Daily Movement

From 43 Folders, Merlin Mann talks of the “email DMZ” concept to quick start your good habits by giving you a clean workspace with little initial effort.

If you ignore for a moment the puzzle of reforming bad habits so that the same bad state isn’t reached again, this same concept can be applied to other habits that you want to break.

• eating of foods you want to stop, such as sugary, fatty, blended caffeine drinks
• spending of time in ways that you don’t want to such as web surfing
• keeping your office and workspace clean

Putting my own spin on it, you reframe the problem of changing your mind gradually to effect the new habit to the problem of avoiding discomfort/guilt/shame due to breaking your currently perfect streak of new behavior. If you’re able to act in a zero tolerant, self-disciplined way with little or no slippage back to old routines then this can work great. It may be some effort, so choose your battles.

So in the examples,

• keeping your office and workspace clean

  put all crap into boxes in the corner or closet until you have a clean office. Then along with keeping office from ever getting dirty again by not letting one paper or thing start to rest on the desk overnight, also start the task of periodically emptying out boxes into the trash, into a file, into your notes, etc.

  In cleaning my office, i still have boxes and big manila envelopes of “organized stuff” stacked, and a couple of isolated piles out of eyeshot which I still need to process, but it doesn’t get in the way any more.

• spending of time in ways that you don’t want to such as web surfing

  just stop reading your favorite sites with intention of never going back there unless you’re searching for something specific. If you start to click towards that old area, call it to your attention and ask, “am i going to do that again?” as if you had broken that habit for so long and now you’re about to fall off the wagon.

• eating of foods you want to stop, such as sugary, fatty, blended caffeine drinks

  stop cold turkey. As you walk by the store in the morning, if your feet fail and turn into the door, you can try to game your mind to make yourself feel guilty.

Then again, I might not want to fight this particular battle.

Here’s some free advice on breaking a habit.

If you’d like to contribute, please comment here and i can incorporate (and attribute) your suggestions into the page, or just go wild with the creative commons idea of making derivative work.

Enjoy and thanks.

Jeffrey Phillips writes in Thinking Faster: Getting Unstuck of a few ways to get started again after you’ve accomplished a lot and are unmotivated to start again.

The same thing happens to me and i’ve likened it to a mini-burnout. Every few weeks after making some good progress, I just don’t want to do the next step. The most angst about being unmotivated is when I know what the next step is, I know what needs to be done, and I just don’t want to do it, but I feel that I need to do it. That’s an internal tension that persists.

Sometimes it clears by playing a mini-hookey going a walk and change of environment to get coffee, for instance. Sometimes it requires me to pass the baton to someone else telling them, “I’m burned, can you work on this for me?” Sometimes it requires a manager to tell me that it’s urgent to get the next step done which motivates by adrenaline.

There are no easy or sure fixes for me. I just have to patiently wait the period out.

Think about what you spend your attention on every day — whether it’s a fleeting few seconds looking at a billboard ad on the freeway or an hour reading a book.

What you attend to or wish you did but don’t says much about you. What you aren’t aware of also gives insight.

Try making a mental note of what you think about.

There are only 16 waking hours in the day. What do you attend to?