Category Archives: Behavior Change

How To Start Your Creative Work

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” We don’t tell ourselves, ‘I’m never going to write my symphony.’ Instead we say, ‘I am going to write my symphony; I’m just going to start tomorrow.'” – The War of Art, Steven Pressfield

You told yourself all week that you would have time this weekend to work on that project. Now it’s Saturday morning, you actually have the time to work, but instead you watch Netflix in bed and hate yourself for wasting four hours. Now it’s 1 in the afternoon and you’re not sure if you should take a nap or eat lunch. The solution is momentum. Here are some ways to jump-start your creative work and keep your momentum building:

1. Write Down What’s In Your Head – When you have a few things you want to do, but don’t know where to start, grab a piece of scrap paper or a note card (always have these within arms reach) and write down what you want to do. Accept that you will not complete most or possibly any of these things today. Next, ask yourself, “what’s the most uncomfortable project? What’s the hardest? What are you convinced you won’t be able to do?”

2. Set a timer for 10 minutes – and start working on the uncomfortable project. Too long? Try five minutes. Once you start, you’ll figure the initial roadblocks and by the time the timer ends you’ll probably want to keep working.

3. Block Junk Food Websites – If your work involves anything online, accept that you’re vulnerable to distraction and indulgence and block the junk food sites. You know what I’m talking about. Remove the same sites from the bookmarks bar and use one of these plugins to block them: Chrome- Website Blocker, Safari – Mindful Browsing.

4. Turn Your Phone Off (Silent or Do Not Disturb Don’t Count) – When your phone and internet and Vine videos are seconds away, it’s too easy to get distracted. When you’re phone is off, you can’t rationalize turning it back on to check it for two seconds only to turn it back off again.

5. There Is No Perfect Time To Work – Start working for 10 minutes and see what happens.  “I’m not in the zone” “I need coffee” “I’m expecting a call and I don’t want to get in the zone and be interrupted.” “I need to exercise soon and don’t want to start.” Rationalizations like these are nasty and really hard for everyone to beat. Accept that they will never disappear and that you can only muscle through as they arise. If you need coffee, get some coffee and get to work.

6. Celebrate Victories – Finish the 10 minutes? Nice job, you’re gaining momentum. 10 minutes is better than doing nothing, and it’s way better than most people. 10 minutes a day will be felt after a year.

Approach these hard projects with a “death by a thousand cuts” mentality. There is no epiphany where it all makes sense. It’s about putting little pieces of work together to build toward accomplishment. The hard part is getting started. Sit down and see what you’re capable of.

 

Changes Since September

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Here are some of the new things I’ve started since moving to San Diego

1. I wake up at 5:30am during the week

2. I meditate for eleven minutes five to seven days a week, usually right after I wake up

3. I am active (run, gym, surf, yoga) at least six days a week

4. I write three to four days per week

5. I read one to two books per week

6.  I drink/party way less than I did in college.

7.  I am taking improv comedy lessons

8.  I use the 4 Hour Chef to cook more

The things I want to change

1. Instead of bingeing TV shows on sites like coke and popcorn, watch one episode at a time

2. Eat more food. I am not making the most of going to the gym

3. See a therapist. Not for anything serious, just to have an empathetic listener who knows how the mind works to listen to me

4. Find something with coffee-like effects so I can drink less coffee. In only drink two cups a day, mostly for saving money

5. Save more money

6. Meet more girls

7. Post here more

 

 

The Simplest Way to Form a New Habit

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1. One thing at a time, make it easy, and be specific. No matter how many things you want to change, you can only change one thing at a time. Period. One thing. I’ll say it again. One thing. No matter how special you think you are, how smart you are, how mentally tough you are, your success rate will be zero percent if you try to do two things at a time. Momentum is a big factor in this, so your first habit must be easy, so easy you can’t fail. Whatever you think is easy, make it twice as easy. If you want to run more, tell yourself that you’ll run for 5 minutes a day. Sounds painfully easy, but you have to start small for this to work. The alternative to adopting a small, simple habit is no habit at all.

2. Identify a trigger action. This is something you already do everyday. It’s the tripwire for your new habit. When you carry out your trigger action, you then perform your new habit. Example: I wanted to write more. I know that every day, when I get back from work, I walk into my room and set my bag on my desk chair in my room, get a glass of water and generally do very little work for the rest of the day. I’ll surf or to the gym, and when I get back from, I eat dinner, read, and go to bed. So my trigger was pouring a glass of water. I told myself, “When I come home from work and pour myself a glass of water, I’ll write at least 200 words in a WordPress draft.” All it was was 200 words of whatever came out. Very little was special, but at least I was sitting down and writing. Identify your trigger action that will guide you into the new habit you want to form.

