Category: Habits

Posted on

Update on Yearly Goals and New Habit Relating to Sleeping

I just reviewed my post about my goals for the year and wanted to give an update on my progress for that.

I’ve made lots of meaningful progress towards many of the goals and I would say that a lot of them are very much doable still. I don’t think any are impossible and few are unlikely. It’s nice to see that they are coming along.

Here is some specific progress relating to specific goals:

  • I haven’t initiated any deals to buy other companies yet, but I’ve had some nibbles, and I’ve made incredible progress towards attracting more of them
  • I haven’t reviewed business profit so far but I suspect we are more profitable than ever
  • I am well within my goal of limiting myself to 30 hours per week of work
  • My photos site is coming along nicely, and it’s entirely possible I’ll have 10 sales by the end of the year
  • Haven’t had any alcohol since I made the goals and shouldn’t have any trouble making it to next year
  • I need to make plans to camp overnight on a river island
  • I’ve been disc golfing a lot, though I haven’t come too close to an Ace yet
  • I may or may not join a rock climbing gym, we’ll see
  • I’ve biked a bit

So overall, good progress. Especially since I wrote that at the end of April and haven’t had that much time to actually get these things done. I finished tons of major projects at home here already. They weren’t “goals” for the year but they still had to get done, and now I should have more time to put towards other things.

Finally, I’d like to formally change the habit I’m working on. I’ve done an excellent job (100% success, I believe) of waking up at 7:30am and not snoozing my alarm.

However, I’m still struggling to develop my own circadian rhythm. And I think one of the biggest parts of that is that I’m doing lots of other things in bed, including not getting up right away and instead using my phone for quite a while.

For the most part, it’s to study, but I think it’s still probably a big problem.

To start with, I’m going to try to establish a new habit of physically getting up within 5 minutes of being awake, starting the day, and not returning to bed at all.

This will require studying elsewhere, which is fine.

I’m hoping that will help quite a bit. I want to generally not use my bed for anything else until I go to bed, but I don’t want to make that a hard rule until I’ve established the morning one first. I generally read in my bed and I think it would be better if I did that somewhere else.

Either way, we’ll start here and then move on once it’s established.

Down the road I could also consider mandating that I go outside and get some light first thing, never use my bed except for sleeping, and perhaps even establish a hard bed time.

But I’ve been getting closer and closer to fixing my sleep and I just need to continue one step at a time.

 

Posted on

I Seriously Need to Focus on just Blasting Through my To-Do List

I’ve wrote about this same thing before years ago when I really started establishing my to-do list as a cornerstone of my progress. While the to-do has served me incredibly well, I think I really need to take a step back and re-evaluate how I approach it.

The main issue is that I still treating as if I have set work hours, and that my to-do should take me exactly as long as my set work hours.

There are a few ways in which this is extremely harmful:

  • It causes me to drag things out longer than they need to be if I see that I should have plenty of time
  • It causes me to get distracted with other misc. activities for the same reason
  • I have a tendency to add new things to the to-do list if I’m ahead of schedule

One of the points of working the way that I do is that I’m focusing on output and results rather than time spent working.

The way I’ve been approaching my to-do list is completely counter-productive to that.

I need to think carefully about what I want to accomplish in the day, and then do that and only that.

And most importantly, I need to be laser-focused on finishing it. No distractions, no new tasks, nothing.

I need to just blast through it.

And if I finish super early?

Great! That’s the dream. I’ll have the whole day to do other stuff.

So I need to do that, because I’ve felt frustrated lately that I seem to not have any extra time, even on days when my to-do was supposed to be easy. I think this is exactly why.

So let’s do better.

Posted on

Watching Spanish Content Makes me Feel Better than Other Stuff

I’ve noticed that I feel a lot better watching content in Spanish vs. watching random, time-wasting content on YouTube.

Now, this may not really be all that deep. Watching Spanish content feels productive and challenging.

Watching YouTube… Is typically not.

But I think it’s worth noting that watching things in Spanish can also be extremely entertaining. There’s nothing stopping me from watching my favorite shows and content in Spanish.

So I think it’s really important to stick to watching things in Spanish and not get sucked into wasting time watching pointless videos on YouTube.

Not much more to my post today. I think the main lesson is just that I really need to focus, always, on productive activities. I can’t be wasting time on mindless entertainment.

Posted on

I Need to Adopt a Pragmatic Approach to Everything

This feels very obvious but I don’t think I’ve really been living it: I need to adopt a pragmatic approach to everything.

