Need to Constantly Focus on Improving Habits

When it comes to habits, I’ve had some successes and I’ve had some failures. Giving up the “snooze” button has notably failed thus far. But pounding through emails and working out have generally succeeded.

I believe that building proper habits is the key to… Well, everything! “Motivation” is not really a thing and I’ve learned that I, like everyone else, am regularly completely powerless to fight how I’m “feeling”. It’s fantasy to believe anything else.

Only habit stands in the way of biology.

It’s the one thing I can rely on to get myself to do things even when I don’t feel like. If properly built-up, habits can ensure that I do all of the things that are good for me and will lead to a better life. Because sheer force of will and motivation don’t seem to go very far.

In my reading I’ve learned that it’s difficult to build up more than one significant habit at the same time, and that it’s better to focus on just one until it’s well-established. So what am I working on right now?

Not really anything! Time to fix that.

I’d like to actually break the habit of seeking out mindless entertainment, especially when I’m procrastinating. This means being okay not having anything to do.

Specifically, this means no browsing the web before I get out of bed. No more browsing after eating lunch or during the work day. Any single session of non-productive internet usage should be limited to 15 minutes maximum.

At the moment, this habit-breaking doesn’t necessarily need to extend to replacing this old habit with anything productive. We’ll get there. But for now, I just want to address the real time-waster. As long as I’m not forcing myself to do something less fun in its place, I believe it will be much easier to give up this habit.

I think from now on, I should also track my habit-building progress on here. I should always be building a habit and tracking how it’s going. I think the more good habits I have, the easier life will be and the more effective I’ll be in all areas.

Must Fill “Free Time” With Activities I Value

I need to always commit to filling “free time” with valued activities.

Now, I don’t mean “free time” like, any time I have that doesn’t have some scheduled activity or where I’m home or not working or anything. I’m referring to periods of time where I could be doing something but my options are very limited, such as when I’m driving a car.

These are times when I have a choice between doing something productive such as listening to Spanish lessons and educational audio-books, something mindlessly entertaining like listening to the radio, or nothing at all.

As a quick side-note: while writing this, I realized that I should be filling ALL of my time, without qualification, on things I value. That could be a whole other blog post but it’s actually more profound of a thought than I had originally imagined.

But for something like driving a car, it’s time where I’m already just sitting there doing nothing, and I could be productive. I could be learning and improving. And over the course of my life, I’m going to drive a lot most likely.

It’s worth mentioning here that I do not value mindless entertainment very highly. It’s extremely easy to access anywhere, anytime, it isn’t fulfilling, and barely does anything for me even in the short term. Therefor, it’s not something I should be doing a whole lot of.

While driving a car, I need to be doing valuable things. At the moment, that means learning Spanish. In the future, it could mean lots of other things.

I think there are a lot of these “free times” when I could be productive. Maybe I’m waiting for something to start or get done, I’m traveling, or I simply don’t have motivation to do anything else.

It’s worth noting, too, that I don’t think I need to have a high burden on myself for these things. I don’t need to necessarily commit to extreme attention and active listening. Attention and focus are limited resources, and if I always require 100%, I know I’m just not even going to do it.

But even having a Spanish disc on and passively listening to it is likely to be beneficial. At the very least, it will be much more beneficial than listening to the radio! So I need to do it.

I think that focusing heavily on this will have significant benefits long-term. Compared to most people who will never do anything productive while driving or in these other “free times,” I should be fairly far ahead of the curve.

Focus Must Always be on Freeing Up Time

I’ll open up today’s thoughts with an example. I have a project that requires some custom coding. It will be a little tricky to implement, and is outside of my current skill-set. My team is already busy with other things, and I don’t want to burden them with this additional task.

It’s also already behind schedule, yet quite important. It needs to get done soon.

I figured I would just handle it myself! So I spent probably over an hour messing around with it. To finish the whole thing, I started realizing would take many hours.

And then I realized… Why am I doing this? Am I really utilizing my time most effectively?

No. I wasn’t.

So what did I do?

I realized that I could just outsource this to my go-to contractor for code-heavy tasks. He’s usually fast and can work with anything. All I needed to do was spend 10 minutes putting together specific requirements and sending him the passwords and documentation, and I was done.

It will probably take him fewer hours than it would have taken me, plus now I am free to work on other things.

I need to always be thinking about how I can free up more time, and I need to have an aggressive mindset of avoiding work that others could be doing. It’s not that I can’t do those things or even that I don’t want to. It may even be on the contrary! It’s that the only way to grow is to focus all of my energy on running the business and making the operations as self-sufficient as I can.

