Tagged “habits”

thread from 7 lessons smokers can teach us about getting shit done

Daily habits are great. For getting momentum, for eliminating decisions,

But they don’t cause free or automatic improvement. If the goal is output, then a regular daily habit is good. If the goal is skill development, it can be better to target something specific.

If you are just doing the exact same thing every day it can be easy to plateau, stagnate, or get bored. I still like the idea of output every day because it prevents overpolish; getting stuck refinining silly little details. Deliberate practice often has no meaningful output - a 30 minute recording of practising scales is not particularly interesting.

Should every day mean every day? What about weekends? Holidays? Time off? Getting ill? Getting obsessive about not missing a day can mean you miss out on life.

I just finished a year of uploading sounds every day. A lot were lazy, or noisy, or just terrible. But making it daily was a good way to avoid excuses. It started only semi-intentionally; initially just having fun playing with a new synth. Didn’t have any kind of audacious goal from the start, but once the streak started it seemed like a good idea to continue.

I have struggled to stick with more spaced out habits. Monthly reviews, gym a few times a week, and other infrequent or irregular ones. You get fewer reps, and needing to do things on different days of the week. For monthly things I tried “closest Sunday” but still was just too easy to miss - less of a streak to break.

Don’t know if I’ll continue with sound uploads daily, had definitely started to feel like a chore by the end (and it showed). But have wanted to try writing more (for years, apparently), so will give that a go.

For what to actually write or what will count, who knows. Will keep them pretty short, some either random thoughts or TILs. Some will just be slightly more expanded additions to links. Will run it for a few days and see what happens.

Have seen a bunch of posts this month suggesting writing more. Some particularly inspirational ones were (Almost) no one cares, and Why to write things. Also Bring back blogging and some responses to it.

Writing feels much easier to get stuck on, either on topic, or just on word selection. I spent too long deciding between “daily” and “dailies” for this (apparently dailies are a filmmaking thing). And there is the fear of being wrong, of people reading it, of it being used to train LLMs.

Still not sure how this one will go. Maybe life gets in the way, or maybe I just get bored of it and it doesn’t take. Even if I continue, I think I will need to miss some days. Just never miss two.

The feeling of being able to control something, to offset the lack of control in the activity or outcome.

Advice gathered by someone smarter than me. My top three of their picks:

• minor barriers aren’t minor
• remember what used to work, then do it again
• when choosing a life path, think about what contexts it puts you in

First two from Chris Sparks, third from Devon Zuegel

cool idea. I’d like a fork of this with todos as well, so you can have daily dos and dont’s.