Author: Mark

So tonight as I ate my steak burrito, I came across this from Leo Babauta:

[tweet https://twitter.com/zen_habits/status/205762701941669889]

I thought it odd that he’d call his own post “amazing” so I followed the link. Now in the past I wouldn’t have gotten past the 3rd sentence probably, but for whatever reason lately (probably something to do with my mission statement over there) I’ve been engaging these types of articles more. This certainly resonated:

One day, I might decide to stop drinking coffee. I’d go two or three days without, then find an excuse to drink it again.

A few weeks later, I’d decide that I was going to start writing every day. Or running every day. Or reading or saving money or playing chess or keeping a clean workspace or following a schedule or walking my dogs more or checking email less.

I’d decide to change something (or usually, many things at once) and implement it immediately. I’d tell myself that from this point forward, things would be different. I would be different.

And invariably, I’d quit the next week, disheartened and frustrated. So I’d try harder next time, with more ambitious goals, more changes to make, only to fail again.

So my curiosity was piqued and I decided to read on about his Limitless allegory. As with most of the great advice I’ve read via zenhabits the point was so elegant in it’s simplicity and correctness:

The ingredient I was missing was patience… In my notes from [Leo’s talk at the first-ever World Domination Summit in Portland], I wrote these words:

One change at a time. Five minutes at first…

[Y]ou’d never try to run 10 miles on your first day back after a long layoff; you know that it takes time to regain your fitness, and that doing too much could lead to injury or burnout. Same with the gym — you don’t go in on Day 1 and try to bench twice your weight… And yet that’s exactly the way I had tried to change my habits… Every single time.

Again this resonated with a bit with my experiences with my first 30-day challenge and with the stuff I’d read on zen habits. I’ve gone 24 days without a Coke because I started small. I didn’t try and go from eating & drinking whatever I wanted to a vegan diet. I picked one thing that I really wanted to change and focussed in on it.

And then the kicker:

Change just one habit a month, and in three years you’ll have 36 new habits.

Wow. Bam! The pieces seemed to fit together so nicely. You can develop 36 new habits all-at-once. But one-at-a-time, building on your successes it seems so possible, so attainable.

And I’ve done this with other habits, just not with as much succession. I started budgetting and paying off debt (and in the process gave Dave Ramsey a try). This is the same core concept he talks about with the debt snowball, the same basic behavior modification. So I’ve done it before. Now I just am going to do it again and again. Once a month x 36 months.

Perhaps my newfound interest in efficiency/lifestyle websites is an early-onset midlife crisis? Maybe it’s my brain’s way of trying to sort out the myriad of changes I’ve gone through in the last 60 days (moved to a new city, for a new job, in a new house and — oh yeah — became a dad).

I’ll admit it feel troubling — like I’m becoming a neo-new age nimwit addicted to self-help guides — but I suspect it’s a mix of the sorting out theory and my interest in learning/doing new things. A few more of the bits I’ve come across recently:

30 Day Challenges — I noticed folks doing such things (and 365-projects), and heard that’s the rough time you need to form new habits, but Good Disruptive Change suggests is not just new habits (i.e. change) but can also be for restarting, renewing, getting unstuck. So, many directions to go in not just one.

Simple Desks — I think I’ll wait to make a great workspace until we move again (ugh).

Lifehacker — maybe becomes a daily read, some good stuff, but could also become a sinkhole b/c it’s not terribly focused. One post reminded me about about.me (where i found a couple friends)

I parked /Notes here just after we moved from Gainesville to Tallahassee. I was starting a new job and thought this would be canvas: To document, learn, speak, experiment. But like so many other projects it was only partially thought-out and suffered for it. 3 months later it sits here unused.

