doing increasingly more difficult things. Instead of thinking about getting better, I think it's more helpful to frame progress as things becoming easier. No matter how weak you feel you are, the things you find difficult in life will become easier as you work on them.
You're quite right. It's amazing what one can accomplish if one lets oneself be satisfied what incremental progress, no matter how small.
For example, I dislike doing pullups. Many times over the decades, I embarked on a program of daily doing as many pullups as I could. I failed because it just took too much willpower.
I finally hit on a solution. I started with doing 3 pullups a day. 3 pullups are easy. It didn't take much willpower at all. After a few months, I "graduated" to 4, which then was just as easy. After several years, I am now up to 10, which is easy, and something I had kept failing at before.
You might think "why wait several years", but my goal with this is long term, so that doesn't bother me.
"Instead of thinking about getting better, I think it's more helpful to frame progress as things becoming easier." That's a huge insight when you actually become able to stick to habits over the long haul.
Doing all those things I mentioned in the article aren't just possible now, they're easier and in fact feel better than my routine before. I wish someone had told me this years ago... for some reason I thought that routines just continued to be hard forever, because I usually gave up before the point where they became easy.
This heavily resonates. I want to add a small tip to your excellent formulation:
Identify your "life long practices" and try to find room to work on them in every day, week or month cycle.
Life long practices are sometimes discovered and sometimes chosen.
Personally, I lift them from the stories I tell myself and then slowly accept them as descriptions of me. This makes it easier to iterate (i.e. fail), you draw strength from having accepted yourself as someone who does this thing and that gives you the patience to not give up as easily.
Of course this patience develops over time. For example, programming is something I have been coming back to, with increasing frequency, for multiple years now.. and it's only recently that I am able to do it every day.
Regarding getting better vs becoming easier, I think that touches on something orthogonal to patience which is being able to set reasonable goals for each session and putting the original lofty goals (that get refined rather than dismissed) to the back of your mind. This is your skill of evaluation - it develops with experience and is also a great enabler of iteration.
I hate running. I'd do it because it seems like the easiest way for me to get a cardio workout to hopefully live longer. But I couldn't get past some kind of 4 mile barrier in my head. It was just too boring. But I started pushing myself like 10 more feet every run. Why not just go to that next bench, that next tree I told myself. I'd make sure to even stop myself if I was feeling good. "Nope, don't go any further or I'll have to go even further tomorrow." It took a long time obviously, and eventually I started enjoying the runs more and more. The 10 foot limit got pushed longer. But I finally got to 11 miles and began to understand what everyone is enjoying in these long runs. Now I LOVE 11 mile runs and am sad I've had to stop doing them (covid related time yada yada).
And now I apply this pattern to a lot of things. I hate waking up early. Well... after months of inching up the wake up alarm I'm now a consistent 5:30am riser and dig the early quiet morning productivity.
This small, continuous, incremental that you barely notice stuff is a powerful weapon.
For me it took having a friend. We started out as two fat guys, bringing beer on our lazy hikes. Slowly we started competing with each other, trying not to let the other one get too far ahead. Over 2 years we went from lazy fat guys to pulling 12-25 mile hikes and running as much as we could tolerate. I ended up in a shape I never would have imagined, being overweight and un-athletic most of my life.
James Clear's book, Atomic Habits (https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Habits-Proven-Build-Break/dp/0...), is exactly about this. Really small, continuous improvements snowball into something amazing over time. I got a lot of value out of reading it, so thought I'd mention it here.
I think this is why the Couch-to-5k plan seems to work pretty well for a lot of people at the early stages. Just that gradual increase in distance/time each time you run, and a couple of months later you're running for 30 minutes/ 5km non-stop and it feels pretty great. I then worked from there all the way up to doing a 10km every weekend and the feeling was amazing.
Unfortunately, after we had kids I got out of the habit, put a load of weight back on and am now back at the beginning. On the plus side, I know what I'm capable of if I take it slow and steady, and I have two more reasons to look after my health.
I also read The Oatmeal's "The Terrible and Wonderful Reasons I Run Long Distances", which really just described my relationship with running perfectly.
For me, the boredom is also aleviated by copious stacks of podcasts. It's kind of my mental relaxation time. Half an hour outside away from the child induced chaos (which I love, but you need a break from it sometimes).
Maybe it's just best to let go instead of trying to mini-max your life's productivity, train yourself like Pavlov's dogs with XYZ productivity systems, and guilt-shame yourself over each day you miss out on part of an evergrowing habit list of shoulda-coulda-woulda's.
