There are literally hundreds of books and websites on the issues of productivity, emotional mastery, goal setting, spirituality and whatnot. I think anyone who is getting started with PD is bound to feel a bit lost and overwhelmed at first. It is also common, I believe, to have an initial "dabbler" period in which you go from one book/website to another, not giving each technique or idea enough time and effort to show results. This can be quite frustrating. I feel I am just now starting to overcome this initial phase and deciding on which PD techniques and ideas I want to bring into my life at this moment.
Habits seem to be the best place to start. They are a time-tested technique whose usefulness has been praised by famous individuals since time immemorial. There is quite a bit of material in my favorite PD websites on the issue of building and maintaining habits, and I’ve just found a really neat piece of online software (Joe’s Goals) in order to track my progress.
Wikipedia defines habits as "routines of behavior that are repeated regularly, tend to occur subconsciously, without directly thinking consciously about them". This is basically my objective: to make this things so much a part of my routine as breakfast or my morning shower. I cannot remember the last time I forgot to do any of those two (and I don’t think I have). They are long-ingrained habits.
I will be using Joe’s Goals to track myself daily for the following habits:
1) Bodyweight exercise & mobility: I’ve been following a bodyweight exercise plan taken from Scott Sonnon's Flowfit and Forward Pressure programs. While my adherence is quite good, I’ve missed a few days lately, especially since I moved my exercise time to the mornings, which makes it a bit harder. Same goes for my twice-a-day mobility plan.
2) Go to bed before midnight: Closely tied to the prior habit. It’s hard to get up at 6:30 AM and exercise when you went to bed at 1 AM. Plus, these late-night stretches are basically just wasting time surfing the web. Having 6-7 hours of sleep consistently makes a difference in my energy levels for the whole week.
3) Get ready for the next day: This basically means setting my clothes, backpack and lunch for the next day before I go to bed. Whenever I try to do these in the morning I end up forgetting something or arriving late. Not packing my lunch usually means I end up eating outside my diet.
4) Select my MITs for the following day: Selecting your Most Important Tasks (MITs) is an idea I got from this post on Zen Habits. It has worked the few times I’ve used it, so I would like to make this a habit. I'm only using it for workdays so far.
5) No sweets or snacks on weekdays: I am more or less good at keeping within the bounds of my eating style (a pseudo-paleo diet), but I sometimes get derailed with snacks or sweets. Cutting them out from Monday to Friday seems like a good starting point.
As you can see, I have already made some progress with some of these, but they are not true habits yet in that they are not automatic parts of my routine.
I will also be reading (or re-reading in some cases) a number of articles on the subject of habits. The following is a short list:
30 days to success
How to maintain not-quite-daily habits
Goals into habits
Five things you need to know about effective habit change
Everyday Systems Podcast: Episode 10
Everyday Systems Podcast: Episode 9
I guess that’s all for the moment folks. We’ll see how this habit thing works these following weeks. In the meanwhile, please do post your own experiences regarding habit-building.
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