I’ve posted many times about my idealism in the past and how I tend to think I’m going to be able to just brute-force my way through problems and achieve a level of perfection that will solve all my problems.

And that obviously isn’t a good strategy.

The only viable strategy is pragmatism.

It’s fine to want to improve, work towards goals, and imagine a future where we are better in certain ways.

But in the present, we need to be completely honest and realistic about ourselves, our opportunities, and our weaknesses.

Because none of those things change over night. If I’m weak against something now, I’m likely to continue being weak against it in the future.

The path the leads to success will take into account all pieces of information and make decisions based on that. Because why wouldn’t it?

Idealism simply ignores some data and replaces it with what you wish things were like.

Pragmatism is iterative, too. You can try something based on what you know, and alter your approach based on how that went. As you learn more, you can improve what works.

So here’s a concrete example of this.

I’m currently not drinking at all. Productivity is way up and lots of other things are greatly improved.

This is highly pragmatic. It recognizes that there are downsides to drinking and that it has very real consequences, and also that it’s difficult to just drink a small amount.

The idealistic side of me has always said, “I can limit it to weekends and it won’t affect me in the week” or, “even if I’m low on energy I’ll just power through it and it won’t affect me”.

They are idealistic and unrealistic ideas.

Whether or not I’ll one day be able to find a happy middle ground remains to be seen, but the fact remains that I definitely AM more productive now, and it is highly pragmatic and effective to give up drinking in an effort to be more successful.

But I can think of some other things that this applies to as well. Here are some of the top of my head:

  • I’m not effective on low sleep, and it’s generally better to sleep late than to try to power through the tiredness
  • I’m not motivated to work or be productive at night
  • Looking to others for help in areas where I’m lacking is probably much more beneficial and rapid than trying to do everything myself

I need to simply give up my idealism and focus on being pragmatic in all areas.

Most importantly, this means acknowledging my own weaknesses and consistent failings and altering my approach accordingly.

My goal now is to just be more aware of times when I’m being too idealistic and take a step back to figure out what I should really be doing. And perhaps writing about it there!

Posted on

Any Anxiety Makes me feel Insecure and Tends to Snowball

I realized today as I was procrastinating and feeling a little insecure about women that even small increases in general anxiety tend to make me feel insecure about unrelated things, procrastinate, and then cause additional problems that lead to more anxiety.

It’s a vicious cycle.

What was I anxious about today?

I had a large to-do list that was way behind schedule due to a morning that didn’t go as I had planned. Time was passing and the prospect of completing my to-do list became less and less appealing to me.

And when that happens, I start getting anxious. And that starts to cause more problems. I procrastinate more and then just don’t get anything done.

I’ve generally been good about totally resetting each morning in that case, so it doesn’t get too out-of-hand. I restart my whole to-do and go from there, leaving the lost day in the past.

But there’s still that lost day.

In the past, I think after one of these days I would start to be super primed for a night of letting loose and drinking. This is, after all, a situation in which alcohol shines. It allows you to easily forget about your current problems and anxiety for a while and enjoy the moment.

Of course everything comes back worse once you’re sober again, but in the meantime it can be quite appealing.

But I’m not drinking now. So you know what I did instead?

I buckled down and powered through (almost) all of the to-do. And I feel much better now and can relax without that specter hanging over me.

I’d argue it’s because I’ve been sober for a while. I can much more easily control these situations and recover them without having big ups and downs.

It’s a Friday evening and I’ll now be able to relax and enjoy myself without drinking, which is nice.

I think the lessons from this are twofold: first, that not drinking leads to greatly improved productivity, resilience, and stability. And the second is that I need to always be aware of how I’m feeling and what’s going on, and if I start slipping off-track and doing things that will lead to greater anxiety, I need to make a conscious effort to get back on-track.

Posted on

Some Recent Wins

I’ve mentioned before that not every post here has to be ground-breaking and deeply profound. Sometimes it can just be an update of how things are going!

Today I had some solid wins that show I’m moving in the right direction and that things are generally going well.

First, I had a qualified seller reach out to me from my website that is interested in selling the hosting portion of his operations. It looks like a great potential seller and we’re speaking tomorrow.

But the best part is that he found me online. All of my marketing efforts lately have gone towards attracting exactly this type of person, and it sounds like they are paying off.

In fact, just today I posted a new article that I’ve been working on related to this topic.

Perhaps because I posted that and just an hour or two later I heard from this new seller, it really felt like I earned it. Like I’ve been doing the right things and am being rewarded for them.

