If you’d like to start your own checklist, here’s a simple template. You’ll notice that I use a green letter x in addition to a green colored cell because, from what I know, you need some content inside a cell to “count it” in Google docs. Hope it’s helpful. If you change it, improve it, personalize it, let me know, I’d love to see.
Notes for these 2 weeks:
- Overall, a solid cycle. Both weeks surpassed my 80% goal. But I still drink too much. Most major slips, if not due to travel, are due to alcohol. The hangovers. The hangovers.
- for October’s Giving Habit, I donated to Dan Carlin and to Coin Center. I’m an active listener of Dan Carlin’s podcasts Hardcore History and Common Sense, and a big supporter of bitcoin as a technology to democratize finance and increase innovation in money
- My evening routine now looks like: tidy the house, wash the dishes, choose tomorrow’s outfit, and write tomorrow’s goals. This doesn’t include existing habits like flossing and reading. I’m testing whether a more purposeful, planned pre-sleep routine will increase my ability to wind down from the day, decrease time-to-sleep, and improve sleep quality
- I removed the daily habit of “publish something”. Usually this means a blog post. For some time now this hasn’t seemed the right metric to measure my content production. Instead, I’d like to write longer, deeper, less frequent content
- Meditating for 15 minutes a day, despite being just a five minute increase from the old goal of 10 minutes, has been harder to sustain than a larger bump in daily writing time, from 1.5 hours to 2 hours. Perhaps not surprising that relative time matters as much as absolute time, in the same way that an hour with a loved one feels like minutes and a two minute sprint feels like hours. Meditation is flat out hard. No way around it. But the effect is enormous, too. At this point it’s almost a cliche to say how powerful the practice can be, but after 3 years of experience, my faith has only grown
Thanks for reading! Here’s an explanation of how and why I track my daily habits. And here’s a starter template if you’d like to create your own.
What habits do you monitor? Which habits would you like to develop? Email me anytime.
(and this very sincere, unplugged