3 Tiny Habits Follow-up

I ended up participating in the actual 3 Tiny Habits program instead of trying to do it myself. The results were actually quite surprising!

The three habits I originally picked:

1. After I get dressed, I will look at my todo list & calendar.

2. After I put my daughter to bed, I will brush my teeth.

3. After I log into my Mac, I will build whatever Xcode project is currently open by hitting Command-B.

Habit #2 turned out to be the easiest by far. I am already in the habit of brushing my teeth right before I go to bed. This tweak was to just do it right after I tuck my daughter in, which tends to be when the night snacking begins if I have nothing better to do. There's not much besides water that tastes good after you brush your teeth. Besides, if I had anything else I'd have to brush my teeth again. And that's just no good.

What surprised me is how much I forget to do habit #3 at first. I'd login to my computer just wanting to check something quick - the weather, my email, etc and realize that shoot - I forgot to do my habit. The best solution I found was to make sure Xcode was up & running with an open project when I left the computer.

You'll notice I left habit #1 for last... This is because what I found with that was most interesting. My morning routine goes like this - get up, use the restroom, weigh myself, eat breakfast & do my devotions, get dressed, head off to work. What I found was that some days the kids get up between me starting to eat breakfast and getting dressed. When that happens, all bets on me doing anything I didn't absolutely need to do to get ready for work are off.

My fix was simple - I put my planner & iPod Touch on the book shelf I pass going from the bedroom to the kitchen & changed the habit from checking my todo list & calendar after I get dressed to after I weigh myself.

In summary: two big things I learned from tiny habits:

1. For a habit to be automatic, you need to tie it to something you already do.

2. To keep doing it, you need to set up as much as possible to reduce resistance to the habit. For example, I'm not going to even look at my development project in Xcode before I check my email unless Xcode is already up and running. I'm not going to run downstairs to check my todo list before breakfast, but I will pick up my planner on the way to the kitchen if it happens to be handy.

I also get the feeling that my best bet for accomplishing what I really want to accomplish - the things that take more than 30 seconds to do - is do them before anyone else in my family gets up or at night once everyone else has settled down to some point. While family is up & about - well that should be family time. After all, they are the most important people in my life! I need to fit the things I want to accomplish in around them, not the other way around.

It will be a work in progress for quite a while - I expect for my whole life.

Three Tiny Habits Different Than Three Small Habits

I got a surprise comment on my previous post on the 3 Tiny Habits program. The creator of the program actually commented on the post.

It seems I missed two things by trying to do the 3 Tiny Habits based off bits & pieces I heard on podcasts and the general description from the website. I went back and read the instructions (that's the last thing anyone does when they have issues, right?)

1. I didn't have "anchors" in place. This is saying you'll do your habit after some trigger or anchor. For example, I said I'd work on a side project every day for 5 minutes. I never said WHEN I'd do it, so it didn't happen every day. I should have said something like I'll do it right after supper.

2. I was doing small habits, rather than tiny habits. The habits I was doing could be 5 minutes as with my "do a side project for 5 minutes every day" habit. Or longer with my "have quiet time after breakfast" habit. The definition of a "tiny habit" for the purpose of this program is something you can do in 30 seconds or less. These are truly tiny, tiny habits.

The point of the 3 Tiny Habits program is not to build a small habit to make life better, it is to build the skill of building habits.

Apps I use all the time

I've been trying to declutter and simplify my life. After listening to a couple episodes of the Minimal Mac podcast "Enough" I decided one good way to do that would be figure out which apps I actually use and uninstall everything else.

Here is the top of my list - apps I use all the time and that actually make my computer useful. I'm going to leave out the obvious stuff like web browsers unless I have something special to say. There other apps I use but they tend to be things I use to tweak my system or things I just use once in a while.

Apps I use every day:

1Password - password manager - because I can't remember them all. I also use it to store the serial numbers for the apps I own.

MacJournal - my note-taking app/everything bucket of choice. If I want to store something and be able to remember it for later, this is likely where it's going to go.

DropBox - currently the easiest way to keep important files in sync between Macs, iPod Touch, and iPad.

Reeder - the best Google Reader client I've seen on the Mac. I like using an app rather than the web interface.

Pomodoro - great simple Pomodoro implementation. You set the timer for 25 minutes of work or 5 minutes for a break and off you go! It logs everything. I've also been experimenting with an app called Vitamin-R that does that plus block out distractions.

WriteRoom - Minimal text editing. I use this for doing quick notes. The iOS version of this has DropBox sync

Sparrow - the best email client I've seen for a while. They seem to have taken the best features of Apple's Mail app, the iPad Mail app, Google's gmail interface and blended them together. This is something you must try if you have a Gmail account.

YNAB - hands down the best budgeting/personal finance app I have ever used. It is built around the concept for zero-based budgeting - every dollar you have is assigned something to do whether this means buying groceries, eating out, saving for an emergency or buying an iPad. There is an iPhone version and Android version. Both sync over the local Wifi network. The iPhone version uses location services to automatically figure out where you are and guess what budget category the transaction will go in making data entry super fast.

Todo list apps
I'm currently in the middle of trying to decide which one I like best. I've actually ruled out two because of cost - OmniFocus (too expensive & too complicated for what I want) and The Hit List (looks like Things, plus has some of the features of OmniFocus but syncing requires a yearly subscription fee)

Things - great app, very slick for managing your lists of things todo. This one is built on the ideas from GTD (David Allen's Getting Things Done) only it refers to "Contexts" as "Tags." It has built in Wifi sync between the desktop and iPhone/iPad version. The general consensus seems to be that Things and OmniFocus are the two best Mac todo list apps if you don't mind dropping some cash on such a thing. Things is simple and elegant. OmniFocus is no less nice looking, but it does EVERYTHING. Most of the time I see people praising OmniFocus, they are either way more OCD than me or own a business and track everything they need to do out of this one app.

