But, how?
You've probably heard advice along the line of, "To make habits stick, pick one and focus on it". Decent advice. But not one that will make habits stick.
CGP Grey, sounds this wisdom about the mind: You won't know what is on your mind before you think about it. In that light, in the context of what arrives and departs your mind, you wont know what will bring you dissatisfaction until it brings you dissatisfaction.
And that's the rub.
Dissatisfaction lies at the heart of any interest to modify habits to bring change or improvement. Your best bet for making habits that stick in a meaningful way is one that addresses dissatisfaction; the ones you have at this moment and ones that have yet to arrive.
Keeping a journal is what can be called an unremarkable habit but its effectiveness at easing the mind and distilling clarity is remarkable. To set your focus on thinking about feelings of dissatisfaction via journaling is to trigger the possibility of dissolving and resolving the dissatisfaction. However, to trigger a possibility is one thing, to actualize it is another matter.
For the purpose of making habits stick, the journaling you do has to integrate practices that logs the observations of dissatisfaction and tracks the application of effort(s), if any, towards their transformation. CGP Grey said it best. Quote:
This is a good place to bring in Roam Research. A note taking app that offers automated back-referencing.
Think of back-referencing as a way to see in your notes where a task, idea, or concept has been mentioned before. The implication of that is easy-speedy recall and an opportunity to observe as well as direct the evolution of tasks, ideas and concepts.
Say you are without a job or dissatisfied with the one you have and would like to change your situation. To resolve the dissatisfaction, with Roam, you can create a block or page called Get a Job and exploit the referencing feature as you apply effort toward your resolution. By creating a page, Roam will deliver all blocks to which that page is linked or unlinked (read mentioned). And with Roam’s daily page feature, you can extract an account of all the days you applied effort to Get a Job.
What makes this remarkable is it allows seamless integration of habit tracking into your existing workflow of journaling, moving the requirement of having separate systems for tracking and journaling from mandatory to optional.
If you were to ask James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, how do you track habits effectively. He might say something along the line of "Automate it, when you can". Roam makes it possible to query and apply code to analyze, visualize, and automate the data you add to it, allowing you to do pretty much anything. This means you can automate tracking of your habits.
Keep two pages in mind—one for scribblings and the other dedicated to habits.
At moments when feelings of anxiety or dissatisfaction tugs at your mind, turn to the page for scribbling and list out the things in your mind. The feelings might be vague but persistent. At those times, allow a flow of everything onto the page, a dumping if you will, with an aim at spinning out actions to resolve them. Other times, the action to take is clear. These clear actions go to your habits page.
To get the most impact from the habits tracked, how you measure matters. Two ways are worthy of note:
You've probably heard advice along the line of, "To make habits stick, pick one and focus on it". Decent advice. But not one that will make habits stick.
The first drawback of the advice is habits exist in tandem with other habits; to pick one habit to focus on is to ignore the relationship it shares with other habits. To address one might mean making the dearth of another so obvious it generates painful dissatisfaction, so that you might find yourself hopping from trying to address one habit to trying to address another.
CGP Grey, sounds this wisdom about the mind: You won't know what is on your mind before you think about it. In that light, in the context of what arrives and departs your mind, you wont know what will bring you dissatisfaction until it brings you dissatisfaction.
And that's the rub.
Dissatisfaction lies at the heart of any interest to modify habits to bring change or improvement. Your best bet for making habits that stick in a meaningful way is one that addresses dissatisfaction; the ones you have at this moment and ones that have yet to arrive.
Keeping a journal is what can be called an unremarkable habit but its effectiveness at easing the mind and distilling clarity is remarkable. To set your focus on thinking about feelings of dissatisfaction via journaling is to trigger the possibility of dissolving and resolving the dissatisfaction. However, to trigger a possibility is one thing, to actualize it is another matter.
For the purpose of making habits stick, the journaling you do has to integrate practices that logs the observations of dissatisfaction and tracks the application of effort(s), if any, towards their transformation. CGP Grey said it best. Quote:
I find the process of thinking about what needs to be improved or changed or constantified one of the most directly helpful parts of the process: Identifying vague feelings of dissatisfaction and turning them into actionable traction-able checklistable items.
Habit tracking evinces insights for a clearer understanding of the course. It delivers feedback and feedback effects intentionality.
This is a good place to bring in Roam Research. A note taking app that offers automated back-referencing.
Say you are without a job or dissatisfied with the one you have and would like to change your situation. To resolve the dissatisfaction, with Roam, you can create a block or page called Get a Job and exploit the referencing feature as you apply effort toward your resolution. By creating a page, Roam will deliver all blocks to which that page is linked or unlinked (read mentioned). And with Roam’s daily page feature, you can extract an account of all the days you applied effort to Get a Job.
What makes this remarkable is it allows seamless integration of habit tracking into your existing workflow of journaling, moving the requirement of having separate systems for tracking and journaling from mandatory to optional.
If you were to ask James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, how do you track habits effectively. He might say something along the line of "Automate it, when you can". Roam makes it possible to query and apply code to analyze, visualize, and automate the data you add to it, allowing you to do pretty much anything. This means you can automate tracking of your habits.
Here is an example from my own practice. Using Javascript, I was able to create a tracker that logs select habits across the span of a month.
So... How do you track habits effectively?
Keep two pages in mind—one for scribblings and the other dedicated to habits.
At moments when feelings of anxiety or dissatisfaction tugs at your mind, turn to the page for scribbling and list out the things in your mind. The feelings might be vague but persistent. At those times, allow a flow of everything onto the page, a dumping if you will, with an aim at spinning out actions to resolve them. Other times, the action to take is clear. These clear actions go to your habits page.
You'd be best served by a habits page with two sections: one section for collecting habits and the other for organizing them. Organize your habits into lists of threes. One, two, three to the three most important. Next three to the next most important, and so on and so forth.
As you might expect, the habits page might grow and shift as you go about your days. Let it. Also, you might notice some habits to be evergreen and/or to have outsized impacts on everything else - including other habits. Star those.
To get the most impact from the habits tracked, how you measure matters. Two ways are worthy of note:
- Binary tracking: A simple yes/no. Did you or did you not do it?
- Quantitative tracking: This measures how many.
Living day to day exposes you to dissatisfaction. Having a system to identify its drivers and to keep track of the effort you apply towards resolving them can be the difference between stagnation and transformation. How you track determines what you notice, and what you notice shapes what you improve.
Simple, unremarkable, consistent, day to day actions is the path through which the remarkable emerges.
Thank you for reading this piece on BasicPulse. Do you have questions, suggestions or comments? Please, leave them in the comment section below. Remember to leave your email in the subscription box below to get updates straight in your inbox. Be remarkable!
0 comments:
Post a Comment
Leave a comment.