Because this is really my long-term strategy and it’s still a bit unproven, it’s really great to see it start to pay off. I hope to continue working hard on expanding my web presence in this area and, hopefully, attracting tons of sellers like this.

The other thing that happened today was that I approved a great candidate for renting my vacant room. Everything looked great for him, and I think he’ll be an excellent renter.

This obviously is less ground-breaking, but it’s fairly important for my goals (for now anyway) that I have both rooms rented, and it’s great to finally have someone after months of searching.

From a day-to-day financial point of view, it just makes my life a ton easier. I don’t have to take nearly as many distributions, and it ends up being much easier to invest more.

I also recently hit a new personal record with weight training, which has been going extremely well.

Sleep has been going well. I’ve been able to wake up without using snooze every morning for quite some time now. I may even be able to finally move on to another habit!

I finally set up my system for tracking initiatives, which is going well. It has helped me concentrate on things I’m trying to get done, and actually make progress in them. It’s what has helped me proceed with attracting new website hosts.

As discussed at length, I gave up drinking a while back as part of a year-long experiment. That’s been going great overall. Life is, perhaps, less exciting, but boy is it more productive (and easier in general).

I’ve been able to almost entirely eliminate social media and other time-wasters from my life. I’ve also kept up quite well with avoiding the daily news.

I’ve finally started watching Spanish language television instead of just YouTube videos, and honestly I think the benefits are immediate and tremendous. I now feel frustrated that I hadn’t been doing it all this time.

I’ve been reading more than ever, and exclusively in Spanish. I’m blasting through the end of Harry Potter and it’s exciting to see how much easier it gets over time. I’m looking forward to moving on to other books.

I’ve also been keeping up with my other studies and vocabulary, and have basically not missed a day in quite some time.

Not everything has gone perfectly, and it’s also easy for me to feel like I’m doing a bad job at things.

Honestly, after writing this blog post, my biggest take away from writing this post is that I need to do these more often. I would have said that I’m struggling quite a bit before writing it. But I’m really not.

I probably haven’t put enough effort into meeting new people here in Buenos Aires, and so I’ve been a bit of a hermit, which feels like a waste of being here. But then again, I’ve been pretty productive and things have been going well.

I just need to keep up what I’m doing, because it’s actually working well.

 

 

Posted on

Thoughts About a Potential Improvement System

I just happened to read my post about how a weight training system helped me quite a bit and then mused that I should have something similar for improvements in my business and personally. Then I read the following post which had more ideas about what I could put together.

And those were both way back in 2020 and I haven’t done anything yet.

Well, while I was reading I had some ideas. What if I put together some sort of end-of-day (or maybe start-of-day?) ranking system that lists all of my current initiatives and then I rate myself on how I’m doing on them.

Perhaps weekly, I could remove things that are no longer important initiatives.

And that’s it, that would be the system.

Why would this work?

First, it would keep things very simple. I don’t like the idea of a clumsy, complicated system that’s a lot of work to manage.

But what would make it effective would be the following:

  1. It would keep all important initiatives top-of-mind
  2. It would help me track how they are going over time
  3. It would motivate me to actually make progress so that I can put good numbers down

The last one is probably the most important. This has worked with my daily survey I fill out personally, because every time I put down bad numbers I feel guilty or ashamed, and every time I put down good numbers I feel accomplished.

It motivates me to get those good numbers.

So what would I put on this list?

It would be things like new habits I’m trying to develop, long-term efforts like trying to find and purchase other website hosting companies or setting up my fine art photography website, and possibly short-term projects as well.

The more I think about it, the more I think that the perfect time to respond to this daily questionnaire would be when I’m putting together my to-do list for the day. This happens almost every single day, usually late in the morning.

I think I would phrase the question like, “How do you think you performed  yesterday with regard to the following projects:” and then it would list each of them on a 1-10 scale.

If I didn’t do any work at all on a project, that’s a 1. If I did minimal, maybe higher.

Or for a habit, if I failed at it completely, that’s a 1. I suppose if I did it but it wasn’t great, that’s a… 5 or 6. If it was fully engrained and went perfectly, that’s a 10.

I think this could actually work quite nicely. I just need to decide how I want to do it. I use Google forms for my other questionnaire but I don’t love it. It could get a little weird over time as I’m adding and removing initiatives, too.

But, I think it’s worth a shot at least to start. I’ll make a note to start it up in a couple weeks when I’m back from Mendoza and we’ll see how it goes.

Posted on

Not Snoozing Alarm Should be #1 Goal

I’ve been trying for years to fix my sleep cycle. I’ve talked about it countless times in this blog.

