The Toilet Door

So when I started my attempt to blog regularly a little over a month and a half ago, I had an overly ambitious goal of adding one meaningful entry per day. Obviously that requires a significant time investment and whilst I managed it for a week, I've fallen off. This wasn't unexpected however, as with all habit building/breaking it's unlikely to change the first time you try. I reaslied it follows the trend of dieting or the gym that most people have. They are pretty vigilant for the first week or two, then they miss a day because of a work function, or they are sick. Then they miss another for a different reason. The routine is then broken and they stop going, they might have spurts of activity where they regain or rediscover their original motivation but the routine always gets interrupted or broken.

What I've realised is that isn't a bad thing, it'd be ideal if we could robotically acquire and discard habits at will. I'd program myself to wake at 6, go running, work efficiently, not eat crap and so on. It's not a bad thing to have routines broken because then the feeling of achievement and progress towards self improvement is much greater for all the obstacles we face. My goal of not having any soft drink has failed fairly miserably, but that's always going to be one of the hardest things to break, but at least I'm noting every day I do or don't have it. There's a few days a month where I don't have any, if I can slowly build on that, that's progress.

So back to this blog, I wanted to update every day, but that hasn't happened, but I have been updating about once every 9 days or so, which is a lot more than I used to do. So I may have failed at my original stated goal, but I set that knowing that I'd likely not be able to keep it up, but if it gets me in the habit of thinking about making blog posts more often, then it's working. So all up, it's been relatively successful. In 90 days or so I've transformed from making one blog post a year maybe to probably an average of 30 or 40 a year at this current rate.

So. Anyone that's come across this blog before has probably seen how infrequently I update it. Part of that is due to Facebook serving as an adequate outlet for microblogging. So basically what happens is I have some random thought or something interesting worth sharing. I share it on Facebook, get a handful of comments and 'likes' and then I never consider it again. In rare cases some discussion is had.

Part of my unending quest towards self improvement is to force myself to develop new habits. With some help from some software on my phone aptly named Hab-it! One of those habits is obviously blogging & journalling my thoughts and life. I see three immediate benefits to this.

1) I can clear my mind by writing stuff down, rather than bouncing around an idea in my head indefinitely until I get a chance to discuss it with someone or work it on more.
2) I'll get more practice writing and putting my thoughts and ideas into structured essays. Which should aid with my aspirations of writing a book one day.
3) I'll get a chance to document some of my life. I watched a TED talk recently about a guy, Cesar, who made a 1 second video every day for the past year of his life. He was doing it so he'd never forget a day.

So expanding on #3, a 1 second video doesn't mean much to an outside observer, but to him it serves as an anchor point for his memories of that day. It winds up being an ordered system of remembering things. One of the benefits he mentioned was that he was making his days more valuable, so he'd try and do something worth remembering each day. Now I'm unlikely to be able to make a 1 second video each day just yet. I'd certainly try it if there was a convenient application to remind me to take one my phone each day. At least writing something each day is a start.

I've got plenty of ideas for things to write about for the next couple of weeks. So we'll see how this goes.