Day 845 Record Keeping
Weekend Habits
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Eating
Day 69 Pantry Check
Day 67 Recording
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Great sleep, great wakeup. Today was my informally designated metric day. I’ve been using a tape measure to measure my belly and my waist. Metrics are all over the place - I feel like it’s just as confusing to accurately get solid metrics as using calipers. Plan to do a big post on metrics as I believe it’s key to skill progression.
Weekend Habits
Day 831 Record Keeping
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Eating
Day 55 Pantry Check (74)
Day 53 Recording
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Good sleep, good wakeup. I previously defined today as my metrics day (every 2 weeks or so) for weight loss, and am seriously considering Sunday for forming a once in a week planning/metrics day.
I think weight loss and metrics are a real pain, and I want to do a full post on it later. In meditation, progress is much more…subtle..so when I record things I have to record more than numbers. I think it might be the case for weight loss.
For example, my numbers didn’t change today from two weeks ago. But I am feeling pretty bloated and gassy today. I’ve also noticed my legs looking differently - you know that feeling when you suddenly notice or feel a difference? I remember when I was biking a lot when I was a teen for the entire summer, I one day suddenly noticed I had quads.
Maybe it’s the bloat, maybe it’s not. But my honest noticing of a body part becoming defined, and the fact it’s sudden, not an obsessive preening, seems to be at least a little worthy of inclusion when it comes to progress. Idunno, just a few thoughts that I hope to writeup more thoroughly later.
Day 651 Record Keeping (78)
Day 620 Fixed Meditation
Day 497 Writing (74)
Day 37 Rowing (77)
Great sleep, great wakeup.
The Little Details Make all the Difference - Metrics and Implementation Intention
I finally got around to measuring my body for a solid metric on weight loss. I have been procrastinating on this for probably a year now. It really reminded me of a talk I recently had with my mother on meditation. I was advising her on how to make it a habit, and told her that the one thing that made all the difference for me was a basic measurement tool - a stop watch.
One of the first stories I ever read on meditation was a book called Henry Sugar and Six More, a couple of short stories by Roald Dahl. Henry Sugar is a British gentleman who becomes very very good at meditation. His tools were a candle and flame and a stop watch. Ever since reading that story, which must’ve been when I was 10, I thought about doing exactly what he did.
I laughingly told my mom that I had been procrastinating getting a stop watch for well over 2 decades. I told her that since she has a stop watch now (she only procrastinated for a week or two) she was probably going to make faster improvements than I had. But it really is true - we always seem to overlook this key ingredient.
What your skill level is now is an important piece of data - a talisman that shows us that we are indeed improving despite feeling like we are endlessly churning our legs in the mud. It’s what the quantified self movement is all about. It keeps us focused through the danger zones and keeps us moving forward, because we have evidence that we have moved forward. This is particularly key in a habit-centric formulation of self improvement, when you’re doing a task automatically, with no feeling, at least initially, of pushing a skill.
Another, similarly overlooked talisman is implementation intention, and forming a particularly crisp if-then parameter. I formed one for my writing habit, which has been lagging since I’ve been pushing it lately. Even the most mundane of solid actions can be used to create a fold in the mind that promotes automaticity.
For me, I tend to rest and drink a glass of water after rowing. So my implementation intention now is “after I finish my glass of water after rowing I sit down and start my writing habit.” Pretty easy, but like metrics, I bowl right over it, and later on I wonder why my SRHI scores aren’t improving. And now, I can already see the improvement occurring.
I’ve been writing down little maxims in a book I carry on self improvement. From all of this I’ve extracted two:
Tools and data pertaining to metrics are invaluable to self improvement, but are almost always forgotten
The more precise the implementation intention, the stronger and quicker automaticity ensues.
Day 538 Record Keeping (55)
Day 507 Fixed Meditation (84)
Day 453 Bodyweight Exercise (3 typewriter pushups - 74)
Day 380 Writing (59)
Day 553 Eating (66)
Bad sleep, bad wakeup.
Current Status (I’m Back!)
In the last several weeks I moved to Spain. Dealt with finding an apartment. A week later, just when I was acclimatizing to the time difference, I left for India. Adjusted to the time zone there and after 10 days returned to Spain. Dealt with paperwork for residency. It’s been a week and I’m finally back!
Needless to say, this has recked havoc on my habits. I had very spotty internet in India, and somehow regularly got into a quadphasic sleep pattern, sleeping for four hours twice a day, which was incredibly discombobulating.
My record keeping is shot. Bodyweight writing, shot (the next article on my list was one I needed to do some heavy internet research for). Eating, shot - there really wasn’t much choice as to what to eat there. But surprisingly my basic bodyweight exercises have been pretty stable, AND my fixed meditation has been incredible. Made some real progress there, and got a perfect score on the SRHI today.
Not too shabby despite extreme circumstances.
I took stock today, and decided that what is best for me is to just nail my habits this week. I’m back to my basic minimums:
-2 typewriter pushups for bodyweight training
-basic meditation. I can regularly get to 3rd jhana, but I’ll settle for quality timed durations (starting with 20 minutes) of first.
-basic writing - that is 50 words on an article for work or any amount of editing
I’ll start pushing next week. On that note, today a few points came up:
-I can feel vortex forces ripping at me - I want to do everything NOW. One possible solution would be to push one habit and change what I push the next day on an alternating schedule. Lydia has done something like this and it seems to work by preventing those psychological forces from ripping apart her habits.
So, instead of selecting on thing, say writing, to push for a few weeks, I would push write on day 1, bodyweight exercises day 2, and repeat.
-Writing is a real problem right now - it’s always been tenuous - I think I went too far too fast. The step up from writing x amount of words to writing x amount of a work-related paper was too much. I didn’t sufficiently form a “ledge” like I did transitioning from pushups to typewriter pushups.
One way around this would be to treat doing x amount of work-related words as “pushing mastery”.
Also I can switch up my habit order, doing writing as soon as I get out of bed.
I’ve recently been doing meditation, which is great, but today I pushed it hard and was utterly exhausted. Depressing and frustrating in the moment, utterly forseeable in hindsight.
I think it’s really really important to make sure I know where I’m at, and what the next ledge is at all times (and I feel this should be emphasized when improving upon Timothy Ferriss’ DiSSS protocol). Having adequate metrics and a pathway to the next ledge prevents stagnation, and I feel that I’m having severe problems with that nowadays, even despite the chaotic moving/travel situations.
There’s a lot of talk on Reddit, Quora, and random online articles about all this. But what I have to remember is though the advice being given is good, it’s all about one habit. I’m now entering that intermediate stage of this project of dealing with the dissonant harmonics of trying to level up multiple habits to mastery, and that’s no easy task.