The thought occurred to me today that maybe I’m trying to do too much. If the goal is to get up when the alarm goes off, why would I make it more difficult than that?

I don’t need to also get up really early.

I should be setting my alarm for a time when I’ve had plenty of sleep. basically the time I spend snoozing anyway should just be added to the time I expect to sleep. Then I’ll be in bed the same amount of time but actually be able to wake up when the alarm goes off.

Once I have that established, I can then work on improving my sleep schedule.

If I end up setting the alarm fairly late: no problem! There’s no need to feel guilty. It’s just temporary while I get this habit down.

Saying it now, it seems pretty obvious. I’m going to try it and see how it goes.

Posted on

I Want to Feel Obsessive Over Things Again

I recall that not too long ago, with almost every new thing I would become obsessed. I would learn a little bit about a topic and I would feel incredibly motivated to spend an incredible amount of time learning about it and practicing it.

I haven’t felt that way in a while.

I suspect that what I was feeling was a surge of effective dopamine and related neurotransmitters that made me excited and hyper-focused on the topic or activity at hand.

If that’s true, then the question is: why don’t I have that anymore?

One of my friends describes his affinity for video games as an “addiction”. When he starts playing, everything else disappears and he just has to keep going. He is extremely motivated and focused on the game.

I don’t want quite that level perhaps, but in general it is sort of what I want. I want things to utterly captivate me. I want to feel, even if fleetingly, like nothing else matters and truly dive into something like I used to.

I’ve learned a lot about dopamine and other neurotransmitters lately and specifically about things like dopamine fasts and other general ways in which you can make them more effective.

I’m already doing most of the things that are suggested like not drinking, avoiding most social media, and generally avoiding addictive-type things that give you lots of dopamine and leave you resistant to it when you need it.

It’s possible that over time, I’m going to feel everything come back and I’ll feel exactly how I did before.

If not, I think I need to put some more thought into what else I can do to help it along.

I’ve considered also that it’s possible my other regular activities are using up the dopamine in a healthy way and there just isn’t any left for other things.

For example, I workout regularly, I study a variety of things daily, and obviously I work everyday and have many habits related to that. Is it possible that these things are using it all up?

I don’t think that’s the case, but it is possible!

I think I just need to keep an eye on it and see how it goes.

If, at some point down the road, I feel like I am back to where I was, I could consider testing bringing some of my old things back and seeing if it has any effect on it. It would be interesting to see what the primary causes were.

Posted on

Intelligence Has Way Less to do with Success Than Other Factors

I wrote a post with basically the same title and premise back in January 2019 and, funny enough, I just read it as part of my regular review of old posts.

Today I’m going to present a bit of a different perspective, though it’s the same at heart.

I don’t want to give away enough details to identify this person, but I recently was thinking about how hard it is to work with someone in my life. And I put some thought into why that is.

This person isn’t dumb and isn’t unfriendly, but they are incredibly ineffective in a lot of ways. The primary reasons seem to be:

  • Lack of accountability
  • Lack of a system to organize tasks that need to be done
  • Inability to think critically and develop novel solutions
  • A sense that things outside their normal scope of care are either unimportant or outside of their control
  • General lack of initiative
  • Total lack of follow-through

These are all things that most people struggle with at some point or another. And none of them really have anything to do with intelligence (though it can help a bit).

But in the case of this person, I would say that these are the reasons they are difficult to work with and also are likely causes for any failures or lack of success they’ve had elsewhere, as well.

It could be totally different for everyone, but these are the main things I’ve seen with this person.

Everyone starts out with tons of weaknesses. Some affect them more than others. Intelligence might help solve some of those problems or improve those weaknesses, but by itself, it won’t accomplish anything.

I’m thinking now that the single most-important traits (or group of traits) is probably the ability to accurately reflect on one’s own weaknesses and to effectively improve or compensate for them.

Essentially, it’s the ability to accurately answer the question, “what’s holding me back?”

And then, of course, to figure out a way to overcome whatever the answer is.

More broadly, this could really be described as having a “growth mindset,” though I generally think of a growth mindset as being entirely internal, whereas external factors could also be holding you back and you still need to be able to overcome them.

A related trait that may be just as important is the ability to effectively identify and take advantage of the right opportunities. Sometimes there may not be anything holding you back, but you still need to be able to figure out which opportunities to pursue, and how to stick with them and pursue them effectively.

That last part is where I feel I’m weakest right now and where I really need to push forward. I’ve identified some excellent opportunities and feel I have everything in place to go after them.

I just need to do it.