TaskPaper - Tracks your todo lists in simple text files. The iPhone/iPad version syncs via DropBox so you can keep everything up to date.

todo.txt - shell script based tool made by Gina Trapani of LifeHacker fame. There is also an iPhone/iPad and Android version of this that syncs via DropBox.


Programming Tools
Xcode - for developing on iOS and Mac apps.

TextMate, MacVim, TextWrangler - because as a programmer, I need a good text editor that does syntax highlighting and I flip between these depending on my mood

Three Tiny Habits - or Five

I’ve run into multiple Podcasts and blogs that talk about a program called 3 Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg and decided to check it out. It’s very simple actually. Saturday or Sunday, you pick three tiny habits you want to adopt for a week. Monday through Friday you do your tiny habit.

I haven’t signed up for the program, but I decided to give it a try. I couldn’t decide on just three habits though, but I did pick five habits I think are most important to what I want to accomplish in my life.

1. Quiet time after breakast every day.
2. Drink pop with lunch (trying to cut back on pop)
3. Track what I eat for lunch
4. Brush my teeth right after my daughter goes to bed.
5. Work on a side project 5 minutes a day. This can be programming, writing, or blogging.

I’m using a program called Sciral Consistency to track my habits. You could use paper & pencil, a spreadsheet or web application called Joe's Goals. I’m sure there are millions of other options, but those are the top ones I know of.

Minimalism vs. Simplicity

A few weeks ago, I read the free preview of the book "The Art of Being Minimalist" by Everett Bogue and liked it enough that I felt it worth it to pay the $17 to buy the full version - which meant I got the second half of the book not included in the preview.

The big idea of the book that got it started was when Everett thought that since people can typically only keep track of 150 or so people in their social circle, they probably can only keep track of about 150 possessions. The book goes into reason you want to live a minimalist life and how to do that with your possessions, time, attention, and a little about how to make money in minimalist ways.

The book had a lot of good info and ideas - such as if you have so much stuff you have to pay for extra storage, you need to get rid of some of it. You should also minimize your interruptions as much as possible (either don't read Twitter or only read it in scheduled batches). Some of the ideas I read there are no way I could do. For example, he suggests getting rid of your car and moving to a bicycle-friendly city and reducing your possessions to the point that everything you own can fit in a backpack. I have a feeling my wife and daughter would NOT be happy with those changes.

After long thought about it, I decided that being minimalist is not for me. I want to be a person who lives a life based on simplicity. Here's the difference, I think. Minimalism means trimming everything out of your life that isn't necessary. Live a minimal life. That is too drastic for me, and I'd imagine too drastic for most people.

Simplicity means getting rid of anything in your life that is over-complicating it. Examples: movies you don't watch, music you don't listen to, stuff that you don't use and just spend time cleaning, dusting, storing and organizing every month. If you aren't getting any use or pleasure out of an object, get rid of it!

There are multiple books out there that at their core are about simplicity: Peter Walsh's book "It's All Too Much", FlyLady's work, and even David Allen mentions it briefly toward the beginning of his best-known book "Getting Things Done."

Put down the computer once a week!

It's turning out one of the hardest goals I have set for myself is once a week, don't do anything on the computer outside of work.

As soon as I decided on one day I was going to make that my "no computer" day, I started thinking of all kinds of things I wanted to do: email friends, check Facebook, do some programming and on and on.

I'm trying to figure out what to do with this info. It seems as soon as I decide I want to cut back or remove something from my life, something in my decides it *needs* whatever that thing was. And I end up coming up with excuses why I need that thing.

Looking back at when I actually succeeded at doing this, I feel the solution is to replace whatever I'm trying to remove with something else. The biggest success I've had with this was back in college when I tried to stop playing video games for 30 days.

I decided to spend the time really digging into learning Unix-based operating systems (namely FreeBSD and Linux) better. I actually found myself telling a friend that I was going to go back to my apartment and "play FreeBSD."

August 2010 Goals

Within the last two weeks, I've hit a couple huge goals I had set for myself. One hundred and twenty days in a row (120!) of working out every day and of doing some kind of programming every day outside of work.

Once hitting this, I have decided to take a new course in my goals. Instead of working out every day, I have heard it is best to give your body one day of rest every week. So I have decided to have the goal of working out at least 5 times a week - one day of rest and one day of just in case something comes up. I am kicking up the intensity with the Couch To 5k program with the help of the C2 5k iPhone app on my iPod Touch.

As for the doing programming every day, I have decided to alter that a little, as sometimes it takes a while to learn something well enough to write any code that is worth it. So my idea is to at least 5 days a week make some kind of progress on a side project or business. Be it programming, blogging, learning how to be a better programmer, or anything similar.

I have also decided that I'm going to read one good book on spiritual growth this month. Being a Christian that area of my life has been sadly neglected.

Last of all, I have decided that I live like there is no life without computers and I want to get away from that a little bit. Every night I have been doing email, Facebook, Twitter, computer games, or some combination of all of them or similar activities. Once a week, I will take a night and not touch a computer outside of work - with the exception of if my wife wants to watch a movie or TV show via streaming video. Obviously that night is not tonight.