Maybe procrastination is an emotional regulation problem and tying your self-worth to your productivity leads to more internal conflict between guilt of not doing enough vs fear of failure.
Maybe we could approach improvement out of a place of genuine interest or self-care, instead of treating ourselves like a computer on a cron schedule and then inevitably getting frustrated when we discover that we're human.
Yup. If you tie your self worth to your productivity then it makes emotionally difficult tasks even more difficult.
Ask yourself:
'Why do I want to make this change?'
'Why does doing this thing make me feel bad?'
The answer to the first question is just for you and it should be solid. If you don't believe it then it's not going to work. The answer to the second question is usually either because you have had a bad experience in the past or because it's enough out of your comfort zone that it challenges your identity. It takes a lot less than you would imagine to challenge your identity.
If you can work through these issues a little bit before you start on your journey of change and continue working on them as you go it will be a much smoother ride and you will be far less likely to give up. It involves being OK with negative emotion during the act and taking the time to process those feelings afterwards.
The cool thing is this doesn't just apply to productivity but anything you want to change in
your life. Sometimes you need change and sometimes you are just guilting yourself into doing things other people told you were good for you. That is why you start by asking 'why?'.
This is true. Setting goals for yourself can be effective so long as you don't beat yourself up too horribly if they fail. That's usually counterproductive--especially if the goal is to improve your mental health.
"A couple of months ago, I was a train wreck that ate too many cinnamon rolls and watched Netflix while laying in sweats on the couch. Yesterday, I ran 3 miles, did 40 minutes of yoga, meditated, ate steel cut oats with berries for breakfast, then turned on my favorite business podcast while I showered, all before work started."
Kudos to your success. Please do not get complacent. I had a similar brief transformation at the start of this year and felt on top of the world for a couple months.
Then I got Achilles tendonitis which made even walking extremely painful for about 6 weeks. My son's mom died after a long fight with cancer. That same week my current girlfriend was diagnosed with cancer. And then quarantine happened.
I let these events allow me to regress back to worse off than I was when I started. And it all felt so easy at first
Yeah it's easy to stick with this kind of thing for a few months when everything is going well.
The challenge is keeping it up beyond the few months when the novelty wears off, life gets in the way, and it becomes difficult.
I personally find that these kinds of things keep my interest for about about three months so I have to find ways to make progress towards goals while also changing whatever I'm doing enough to continue to hold my interesting. Examples might include changing my workout routine in a way that is different enough to hold my interest but similar enough to continue making progress. Or switch to learning a different style of guitar. Stuff like that.
I'm no expert, but one thing that seems to help me is exploiting my natural laziness and bad habits. For example, I got in the habit of getting a nice expresso during the day from a place that's about a mile's walk away. Kind of dumb, but it built a walk into my day that I pretty rarely missed.
Along the same lines, I chose a place to live that involved a fairly long walk to the train. In principle I could have started taking a cab to the station, but I'm just to lazy to make a change like that, and indeed that worked for years (until I moved).
And that's an important point about regression. For me good habits tend to break after about 2 weeks of non-compliance. Then it often ends up being months or even years before getting back on track. At which point it's like starting over.
There's no need to beat yourself up about it, or even call it "regression". You had capacity to make progress for a while, and you did. Then stuff happened, and you no longer had extra capacity. But you used the time wisely, and as you heal you'll still be in a better place than you otherwise might have been.
Similar story. I made good progress with running, until I wrecked my knee such that getting from bedroom to bathroom was difficult and painful and could only be done with support from walls. I couldn't leave home at all for a few days, and the next couple weeks after that were very slow limpy walks. It took weeks to heal. When it was finally ok, I started running carefully again and.. a week or two into it, wrecked my other knee. FML. This one wasn't so painful but took even longer to heal (pain would resurface every time I do as little as walk to the grocery store and back) and now I don't know if I dare ever run again. And it looks like I've lost dorsiflexion in the other foot.
Months of progress wiped just like that, and now I'm worse off than before I started running regularly.
Best part about getting to a certain level of fitness is that: 1.you know what's possible
2.your body can get back to that faster the second time, especially if it's not derailed by injury.
I share the same frustration with regressing back to where you started (or worse).
It seems like we all have a built-in set point for productivity. Some lucky people are just able to go, go, go, while those without such fortune are quite lazy and need pushing to do even basic tasks.
It's frustrating because you are always fighting against that regression to your set point. It takes energy, which you have less and less of as you get older. Life's hard.
