the main message is this: it takes a long time to build a good personal system and it happens piece by piece.
the lesson is most clearly demonstrated with a story. i know my own better than any other so i’ll start there. this isn’t the whole thing, but it’s some of the important lessons:
experiment 1: sometimes i feel socially burnt out. how do i remedy that? [do several weeks of experimentation with varied number of social meetings per week (2 one week, 10 the next, 5 the next, etc.) and observe my well-being] lesson 1: do no more than two social meetings per day, absolutely no more than one per evening, and no more than five per week.
experiment 2: lesson 1 means i don’t see my close friends enough. how do i fix that? [talk with several close friends and discuss how to see each other regularly] lesson 2: close friends don’t count as social meetings (lesson 1). schedule standing, bi-weekly sessions (dinner, walks, tea, virtual chats, etc.) with close friends. regularity helps a lot.
experiment 3: i spend too much money on food. how can i spend less money on food? [insert several weeks of experimentation with making food, buying meals, fasting, etc.] lesson 3: cook three dinner meals over the weekend. eat one. save the other two. eat dinners i prepared over the weekend on evenings that don’t have standing friend dates or other social meetings.
experiment 4… etc. etc.
as i write this, i realize i haven’t ever written down all my experiments, but there are a lot of them. and, as with all things of this nature, the point isn’t the lessons; the point is that everyone needs to experiment and figure out what works for them. gretchen rubin said in her interview on design matters that no technique or strategy works for everyone, but everyone has something that works for them. the trick is to figure out what that is.
frankly, one’s personal system will never be perfect because things are always changing. change can happen in your life phase, in work, in your location (residence, city, country, region), in the culture, in technology, and on and on. and still, the value gained from having a functional personal system is limitless. i’m constantly tweaking my system and i think it’s getting better and better.
brick by brick will your personal system be built and no one’s gonna build it if you don’t. so why not start building now?
in today’s world, it’s easier than ever to be connected. digital tools help us see the world from the perspective of others, ubiquitous computing puts much of human knowledge in our palms, and the democratization of means of production make content production continuous and everywhere.
in such a reality, it’s easier than ever to be overwhelmed, especially if you care about social justice. there is always a battle to win, a cause to support, or a new voice to hear.
in all this, self-care is still just as important as it has always been… it might even be more important now. this audre lorde quote has continued to come up in conversation because of all these trends:
“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” — audre lorde
the following three techniques i’ve either used for myself or offered to others.
if your calendar is an important part of your personal system, use it to block off self-care time. this is what i do and i just take whole evenings and block them off. i put an actual event, usually from 6-10p, and then just refuse to schedule anything during that time. i also have a few other 2-3 hour blocks that i float around my calendar. because i use my calendar so rigorously, i know that seeing a big block of unavailable time means i make decisions about my day knowing that i have less time to meet with other people or whatever. super helpful for me, doesn’t always work with other people.
if time-tracking is a part of your personal system, but calendaring isn’t that helpful, setting a time goal for self-care time and keeping track of your progress also can be great. if you know that you need 6-7 hours of unwind time per week, as long as you can make sure you get that, great. you can divide the time up however you want (1h/day every day, all the time on one day, could be different from week to week, whatever) as long as you get it all.
make a list of self-care activities and try to do a certain number of them each week. if time-tracking isn’t a significant part of your system at all, a checklist of activities with a goal number can work well. for example, your list of activities might be: watching an episode of a show, going for a run, swimming, and reading. and you might know that if you get seven “points,” you feel good. week 1 might look like 3 episodes, 1 run, 1 swim, and 2 reading blocks. week 2 might have bad weather so you just read 4x and watch 3 episodes.
there are obviously more ways to make sure you’re getting enough self-care time, but these three techniques have been helpful to me and seem helpful to others.
writing my masters thesis was the beginning of my personal systems and productivity transformation. it may or may not have happened at the same point in my life, but definitely attribute my attention to my workflow and productivity to the magnitude of the task. having been through the undergraduate program in my department, i got to know many masters students. i also got to watch two years of students go through what looked like hell as they wrote their theses. the spring semester of everyone’s final year seemed like an incredibly isolating, depressing, and terrifying time.
i wanted the masters degree, but i was determined to avoid that experience at all costs. hence, i tried to get as much advice and pick up as many strategies as i could before i went into it.
although i learned a lot and built many important habits during the process, two specific ones really changed the game for me.
first, i realized how important it was to have a thesis buddy (huge shoutout to annemarie gray). we committed to getting up at 6a almost every day starting in early 2016, getting to a coffeeshop by 7a, and writing for 2-4 hours. we did this for months. we even had a hashtag for our instagram posts: #thesismornings!
