Everyday Systems Podcast

No time to exercise? Get philosophical. Use enlightened self-mockery, a neo-Kantian personal categorical imperative, and an existential leap of action to get you moving.

How to use index cards for todo lists at the three scales of the chain of command: daily, monthly, yearly.

Organize your self improvement efforts on three temporal scales: year=general, month=officer, day=footsoldier.

Make your goals fun, important, and attainable with Personal Olympics.

A month is a much better granularity than the more typical yearly resolution we make on new years, because you can estimate better on that smaller scale, and recover and reset faster. And it's long enough (over 21 days!) for some habituation to occur, even with a slip up or two.

Limit your celebratory eating to the holidays themselves. Adjust your expectations so that your goal is mere maintenance. If you screw up, don't wait till new years to get back on the wagon.

One thing that every self help guru can agree on is that you have to have an arbitrary number in your system. It is a little weird that the most rational concepts we have available to us -- numbers -- are so irrationally inspiring. But it clearly is the case.

Strictness builds habit faster. Dumb down what to be strict about with "fence around the law." Avoid punishment and reparations.

Use the full habit traffic light for 21 days to build your habit, then switch to more efficient negative tracking.

Need to keep track of something? Keep track of behavior, not results, with the Habit Traffic Light. Mark each calendar day with green for success,  red for failure, yellow for exempt (S-days). It's cheap and keeps you focused on what you can control.

How to identify behaviors that are easily automated into unconscious habit.

Want results? Frame your goals in terms of behavior. Results goals are just wishful thinking. Automate conscious behaviors into unconscious habits.

Smooth out dangerous and humiliating binge drinking into moderate and pleasurable moderate drinking with a 2 drink a day "glass ceiling."

For every labor saving device there seem to be at least two time consuming devices to soak up all that freed time again. As T.S. Eliot put it, we are "distracted by distraction from distraction." Weekend Luddite is a system that addresses (at least in part) this problem of distraction management.

Reimagine yourself so that walking becomes the most important, the most exciting thing you could possibly be doing.

14 minutes is one minute less than the smallest unit of schedulistically significant time. No calendar has a finer granularity than 15 minutes. No one ever has a meeting that starts at 9:05 or 9:14. You have no excuse not to do this. Time-wise, it doesn't even register.

Take a sledgehammer and wrap an old sweater around it. This is your "shovelglove." Every week day morning, set a timer for 14 minutes. Use the shovelglove to perform shoveling, butter churning, wood chopping and other motions until the timer goes off. Stop. Rest on weekends and holidays

Last week I gave a high level overview of the no s diet to give you a sense of how something this simple could possibly work. This week I'm going to zoom in a little to a smaller scale and go over each of the rules in a bit of detail.