Ugh, Achilles tendonitis had me in pain for YEARS. My tendon took on a lot of scar tissue. Debridement surgery didn’t seem to help. Eventually wearing some negative-heel shoes (those goofy MBTs) did it. So destructive to my shape in the meantime.
I had achilles tendonitis last year and it took me a month of rest and a slow ramp up to get back to running. Look up eccentric heel drops, doing those consistently 2-3 times a day got me back
very sorry for your loss. f cancer. I hope you figure your way around toward framing improving yourself as a way to say F You back to life, instead of letting it bring out the worst of you.
>A couple of months ago, I was a train wreck that ate too many cinnamon rolls and watched Netflix while laying in sweats on the couch. Yesterday, I ran 3 miles, did 40 minutes of yoga, meditated, ate steel cut oats with berries for breakfast, then turned on my favorite business podcast while I showered, all before work started.
This reminds me of this guy with the bookshelf in his garage that went viral on youtube years ago. I honestly don't think gamifying your life and jumping on the hedonistic treatmill is a step up from eating cinnamon rolls at 3 am, just the flip side of the same coin. It Reminds me of Baudrillard in America
"The skateboarder with his Walkman, the intellectual working on his wordprocessor, the Bronx breakdancer whirling frantically in the Roxy, the jogger and the body-builder: everywhere, whether in regard to the body or the mental faculties, you find the same blank solitude, the same narcissistic refraction. This omnipresent cult of the body is extraordinary. It is the only object on which everyone is made to concentrate, not as a source of pleasure, but as an object of frantic concern, in the obsessive fear of failure or substandard performance, a sign and an anticipation of death, that death to which no one can any longer give a meaning, but which everyone knows has at all times to be prevented. The body is cherished in the perverse certainty of its uselessness, in the total certainty of its non-resurrection. Now, pleasure is an effect of the resurrection of the body, by which it exceeds that hormonal, vascular and dietetic equilibrium in which we seek to imprison it, that exorcism by fitness and hygiene. So the body has to be made to forget pleasure as present grace, to forget its possible metamorphosis into other forms of appearance and become dedicated to the Utopian preservation of a youth that is, in any case, already lost. For the body which doubts its own existence is already half-dead, and the current semi-yogic, semi-ecstatic cult of the body is a morbid preoccupation. The care taken of the body while it is alive prefigures the way it will be made up in the funeral home, where it will be given a smile that is really ‘into’ death."
> This omnipresent cult of the body is extraordinary. It is the only object on which everyone is made to concentrate, not as a source of pleasure, but as an object of frantic concern, in the obsessive fear of failure or substandard performance, a sign and an anticipation of death, that death to which no one can any longer give a meaning, but which everyone knows has at all times to be prevented.
It's a huge rhetorical jump to go from "people engaging in focused activity" to "ritualistic pre-enactment of inevitable death", and even after re-reading this quote several times, I'm confused by how that jump is supposed to make sense?
Cute. But really, eating oneself into a miserable pain-ridden old age is not comparable to healthy eating and exercise in moderation? Sounds like sour grapes to me.
It isn't mentioned in the blog as far as I can see but the author appears to be advocating "micro habits" (also known under similar and other monikers, small habits, BJ Fogg's method etc).
The idea being you pick up a new habit using similar techniques to pomodoro, a little bit at a time.
One thing I did find useful in this particular essay (the OP) was a reminder of the relative difficulty of spending X amount of time doing something new compared to the same amount of time doing something second nature - which is magnified further according to how boring, painful, or just plain irritating it is.
Ha! Well that was a pure treat - instantly grabby title leading to a concise, witty, well-constructed article, containing good advice. Loved it for all those reasons.
The advice to start really slowly is good. It also makes sense to have a kind of plan, on paper, to commit to, and to remind yourself, holding yourself accountable. Blogging about that is not a bad idea, either.
What I did wrong (and sometimes still do) is that you cannot just add new things without removing other things. It helps to be fully aware of what kinds of things you'll have to remove from your life. What is the habit you're replacing(!) with a new habit? Food for thought ... ;).
Apocryphal? Reads like a self-help magazine article. Sure this could work, for some. But nothing about falling off the wagon (and how to get back on), padding/rounding effort until its all padding and no effort, folks tearing you down because they can't imagine succeeding and wanting you to fail too, and so on.
It’s amazing how many things exist in modern western culture that are geared around the most basic principles that used to be automatic, like “work hard”, “make your bed”, etc.