Lately, whether it’s a lack of sleep or the settling into simple routines, I’ve been feeling stuck — a surprising feeling since everything is new: A baby, new job, new city, new house. I think routines have been have been a way to escape, to narrow down the possibilities a bit so that not everything is on a growth edge (as a friend once called it), an easier, less threatening way to organize time. Stepping back though it’s unsettling and a little scary — but useful to realize that it’s also not new. I’m feeling just a variation of old feelings & bad habits.

Nothing else to do but work my way out of them. With all this mixing in my head, I stumbled across two posts in Sean Bonner’s blog. We were contemporaries in Gainesville (c. early 1990s), but ran in wholly different circles. I’ve often admired that he, unlike me, carries his silly notions through to project completion stage.

First is his “Year of Less“, a challenge to reduce stuff and clutter.

I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately. About how it’s easy to see in my mom, but block out in myself. About how difficult it’s gonna be to move again in 7 or 10 months. About going back to Cinque Terre and living for a year or somethign. And frankly about what a pain it would be to get rid of stuff.

Leading up to starting his Year of Less project on Jan. 1, 2012, Sean wrote:

One thing that keeps coming up that I realized last time I went through a major purge is that any single item can be justified. Take a box you have in storage, one that has been there for years untouched. One that you’ve been paying $100+ a month to store. Do you need anything in that box? Without opening it I can tell you that, no, most likely you don’t need anything in that box. You could through it out and chances are for the rest of your life you’ll never miss anything in that box. But! Open it up, and suddenly the stuff in there is oh so important. Stuff that 5 minutes ago you didn’t even remember existed is now precious and worthy of saving.

That’s the stuff lying to you.

I’ll say it again – on a single item basis, you can justify keeping anything.

Yes that camera still works and it would be fun to take it out one day and shoot a roll of film through it. Remember when you used to wear that watch all the time? Who are the people in these photos, summer school class of 1980-something? Do these batteries still work? You still have that t-shirt too?

Lies.

The truth is getting rid of stuff is hard, but it’s hard for a reason. Stuff is designed to make you want it. If you haven’t needed it in the last 12 months, you likely won’t need it again, ever.

Spot on. So while I won’t be going as far as he is (only buying 12 new things in 2012), I am gonna start the great purge of 2012. Mix some of Sean’s ethos here with what my friend Dave used to do: To bring 1 new thing into his house he made himself get rid of 2 old things. Books and music will be the hardest, but it’s about setting up a structure. I think the other big challenge will be getting rid of the past. Digitizing and organizing it seems the way to go but that means doing it.

This is more about clutter than anything else. For me there are 2 parts: physical and operational. Stuff and ideas. For some reason I’m weighed down with the unfinished. So another part of purging in 2012 will be completing the uncompleted (or at least starting work on it again, or queueing it up at the very least), or moving it from the “on hold” to “abandoned with cause” column.

Second, was To Do, Everyday. If I had a dollar for how many times I’ve scribbled lists like this in my journal. And they’re usually very similar. But what jumped out at me was the why:

But I started playing around with superbetter earlier this month and was presented with the idea that doing something I like can act as a bit of a power-up. I like this idea a lot, and I think there’s things I should be doing everyday not because they would be accomplishments, but because I like doing them and I feel better after I do, and then I can do even more things that are accomplishments. So what might those things be? I thought about it and decided to make a list:

I’m thinking of what’s already on my list. I like the idea of making the list, periodically revising.

So reading those made me dust of this: /notes. I’d been thinking already of cataloging some stuff anyways — so why not all in one place? Like Sean’s #10: Be Awesome… let’s get to it!

 

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Thinking about making some sections: Hear, make, read, do?

Hear + Read

01. 40 Miler – Tim Barry
02. Top Shelf presents: Shores’ Coup de Grace
03. Horse Heaven – Creepoid

sbdc: To Do, Everyday
sbdc: Year of Less
Sean Bonner: Neo-minimalism and the Rise of Technomads

Make + Do

01. Analyzed the 2011-12 Gainesville Celtics and figured out a rough replacement-level stat line for the h2h league.
02. Kickstarted ./Notes