3. Buy a big calendar. I got this part from Jerry Seinfeld. When you complete your habit, make a big X over the that day’s date. The motto is “don’t break the chain.” After a few days, those Xs will feel as good as reaching the top of mountain or finishing a book. My calendar is above.

4. Every three weeks, choose a new habit  Since I put this this calendar in my room in August, this system has worked better than anything I have ever tried. It keeps you honest and you can clearly track your results as you progress.  Instead of moping about the things I haven’t changed, I now wake up with no snooze every weekday, write at least 200 words everyday, smile more, and regularly go to the gym.

If you slip up and miss a day, just keep going. Finish the three weeks and start a new habit. If one habit was too hard, be honest with yourself about it. Don’t make excuses about why you didn’t do it. You failed and that’s fine. Just pick an easier habit the following session and keep your momentum up. After you’ve adopted a few habits, you’ll become confident in the process.

The hardest thing here is not starting a new habit, it’s making it normal, easy part of your life. It’s common to watch some TED talk or a youtube video and get inspired and excited to change your lifestyle. The idea of changing habits is awesome,  but it’s psychologically draining when you make lots of changes at once. You will stall and relapse into old habits and not even know why. Take this smart, slow approach, and start building real habits, one at a time.

Cold Showers

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Cold showers jumpstart my day. It’s an easy way to start off beating the resistance. If you I beat it once a day, I think that’s more than some people.

Last summer, I started taking two ten minute cold showers a day. It’s an easy way to increase lean muscle, stimulate your immune system, and keep your mind happy. Seneca bathed in cold water everyday of his life, even as an old man.

During the winter in upstate New York, I stopped because I would have gotten pneumonia.  Now that I live in San Diego, I take cold showers every morning. The 52 (brutal, I know) degree San Diego mornings make it easy to convince myself to just turn the knob to warm water. But I don’t. I always turn it on cold. When I’m done, it’s an accomplishment. I can tell myself that I did something uncomfortable and hard, and I haven’t started my real work yet.

If you want to try taking cold showers, it’s best to start just 30 seconds or one minute and increase the time you stay in by 30 seconds each day. I made passing time easier by memorizing my favorite monologue of all time or by meditating. If you don’t have something to keep your mind occupied it’s harder.

Eliminated

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  • Spontaneous internet surfing before, in between, or after work.
  • World Cup games that don’t involve Argentina, Germany, or the U.S.
  • Hulu during weekdays.
The list above contains my biggest productivity inhibitors.  The problem with these activities is that they interrupt what normally is set on Google Calendar.  The unplanned disruption sends the rest of my day into a downward spiral.
I don’t budget time to watch The Office during my morning bowl of Kix. When I’m planning my day this kind of thing doesn’t even show up on my radar.  But when I enter the dining room and the Post Standard is still in the mail box, leaving the table absent of information to consume, I panic and rationalize that I deserve long, relaxed breakfast, and that laughing at Dwight will make me happy the rest of the day. These activities and rationalizations are destructive, so in the interest of a productive summer, they are now eliminated.

Monday

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Allegedly, Mondays are the most challenging day of the week.  This morning however, eager to begin the first, and last, full week of my behavior change, I leapt from my the protection of my heavy comforter to silence my alarm, making Monday an accomplishment before even the sun rose.
Rising at 5:50 am isn’t too unfamiliar.  Milking over the summer and the occasional Sunday morning during school has provided me the early morning experience, but knowing that my experiment was running gave me a heightened awareness of what a slow offers.
I milked last night and so took a shower before going to bed allowing me this morning to gain extra time by washing my hair in bath tub.  Dressed by 6:10, I prepared my usual breakfast: Two fried eggs (collected yesterday), a glass of milk (raw), and peanut butter (Nature’s Way – Organic), butter (Organic Valley Pasture Butter), and honey (Kutik’s).  By 6:30, lunch assembled, bag ready, teeth brushed, I felt totally chill as I decided what my next move would be on this strikingly slow morning.  I settled on a cup of coffee (Sumatra Mandheling – black – organically grown) and the comics, leaving the house at 7:05, thirty minutes before I usually do.
The luxury of a finding a convenient parking spot at OCC feels so so good.  I pulled in at 7:35 and to a front row parking spot.  It’s the little things in life that make one happy.  This is one of those little things for me.