Category: Habits

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Resting Instead of Phone Use

I have a bit of a theory. What if our constant viewing of entertainment was actually robbing us of all our willpower?

In reading ‘The ONE Thing’ again, I’ve been thinking about the chapter on willpower. He basically calls it a finite resource that needs to be managed.

Studies have shown that taking a break and having a snack or meal or resting tends to restore blood sugar and also seems to increase levels of willpower.

But what do I (and everyone?) tend to do when I don’t feel like doing anything? Sit on my phone immediately, and find some entertainment. No, we’re not using up any willpower to do that, but what if we’re preventing it from replenishing and starting an endless loop?

I think I need to try literally just taking 20 minute breaks where I maybe have a quick snack and lay down to rest my eyes for a bit. Often times my phone binges last way longer than that anyway, and if I had new willpower, I could get back to doing whatever needed to be done!

For the moment, I think it’s at least worth a shot. So I plan on doing that, and reporting back results.

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Need to be Laser Focused on Business-Improving Activities

I started reading the book “The ONE Thing” again (which is something I really need to do every single year), and it really has me thinking. I’m currently spending little to no time on activities that improve my business, and all of my time on things that simply operate the business.

The book goes into detail about how most people are simply putting out fires and just going through the motions, when really they should be focusing all of their time on the select few activities which make everything better.

I need to spend a lot of time thinking about what those activities are. To start, analyzing what I’ve done that has worked would be good. Then brainstorming how to improve.

I’m not sure exactly what I need to be doing yet, but I know that right now I’m spending very little time on the most important things. I’m spending a lot of time simply operating the business and it feels a little bit like I’m going through the motions.

I should be done doing any work on my house soon, and when that happens, I’ll have a lot more time to commit to these types of things.

Although even that is a bit of a cop-out. I should be doing them now. I need to be constantly improving and always focused on the most important items. Otherwise I’m never going to improve.

So right now, the most important thing for me is to start constantly thinking about what the most important thing is.

That’s a start.

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How to Stay Motivated without Pain and Struggle

When I first started my business, I had a free one-hour consultation with a business coach. He asked me what the minimum amount of money I need to make each month is in order for me to sustain my life, and I told him, “$500”.

I’ll never forget what he said next. He told me, “If you want to make more money in your business, you’re going to have to raise that number way up”.

His advice was literally that if I wanted to make more money, I would need to increase my daily expenditure so that it would be a struggle if I didn’t make enough to cover it.

They say that pain and struggle are incredibly powerful motivators. When your next meal depends on making more, you tend to do it.

I don’t know that I agree fully with what he told me, but I think people absolutely get complacent. When you’re making plenty to get by how you’re living, you don’t feel the need to make more.

I think that’s actually why it’s such good advice to automate your finances and investments. Even buying a house makes sense, because it forces you to build that equity. You don’t have a choice not to make enough to cover it.

Without those things, people just tend to inflate their lifestyle. Nobody accumulates cash. Either they find a way to make sure that extra money gets invested (which is rare), or they just spend more every month. Usually in the form of costlier housing or a car.

In my case, I tend to just travel more but I have the luxury of that as an option.

But I don’t want to struggle. And I want to continue improving my business and making more. So how do I proceed?

The one option, as mentioned, is to automated investments, and force myself to always be struggling to have enough for everything. But again, I still have that struggle.

I guess my question to myself is whether the struggle is actually necessary. Is the human nature of complacency too strong for me to overcome?

I tend to be an idealist, and I think, “absolutely not!” But what if it is? What’s the pragmatic approach here?

What if I set rigid goals for myself? Are goals, in general, the key? Because I could say something like, “I want to cap my yearly spending at X, and I want to grow my business by Y each year” and then stick to that.

But is it really doable when I am otherwise comfortable?

I think part of the answer lies in the fact that “motivation” is fleeting, and is more or less a myth. Struggle is only supposed to be temporary. If it goes on too long you get worn out, and the motivation fades.

The solution, I think, lies in habits and an attitude where you just do things and don’t wait around for motivation. Set goals, develop a rigid plan to achieve them, and then implement.

Even if you’re comfortable financially, that time-tested course of action should work.

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Downtime – Switching Tasks Can Take ALL the Time

We hear all the time that distractions are killing our productivity in today’s hyper-connected world. But what’s the logical takeaway from that? Just turn off the phone for a while? Put headphones on? And what is the actual problem with the distractions?