having the accountability and support of a partner was unbelieveably important for me. on days that i didn’t want to get up, hearing annemarie getting ready made me do the same. and i knew that if i wasn’t ready to go so that we could get to a coffeeshop when it opened, i’d feel real bad.
so, having a buddy totally changed how i view and understand accountability. i always knew it was important, but this took it to the next level. especially since it lasted for months. this understanding about accountability has influenced the international writers group i’m trying to grow these days (shout out to cameron russell and janani for the inspiration on that one!) and also my decision to join my friend ross as a co-founder of jungle).
and second habit was the pomodoro technique. so many good things came from pomodoroing:
the practice of dividing my work into chunks helped me get realistic about how long each step of the process was actually going to take.
working for uninterrupted blocks of time and then doing whatever i wanted during the break times made me realize how much more effective i was when i could focus. that also helped me realize how detrimental interruptions are to my productivity. even the smallest interruption can be totally destructive to certain types of work.
learning how to notice when my heavy-thinking energy had been used up made me understand the value of working with my body’s systems and not against it. having pomodoro chunks of time made it very obvious that 25 minutes of writing at 7a was sometimes 2x more productive than 25 minutes in the afternoons and sometimes 3-5x more productive than writing at night. this made it much easier for me to justify to myself and others why i needed to not have morning meetings.
learning how doing something physical during the 5-minute breaks kept me productive during the 25-minute sessions has made me integrate walking and stretching into all my workflows.
observing how critical these two changes were to me completing my thesis in a low-stress manner kickstarted my productivity journey. things have never been the same and they’re definitely only getting better.
some goals are themselves the reward. making dinner meals on sunday nights for the week is one of those types of goals. doing the work on sunday night pays off during the week when you have food already made.
other goals require a little more indication of success, especially if the goal is less immediately tangible or is a piece of a larger goal. for example, keeping track of all your receipts for a year. the payoff for that might be a stress-free tax filing process, but week to week there’s no feedback.
regardless of which type of goal you’re working towards, setting up rewards for yourself is clutch. it’s especially clutch during the habit formation process.
example: sometime in 2015, my dear ex-roommate, annemarie, and i set out to read more. we did several things push us towards our goals.
first of all, we build a concrete system with specific metrics to track our progress. we both like to work in pomodoros (which we learned to use during the process of writing our masters theses) so we said we’d like to do fifty 25-minute chunks of reading.
second, we set out to work towards the goal together. it created some accountability (which was best for me) and also some competition (which works well for her).
finally, we created rewards for ourselves. we both really wanted new small backpacks for short trips. i can’t remember if she wanted the same kind, but i definitely had my eyes on a fjall raven backpack (i’m really into buying high-quality stuff with lifetime warranties these days ‘cause fuck planned obsolesence). if we hit the goal, we’d each buy ourselves the backpacks.
in the end, we actually moved out before either of us hit our goal, but i’m still working towards my goal. i’m only a few tallies away… maybe because of this post, i’ll finish today.
ps - i made the little chart below (this is a sketch because i can’t find the original) and we each recorded tallies to keep track. it was definitely fun to come home after a day or weekend apart and boast to each other how many tallies we got to write up.
the bad news is that change is hard. always has been and probably always will be. in my experience, personal systems change is one of the hardest types of change to make. most people have built their current habits and practices over a lifetime. a habit built and maintained over years is not easily broken.
the good news is that change hard! as it is with all double-edged swords, once a habit, good or bad, is built, it’s much harder to break it.
so, in my own personal systems, i’m all about finding ways to break old habits and build new ones.
so here are two tricks that i’ve used on myself and seem to be helpful to other people.
first, in line with my favorite buckminster fuller quote about change, i think the best way to break an old bad habit is to replace it with a new good habit. lots of people i know, myself included, have addictive personalities. this means when we get into something, we really get into it. that makes it much easier to take on a new good habit (say reading a book a week) than it is to try and kick a bad habit (say binge-watching an entire tv show a week). and making new habits stick is easier when you’ve set up some rewards and/or positive feedback cycles in the new habit.
accountability is HUGE in making change stick. many people vastly undervalue and underestimate external support and validation. however, i’ve seen (and experienced) that just knowing someone is watching or cheering for you can make the difference between success and failure of a new habit.
accountability can show up in many ways. some methods i’ve used on myself and with others are: (a) letting someone else know your goals and then checking in with them about your progress, (b) asking someone else to check in with you regularly about your progress, and (c) committing to something with someone else and supporting each other in it.
change is hard. the more ways to make it easier, the better.
ps - i’m also testing a combination of (a) and (b) which is that you try to check in with someone about your progress and then if they don’t hear from you, they should actively ask you how it’s going.