However, it’s easy to draw a strong correlation between this and the the departure from farm / manufacturing life into modern urban / suburban office life.
In, perhaps, 60 years, we will be at a point where the vast majority of people won’t even know anyone who works hard (from today’s perspective, such as a garbage man or farm hand). In the long run, these kinds of jobs simply won’t be valued; they’ll all have been “tractored out”.
A little bit too soon to give advice on how to be productive after only two months. You haven't conquered laziness unless you're consistently productive over the course of the years and that state becomes your normal.
Most people have these bursts of productivity for a short time that follows a slump and a realization.
Sometimes you try new technique and that trust in the technique provides enough motivation to get you going for a while.
But in fact, relying on a technique is relying on outside factors not having trust in you. Trust in yourself is the beginning of the lasting change.
If you’d like to troubleshoot why you are unable to perform certain actions/behaviors based on a framework, I highly recommend reading about Fogg Behavior Model [0].
It’s a simple yet powerful framework that you can use to gain a better understanding of your behaviors.
Or people with bipolar disorder or health issues. As someone who had to get my thyroid removed due to cancer last year, it's been a challenge to feel the same everyday. Still working hard at routines - morning yoga, breathing exercise, etc
It's hard to take advice from someone who says "in a couple of months i became this" at the start of the blog, and who ends it with actually telling us it was 6 months.
[+] [-] somestag|5 years ago|reply
I think people change slowly—much more slowly than we usually assume. Every time you try something to fix your life and you fail, you actually make a little bit of progress on yourself, just not enough to switch your behavior into something recognizably better. When you try a new strategy and succeed, there is a strong chance that you would not have been successful had you not made all of that incremental progress on yourself from all your failures. That's why it's important to never give up on yourself.
I've had "breakthroughs" that were basically just me trying the same thing I tried (and failed at) years earlier. The difference was that I'd gotten stronger in subtle ways over that time. Then, 6 months later, I'm back to my old habits. This is depressing, but when I remember that this is the first time I was able to stick with something for months instead of weeks, I realize I've actually made progress on myself.
Even though this isn't strictly about productivity, I think the best lesson from OP is that things get easier as you practice them. This seems obvious, but when we talk about building skills, we often frame it as us rising to the challenge. I.e., there's this very hard thing we want to do, and we need to become stronger to be able to do it. This isn't wrong per se, but I think it's bad for motivation because it frames progress as doing as doing increasingly more difficult things. Instead of thinking about getting better, I think it's more helpful to frame progress as things becoming easier. No matter how weak you feel you are, the things you find difficult in life will become easier as you work on them.
[+] [-] WalterBright|5 years ago|reply
For example, I dislike doing pullups. Many times over the decades, I embarked on a program of daily doing as many pullups as I could. I failed because it just took too much willpower.
I finally hit on a solution. I started with doing 3 pullups a day. 3 pullups are easy. It didn't take much willpower at all. After a few months, I "graduated" to 4, which then was just as easy. After several years, I am now up to 10, which is easy, and something I had kept failing at before.
You might think "why wait several years", but my goal with this is long term, so that doesn't bother me.
[+] [-] epinards|5 years ago|reply
Doing all those things I mentioned in the article aren't just possible now, they're easier and in fact feel better than my routine before. I wish someone had told me this years ago... for some reason I thought that routines just continued to be hard forever, because I usually gave up before the point where they became easy.
[+] [-] openfuture|5 years ago|reply
Identify your "life long practices" and try to find room to work on them in every day, week or month cycle.
Life long practices are sometimes discovered and sometimes chosen.
Personally, I lift them from the stories I tell myself and then slowly accept them as descriptions of me. This makes it easier to iterate (i.e. fail), you draw strength from having accepted yourself as someone who does this thing and that gives you the patience to not give up as easily.
Of course this patience develops over time. For example, programming is something I have been coming back to, with increasing frequency, for multiple years now.. and it's only recently that I am able to do it every day.
Regarding getting better vs becoming easier, I think that touches on something orthogonal to patience which is being able to set reasonable goals for each session and putting the original lofty goals (that get refined rather than dismissed) to the back of your mind. This is your skill of evaluation - it develops with experience and is also a great enabler of iteration.
tl;dr
Patience :: Faith -> Determination -> Courage
Evaluation :: Experience -> Understanding -> Trust
[+] [-] nate|5 years ago|reply
And now I apply this pattern to a lot of things. I hate waking up early. Well... after months of inching up the wake up alarm I'm now a consistent 5:30am riser and dig the early quiet morning productivity.
