#scaleability

Redesigned Logo

I've been thinking a lot on what I want my writing habit to look like, and I feel my final picture is one that will have cross over to most other habits.

Habit formation is the focus of this project, but it's not the entire end game. Mastery of skills is. And so scaleability of tasks and pushing for constant improvement to bust out of plateaus is key.

When I think of my writing habit, it starts with fear. I'm afraid to just write due to various reasons. So step 1 is simply overcoming that initial fear response. Train and train until the response is action to the task rather than putting it off.  To do this I implement a small habit. Small sized habits - like doing 2 pushups or writing 50 words - make it ludicrous to NOT start or do the task in a day.

Step 2 is making it so that the task - writing in this case - isn't just something I have to do in a day. It's like breathing. It's like brushing my teeth. It's a part of my daily routine. And an advanced version of this - the superhabit - means that it would take more effort to not do it than to do it.

This is all well and good, but this can, for some tasks, land you squarely in a cycle of churning mud in place. Do 50 words, but they can be crappy words. You need to push past, and this can be done in various ways. For bodyweight exercises its doing more. I went from two burpees to 24. And this is step 3 - extending the habit. I did this with burpees by simply recording them. By recording, I was forced to distance myself and look at what I was doing. Naturally you want to slowly do more.

In writing I'm doing this naturally. And I've started to emphasize this by recording how many words I do. And I will continue to do this, and it's a great thing right now. But very soon I will need more than just quantity. I'll need quality.

So enter step 4. With working out it's following a version of a scaled strength plan. So instead of just adding to the number of pushups I can do I mix it up. I do back bends and abs. I do more and more difficult exercises. And this is exactly what I will need for writing.

I envision a plan where I have one day where I work on transitions. One day where I work on pitches, and one day where I work on specific chinks in my writing armor. Maybe for one month I work on one thing, and then I move on. Maybe I take a class. I don't know.

What I do know is that it has to be targeted.  It can't be just taking a general easy class, because then complacency rises up - it's easy to write 50 crap words, but improvement doesn't come through anything but uncomfort.

I've tried a version of this with eating - I challenged myself to not eat bread for a month. Could I do more? Yes. What about other habits? Could I improve in recording? Absolutely - I can memorize the SRHI and take it in my head. Meditation? Sure.

The last few days my emotions have been all over the place. I've had loss of clarity, loss of focus, and today I have yet to do my new writing habit.

This all makes sense - I predicted that my emotions would be unstable during this induction phase of a new habit. But what I'm beginning to think is that I haven't quite set up my new habit well.

The whole point of making a habit tiny is to lower the threshold for fear and paralysis. Such a habit should be ludicrously tiny. When I started burpees I did 2 burpees - an easy amount. I never had a point where I said - wow I don't want to do the work today - it was only 2!

Although 200 words seems like it's very small, it's obviously not so in my mind. A habit should be tiny enough to completely negate the initial static mindset I have that prevents me from even opening up my word processing software.

When this happens, the basic most simplistic action becomes ingrained as a habit. And then, like BJ Fogg says, it will grow.

So I'm dropping my daily word count from 200 words to a measly 50.

I agree with BJ Fogg that such a habit will NATURALLY grow. But I believe at some point you hit a plateau. At some point you don't have to work and you have to force it. And that's where scalability comes in.

I do meditation every day, but I don't push it. Bodyweight exercises grew from a tiny habit, and then seamlessly merged into plank progressions, and that will merge into general bodyweight progressions, the later 2 examples of scaling.

Day 162 Record Keeping SRHI = 84 Day 130 Fixed Meditation SRHI = 82 Day 76 Bodyweight Exercise SRHI= 79 (3 bridges, 1 min wall plank) Day 3 Writing = 21 Day 176 Eating SRHI = 62 Good sleep, bleary wakeup. Depression, irritation and loopiness yesterday. Perhaps went too low in the carbs - also had very intense burpee workout yesterday.

Scaling Fixed Meditation I'm noticing quite a bit of improvement in my bodyweight training - I'm pushing, and I'm able to improve daily. I like that feeling, and I want that to occur in all the habits that aren't static. Record keeping and eating are pretty static, as flossing will be when I get around to it.

But writing is scaleable - and I already have a plan for that - I want to get faster, I want to have more of a minimum daily amount, like in my burpee habit, and I want to get it so it's eventually a polished, publishable article that I write per day.

But meditation hasn't been like that. What I'm currently doing is the same thing I outlined in my initial meditation protocol (Described a bit HERE and HERE).

To recap, I do an extension of Vipassana. In Vipassana you observe emotion. By observing the emotion and describing it in your head, you refuse to give it fuel, and it eventually fades. In this extension you observe the emotion, imagine it leaving your body, transform it into positivity, and reintroduce it back into the body. I realize this sounds very woo-woo but it works incredibly well, and has completely changed how I deal with bad moods. Suddenly, bad moods and depression are things I have a choice about - If I stay in a bad mood, it's my own fault.

But how can I scale meditation? Well for one, I can time it. It has naturally gotten quicker to do, but ideally I want it to be instantaneous - or as close to that as possible. I can also add different types of meditation. For example, I should be able to relax myself totally at will. And eventually I want to be able to do very advanced practices like Tummo - fire meditation. 

Here are five more things:

What is an art lending library?

What are the relative merits of analog versus digital film from an archiving perspective?

Check out these inspired apps for organization.

Does your DAM solution scale?