I have now concluded that it’s not really the “distractions” that are even the problem; it’s the switching of tasks and, more importantly, the time wasted between the two tasks.

For me, I’ve noticed that every single time I “finish” a task (or potentially even when I have some kind of distraction), a process takes over where I go and seek out other distractions.

For example, let’s say I just finished a difficult task. I’ll check it off my list, and then check Facebook quick for notifications, then possibly the news, then my texts, then emails. It’s almost automatic behavior.

If I only did two things all day, this wouldn’t be an issue. But that’s not how it works. I probably switch tasks many dozens of times each day, and so these distractions are huge. That’s a ton of time.

And it can happen even when I’m not switching tasks. If I check texts or whatever, it’s likely I’ll go through the same routine.

So what do I do with this information?

I think the first step is to just work on being hyper-aware of it when it’s happening. I need to overwrite that script and habit, and being aware it’s happening is the first step.

Then, I just need to fight that urge and go right on to the next thing.

When I think of all my most productive days, I remember just plowing through and going right from one task to the next. A common theme is usually that I had a good “to-do” for the day, too.

I think it’s important to make it as easy as possible to go to the next thing in the list. Having a to-do list means that you don’t have to think about what’s coming next, and that means you’ll be way less likely to procrastinate about moving on. So always make that to-do!

But most importantly, I need to constantly be thinking about the distractions and how I can rewrite that script.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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Second Most Important Thing?

Recently I posted in this blog about the “most important thing” being these blog posts, where I have some reflection and determine all of the things I need to improve. It’s still quite possibly the most important thing I do every day.

But in the past, I had always considered the “most important thing” to be self-improvement through education and learning. Mostly it has taken the form of reading books on a variety of topics.

Is that, then, the second most important thing? For now, I’m going to say yes! Things like, focusing on improving the business are important too, but none of them are as far-reaching and critical to my long-term success as improving myself through learning.

Reading has given me a huge list of improvements, both short-term and long-term. In the short-term, I feel empowered and capable. Learning something new makes me excited to try new things and general sense that I’m improving and my situation is going to constantly improve.

And long-term, it’s basically everything. I makes me more effective. It improves my decision making. It helps me focus on what’s important and ignore the rest. It literally makes me better at everything. Knowledge is power, as they say.

These are all things that will serve me well for my entire lifetime. The more knowledge I can acquire while I’m still young, the more valuable it will be over the course of my life. Just like making an investment early. Exactly like that, actually.

I need to redouble my efforts to constantly improve myself. Whether that means reading books, taking courses (online and off), trying and improving in new things, learning a language, or even just meeting new people and hearing their thoughts. It’s absolutely critical.

Without that learning, it’s easy for things to feel stagnant. Like nothing is going to improve, and that I’m not getting better at anything. I think one of the most important things in life, in terms of feeling fulfilled, is to always be improving. And I need to do that.

Lately I’ve maybe not been as focused on it as I should have been. I’ve gotten carried off in different directions with work, and I’ve been spending more time on other, unrelated activities in my spare time. I’ve even got a handful of books I’ve only partially finished! I need to finish those up.

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Time to Be More Disciplined

I’ve decided I need to be much more disciplined with my work.

Today, for example, I feel like I got almost nothing done despite having been home all day and working relatively long hours. I had important things to do but I kept putting them off.

Why do I do this? Probably just human nature I guess. A lot of it is rationalization. “If I go upstairs immediately after lunch, I can play a quick game before starting work again!”

And then throughout the day you find yourself browsing Google news for the 10th time, looking at pointless articles.

Part of the problem is that I see that I have a lot of things to get done during the day, and I just procrastinate on the difficult ones. In reality, I think if I condensed what I was doing down to just a small time frame, and just focused on it, I could get all of that done and more.

Maybe I need to just actually have a timeline, and say that I’ll only work for, say, 6 hours per day at most. And then just agree to work really hard and focus hard during that time.

But that’s not to say I haven’t improved in this area. One of the first website I built took months, and it was basically my only client. I would spend the whole day playing games or distracting myself in other ways.

I’ve made large strides over time to improve it, but I realize that nothing ever came all at once. It’s been slow progress. Every year is just a bit better. But the last couple weeks, at least, I feel like I have not been very disciplined. And I need to improve that.

If I want to work on the business and change a bunch of things in my business, I need to finish the other things first. And that won’t happen on its own.

(Note: this article was originally private and I’m not sure why. Upon reading it years later, I have made it public.)