This small, continuous, incremental that you barely notice stuff is a powerful weapon.
[+] [-] 01100011|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noneeeed|5 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, after we had kids I got out of the habit, put a load of weight back on and am now back at the beginning. On the plus side, I know what I'm capable of if I take it slow and steady, and I have two more reasons to look after my health.
I also read The Oatmeal's "The Terrible and Wonderful Reasons I Run Long Distances", which really just described my relationship with running perfectly.
For me, the boredom is also aleviated by copious stacks of podcasts. It's kind of my mental relaxation time. Half an hour outside away from the child induced chaos (which I love, but you need a break from it sometimes).
[+] [-] bsuh|5 years ago|reply
Maybe procrastination is an emotional regulation problem and tying your self-worth to your productivity leads to more internal conflict between guilt of not doing enough vs fear of failure.
Maybe we could approach improvement out of a place of genuine interest or self-care, instead of treating ourselves like a computer on a cron schedule and then inevitably getting frustrated when we discover that we're human.
[+] [-] partyboat1586|5 years ago|reply
Ask yourself:
'Why do I want to make this change?'
'Why does doing this thing make me feel bad?'
The answer to the first question is just for you and it should be solid. If you don't believe it then it's not going to work. The answer to the second question is usually either because you have had a bad experience in the past or because it's enough out of your comfort zone that it challenges your identity. It takes a lot less than you would imagine to challenge your identity.
If you can work through these issues a little bit before you start on your journey of change and continue working on them as you go it will be a much smoother ride and you will be far less likely to give up. It involves being OK with negative emotion during the act and taking the time to process those feelings afterwards.
The cool thing is this doesn't just apply to productivity but anything you want to change in your life. Sometimes you need change and sometimes you are just guilting yourself into doing things other people told you were good for you. That is why you start by asking 'why?'.
[+] [-] al_ak|5 years ago|reply
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/dont-delay/202003/ne...
[+] [-] snazz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gideon_b|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colecut|5 years ago|reply
Kudos to your success. Please do not get complacent. I had a similar brief transformation at the start of this year and felt on top of the world for a couple months.
Then I got Achilles tendonitis which made even walking extremely painful for about 6 weeks. My son's mom died after a long fight with cancer. That same week my current girlfriend was diagnosed with cancer. And then quarantine happened.
I let these events allow me to regress back to worse off than I was when I started. And it all felt so easy at first
[+] [-] mason55|5 years ago|reply
The challenge is keeping it up beyond the few months when the novelty wears off, life gets in the way, and it becomes difficult.
I personally find that these kinds of things keep my interest for about about three months so I have to find ways to make progress towards goals while also changing whatever I'm doing enough to continue to hold my interesting. Examples might include changing my workout routine in a way that is different enough to hold my interest but similar enough to continue making progress. Or switch to learning a different style of guitar. Stuff like that.
Having defined goals to begin with helps a lot.
[+] [-] downerending|5 years ago|reply
I'm no expert, but one thing that seems to help me is exploiting my natural laziness and bad habits. For example, I got in the habit of getting a nice expresso during the day from a place that's about a mile's walk away. Kind of dumb, but it built a walk into my day that I pretty rarely missed.
Along the same lines, I chose a place to live that involved a fairly long walk to the train. In principle I could have started taking a cab to the station, but I'm just to lazy to make a change like that, and indeed that worked for years (until I moved).
[+] [-] Reedx|5 years ago|reply
And that's an important point about regression. For me good habits tend to break after about 2 weeks of non-compliance. Then it often ends up being months or even years before getting back on track. At which point it's like starting over.
[+] [-] clishem|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kluny|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clarry|5 years ago|reply
Months of progress wiped just like that, and now I'm worse off than before I started running regularly.
[+] [-] soperj|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] biohax2015|5 years ago|reply
I share the same frustration with regressing back to where you started (or worse).
It seems like we all have a built-in set point for productivity. Some lucky people are just able to go, go, go, while those without such fortune are quite lazy and need pushing to do even basic tasks.
It's frustrating because you are always fighting against that regression to your set point. It takes energy, which you have less and less of as you get older. Life's hard.
