Developing habits

Funny things, habits. The only way you can develop them is by doing them. The ones you want to encourage – let’s call them intentional habits – can be hard to obtain and maintain. The ones you want to discourage – that is to say undesirable habits – are often difficult to shake. I suppose there would be other categories which are less interesting to this particular musing: habits that you have that are pretty benign or form part of your character, but that come easily (maybe inherent?) and those that are difficult to stick to but not that important (erm… irrelevant?).

Anway, this is all preamble to me attemtping to develop some more intentional habits, starting with this blog. If you read back through my ramblings^[1], you’ll likely come across many times that I promise to do more blogging or make this a habit. What has worked in the past was when I wrote weeknotes. There was also that time that I wrote reflections on returning to work after paternity leave. Every year I start with the best of intentions at bullet journaling. I have no problem indending to be intentional.

Part of what works against developing habits is friction. Making stuff easy to do – or at least not too hard to do – can help. That said, I’ve wasted incredible amounts of mental effort in tinkering with things in the vicinity of the habit I was trying to develop – stuff like the style or hosting of this blog, for example. So as well as making things easy to do, it should also be difficult to get sidetracked. This is the promise of distraction-free writing environments. I wonder which editor will help me finally focus on writing. That was an ironic statement, in case it needed clarification.

That said, the best way of developing a habit is just to do it. Every year for the last three years I’ve participated in February Album Writing Month, where every participant sets a target of writing 14 new songs over the course of a month. Short term targets – with a bit of a stretch outside the comfort zone – but it works. I’ve hit the goal each year, and this year managed to release an album^[2].

In other habit news, I’ve recently signed up for an eye-wateringly expensive 12-week personal training programme, which I’m intending will get me into some healthy habits. I’m doing this with my wife, and we went for our first consultation on Tuesday. I was very impressed with the pre-flection^[3] focussing on personal change, and an excellent visual about various metrics moving over the course of the 12-week period. All sketched on a whiteboard. This is about developing habits that could literally prolong my life. You’d think that would be a good motivation.

The final related musing was the recent Adventures in Nutopia podcast episide entitled “The Magic Hour”. This is a podcast generally chock full of interesting ideas. One of the interesting ideas that struck me in this episode was the concept of sigilisation – creating a sigil (or seal) which represents something you wish to influence. The basic process outlined is to write down a statement of how the world is after the change you desire has come about – for me it might be something like “I am writing at least one blog post per week”. Then you cross out all the repeating letters and rearrange, simplify and re-rearrange the letters until you get a pleasing symbol that’s easy to recreate. You then ponder this further, and then use the sigil in some ritualistic way to make the magic stick, or just stick it on the fridge. Whatever works for you, really. What really struck me is that this is a great way to embed an intention deeply in your brain, rather than just tossing it around as a vague thought. That feels powerful.

Anyway, here we are… and whaddya know… I’ve written something.