Habit forming

Excellence is not a singular act, but a habit. You are what you repeatedly do. - Shaquille O'Neal

I was hoping for a more noted scholar than Shaq to make my point but most quotes on habits are about breaking bad habits. Which I've had less success with over the past 240 days than establishing some good ones. That I am going to highlight here.

#30 - Change sheets 143 times. The 143 times breaks down to once per week for the 1001 days and I'm 34 weeks in. So with 17 sheet changes I'm a little over 50%. That is accounted for by a slack period around May & June. But I've got a streak of 15 weeks going at the moment.

This lets me talk about Remember The Milk which is a fantastic online task manager. I started using it at the end of June and it has really affected my life positively. I use it to implement Getting Things Done and I've had pretty good success. Just writing down a task really motivates me to check it off - this is how I managed to eat breakfast almost every day for the past two months. I've also got all my cleaning tasks (like the sheets) on a repeating schedule so they don't all pile up. Rather than feeling hyper-scheduled I actually feel in control - in a rhythm. As you know I had been attempting GTD for awhile now, but I've finally found a system that clicks.

#31 - Weekly reviews. One thing that has helped the GTD is getting into the weekly review habit. Again I wanted to do 143 of these, and I slacked for a good long while. But again I'm in a new rhythm: streak of 14 for a total of 20. Which is a bit over 50%. That gap will close - every Monday I take two hours - I empty the inbox, plan out tasks for the week, decide on new projects to tackle - like which of these 101 items to move out of "Someday/Maybe" and into active status. It is a great opportunity to re-evaluate my commitments.

#67 - Contacts. I have disposable contacts which should be replaced every two weeks. I've never been really consistent about replacing them on a schedule. Sometimes (like many other things in my life) I let it slide. But again thanks to RTM, GTD, and TIM - streak of 8, total of 12 out of the expected 17. Not too bad.

#81 - Leave the house. I've managed to be pretty good about this one. Since I started keeping records on July 1st, I've only missed three days out of the 101 days since then. And maybe one or two days before that - so I'm calling it 5 missed days for the 239 days so far. Now you might say going to work makes this an easy task to do - but I was unemployed for a month - this task really helped me mentally. Also, it is nice to have a "gimmie" task occasionally.

I won't focus on the items I haven't been keeping up with. Check out the updated list and you'll see them enough. Today is Positive Encouragement Day at The Ballpark.

Update: Not sure why I didn't notice this straight off, but Shaq is paraphrasing Aristotle. More Shaq-love on the ancient Greeks: "Our offense is like the Pythagorean Theorem: There is no answer!"

End of Post Period P-U-R-E-U-D Period.