[+] [-] ribs|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sylens|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swyx|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Barrin92|5 years ago|reply
This reminds me of this guy with the bookshelf in his garage that went viral on youtube years ago. I honestly don't think gamifying your life and jumping on the hedonistic treatmill is a step up from eating cinnamon rolls at 3 am, just the flip side of the same coin. It Reminds me of Baudrillard in America
"The skateboarder with his Walkman, the intellectual working on his wordprocessor, the Bronx breakdancer whirling frantically in the Roxy, the jogger and the body-builder: everywhere, whether in regard to the body or the mental faculties, you find the same blank solitude, the same narcissistic refraction. This omnipresent cult of the body is extraordinary. It is the only object on which everyone is made to concentrate, not as a source of pleasure, but as an object of frantic concern, in the obsessive fear of failure or substandard performance, a sign and an anticipation of death, that death to which no one can any longer give a meaning, but which everyone knows has at all times to be prevented. The body is cherished in the perverse certainty of its uselessness, in the total certainty of its non-resurrection. Now, pleasure is an effect of the resurrection of the body, by which it exceeds that hormonal, vascular and dietetic equilibrium in which we seek to imprison it, that exorcism by fitness and hygiene. So the body has to be made to forget pleasure as present grace, to forget its possible metamorphosis into other forms of appearance and become dedicated to the Utopian preservation of a youth that is, in any case, already lost. For the body which doubts its own existence is already half-dead, and the current semi-yogic, semi-ecstatic cult of the body is a morbid preoccupation. The care taken of the body while it is alive prefigures the way it will be made up in the funeral home, where it will be given a smile that is really ‘into’ death."
[+] [-] papeda|5 years ago|reply
It's a huge rhetorical jump to go from "people engaging in focused activity" to "ritualistic pre-enactment of inevitable death", and even after re-reading this quote several times, I'm confused by how that jump is supposed to make sense?
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mellosouls|5 years ago|reply
The idea being you pick up a new habit using similar techniques to pomodoro, a little bit at a time.
Example of similar reflections:
https://hackernoon.com/micro-habits-changed-my-life-47f572bf...
One thing I did find useful in this particular essay (the OP) was a reminder of the relative difficulty of spending X amount of time doing something new compared to the same amount of time doing something second nature - which is magnified further according to how boring, painful, or just plain irritating it is.
[+] [-] epinards|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 10xRich|5 years ago|reply
Sometimes the anxiety of doing something important makes that something seem much harder than it actually is.
Lowering the bar helps ease that anxiety.
I've picked up a whole flossing habit just by starting with "at least one tooth and then you can stop if you'd like" ha
[+] [-] kosmischemusik|5 years ago|reply
As much as I know that habits need to be stacked, I just can't get myself to be patient and do one thing at a time.
[+] [-] jchook|5 years ago|reply
- The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
- Can't Hurt Me by David Goggins
- Indistractable by Nir Eyal
- Mastery by Robert Greene
[+] [-] cpursley|5 years ago|reply
- The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
[+] [-] mrwnmonm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scrumper|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epinards|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mshekow|5 years ago|reply
What I did wrong (and sometimes still do) is that you cannot just add new things without removing other things. It helps to be fully aware of what kinds of things you'll have to remove from your life. What is the habit you're replacing(!) with a new habit? Food for thought ... ;).
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|5 years ago|reply
Life isn't "This one thing that changed my life".
[+] [-] gonational|5 years ago|reply
However, it’s easy to draw a strong correlation between this and the the departure from farm / manufacturing life into modern urban / suburban office life.
In, perhaps, 60 years, we will be at a point where the vast majority of people won’t even know anyone who works hard (from today’s perspective, such as a garbage man or farm hand). In the long run, these kinds of jobs simply won’t be valued; they’ll all have been “tractored out”.
[+] [-] oillio|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michalu|5 years ago|reply
Most people have these bursts of productivity for a short time that follows a slump and a realization.
Sometimes you try new technique and that trust in the technique provides enough motivation to get you going for a while.
But in fact, relying on a technique is relying on outside factors not having trust in you. Trust in yourself is the beginning of the lasting change.
[+] [-] DecayingOrganic|5 years ago|reply
It’s a simple yet powerful framework that you can use to gain a better understanding of your behaviors.
[0]: https://captology.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Be...
[+] [-] atemerev|5 years ago|reply
ADHD sufferers: uuuugh...
[+] [-] rajsripathi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flipactual|5 years ago|reply
It’s been incredibly freeing to not worry so much about hitting these arbitrary KPIs and instead just see what I feel like doing in any given moment
You’ll struggle to find any blog posts about this perspective though... we’re all too busy enjoying life
[+] [-] ambivalents|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clairity|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Noos|5 years ago|reply