{"id":316,"date":"2012-05-07T23:21:53","date_gmt":"2012-05-08T03:21:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/?p=316"},"modified":"2012-05-07T23:59:56","modified_gmt":"2012-05-08T03:59:56","slug":"three-weeks-an-experiment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/2012\/05\/three-weeks-an-experiment\/","title":{"rendered":"Three Weeks: An Experiment"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>The Gist<\/h2>\n<p>I am going to write a blog post every day for three weeks, and they can&#8217;t completely suck.<\/p>\n<p>Some background: I am the target market for self help books. I constantly wish I were doing more to improve my self and my life, and I frequently dream up big schemes, then (maybe) execute on them for a day or two. Something pulls me out of the pattern and it&#8217;s over. The dream is forgotten, and I move on.<\/p>\n<h3>I&#8217;ve tried a number of approaches:<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Just do everything<\/li>\n<li>Do whatever single thing interests me that day<\/li>\n<li>Commit to big specific projects I think I want to do<\/li>\n<li>Start with small things and slowly ratchet them up<\/li>\n<li>Try to get people to care if I fail<\/li>\n<li>Change my sleep schedule for some reason<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>Regular pitfalls include:<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Missing a single thing leads to a feeling of failure, and I give up<\/li>\n<li>Failing to have a specific interest on a given day<\/li>\n<li>Overcommitting my time, or getting mired in setup<\/li>\n<li>Deciding which things to start with is hard<\/li>\n<li>Other people are rarely motivated to see my plans through<\/li>\n<li>There&#8217;s always a reason to stay up late or to sleep in<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>The Next Grandiose Scheme<\/h2>\n<p>I would bet that you&#8217;ve heard about 21 days being the time required to form a habit, right? Go to google and type in &#8220;21 days&#8221;, it&#8217;s probably in the first two predictive results. My plan is simple enough that I&#8217;ve ignored it for years. It goes like this:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Focus on a single thing for three full weeks.<\/li>\n<li>Repeat.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>My plans on the order of &#8220;do a billion things&#8221; have never been a truly successful, so it makes sense to give things a try one-at-a-time.<\/p>\n<h2>Logic<\/h2>\n<p>Since these are relatively small packets of time, I&#8217;m able to choose topics I might otherwise fear are wasteful. I should also be able to set realistic, objective goals for where I&#8217;d like to arrive at after three weeks of focused effort. I can also freely fail at focusing and just try again &#8212; one of the intended results of performing this experiment multiple times is that my ability to drill down and focus on something new should improve. Right now I tend to get watery-eyed and feel like a nap after an hour of focus.<\/p>\n<p>Documentation of the three-week effort brings some other things to the table. There&#8217;s a well-known method (I&#8217;ll call it the Seinfeld method) where a success-to-be plots a big red X on a calendar every day they&#8217;ve performed the task they want to improve at. I don&#8217;t have a big calendar in my house (though I may get one), but I do have a blog. It&#8217;s like putting my big red X marks on the lawn, and telling all of my neighbours why. But I&#8217;d hate to get half-way into a three-week sprint and fail to blog about it. Thus, my first sprint should force me to be blogging every day. In a way, I&#8217;m combining some of the earlier strategies:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>This is a small start.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;m telling others.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;m working on something that interests me.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>As time goes on, my writing should improve, and you will have the chance of learning something, since I&#8217;ll often report on my activities by explaining them.<\/p>\n<p>Off on a tangent: a hack I&#8217;ve learned is to trick myself into starting a large project by convincing myself to do one very easy but related task, then riding its momentum. An example is doing the dishes: rather than set out to &#8220;do all of the dishes&#8221;, I just decide to rinse a single dish that is nearly clean. Once the water is running and I&#8217;m rinsing the dish, I may as well wipe it. Now I have a wet cloth and running water, and I&#8217;ll reflexively grab another easy looking dish. As the pile grows, momentum builds.<\/p>\n<h2>Once more for effect<\/h2>\n<p>So this is my first easy dish: just write a blog post today. That&#8217;s all I have to be aware of each day, and on Monday, May 28th, I&#8217;ll find another easy dish to start.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Gist I am going to write a blog post every day for three weeks, and they can&#8217;t completely suck. Some background: I am the target market for self help books. I constantly wish I were doing more to improve my self and my life, and I frequently dream up big schemes, then (maybe) execute [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[26,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=316"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":321,"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316\/revisions\/321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}