Every time I’m bogged down working on actual client work, it’s completely unscalable and I’m hurting my future success.

If I can keep that in mind always, and constantly be looking at how I can improve that, I will me more profitable and will have fewer headaches in the business.

I need to be honest and fair with myself as well, however. I can’t change everything overnight. To be honest, one day I’d like to not only avoid doing sales myself, but also focus all of my time on the direction of the company and none of it interacting with clients.

But that can’t happen overnight. Hiring a salesperson is a very difficult thing to be able to do. And currently, I handle most of the client interactions, which is how it needs to stay (with the exception of having developers interact with clients during projects, which can and should be happening as much as possible.)

So I can’t beat myself up at the moment when things come up that I need to deal with. The goal is constant improvement in these areas, not overnight changes.

But overall I just want to re-state my focus so I can continue to improve.

Pragmatism, not Idealism

As someone who probably tends to be overly optimistic, especially when it comes to my ability to do things or general predictions for the future, I think I’ve always had a propensity to focus on idealism. Whenever I’m making decisions, I basically make them assuming that I’m going to be perfect in every relevant category.

Having trouble focusing and getting stuff done consistently? Not a problem! I’ll have the perfectly solved with my elite-level self-control in the near future. Weak in some business-related skill? Not to worry! I’m sure a year from now I’ll have read 100 books on the topic and will be an expert.

Now, I don’t intend to make this a lengthy discussion on the value of optimism. I believe there are myriad ways in which being unrealistically optimistic can help you out. It helps you move forward when things are hard or unlikely to succeed, makes your more likable, and just generally helps out.

But if you define “optimism” as being more positive than can be justified by the evidence, then there are certain areas in which it can be quite pernicious. Self-improvement and self-management, for instance, is quite ineffective if you’re overly optimistic or idealistic.

I think I need to adopt a strategy of strict adherence to a pragmatic policy. If something isn’t working, I need to change it up. If I’m relying on unlimited willpower to get things done, it’s simply not going to happen. At the end of the day we’re still just really smart apes and we have powerful limits on motivation and desires.

Ramit Sethi talks a lot about being “brutally honest” with yourself. You need to look in the mirror and admit when something isn’t working. Beating yourself up for failing at perfection isn’t only pointless, it’s actively counter-productive.

I’m going to fall short, and I’m going to fail. The question is: how can I move forward from that? What is a realistic solution that takes into account the world and myself as we are, and then proposes steps that will produce real value and improvement?

For me, the biggest takeaway from this post (and the thing I’d like to keep in the back of my mind) is to constantly be shifting my mindset towards pragmatic solutions. In everything I do, I need to be honest with myself, fix what’s broken, and avoid the trap of thinking that I’m going to somehow succeed where everyone else (including myself) has failed because I can just power through and git’r’done.

What next?

These Blogs are the Most Important Thing

It’s been something like six weeks since I last posted. And yet, I’ve already mentioned how I think these are the most important thing when it comes to both my business and, probably, my life. But I haven’t been doing them!

Sure, I could say that I’ve been busy, which is true. I’ve also had other things going on in my personal life that have caused me to be both busier and less productive while working.

But if something is truly “the most important thing,” shouldn’t it come before literally anything else?

The answer is clearly ‘yes’.

Maybe I should revisit why it’s the most important thing. Let’s make a list, shall we?

  1. It focuses my mind and efforts on productivity, growth, and improvement.
  2. It reminds me of past goals, thoughts, methods, and efforts which helps those things contribute more to improvement.
  3. It’s about the only time and place where I really work through difficult problems in a clear, productive, and concrete way, and then holds me accountable to my conclusions.
  4. It clears up what I need to be focusing my time and efforts on in order to achieve my goals.
  5. It makes me more productive, even in the short term (such as that day).

It seems to me that without this, I’m simply going day-to-day, performing routine tasks as they come up without any guidance or thought. Honestly, I suspect that’s how the vast majority of people live their lives.

But I don’t want to do that! I’m still young, and any investments I make in self-improvement now will pay off over the course of the majority of a lifetime. It’s more important that I do them now than ever.

It really is critical that I do this regularly. Even to the point where I can be neglecting other responsibilities and projects to do it. If it is the most important thing, then it needs to come first, or else everything else ultimately suffers.

And realistically, it’s not very hard or all that time-consuming, and it makes me feel better to do it. So there’s no reason not to!