How to accomplish everything on your To Do List
The notion of habits of progression
Every year around this time, I get the sudden urge to be extra productive and i’m sure my YoY Amazon shopping habits would reflect this. As I was doing some cleaning last week, I came across a Self Journal that according to the shipping notice I found in my Gmail, was purchased on December 1, 2018 (I told you about the shopping habits). Perhaps the fact that I had this for over 3 years and completely forgot about it is a reflection of something, but I’ll choose to ignore that for now.
It must have been fate but around this same time, I also got around to reading this article that was saved in my “To Read” Chrome tab since the summer. The article titled How to Be Great? Just Be Good, Repeatably by Steph Smith was an awesome read - best summarized by this quote, “If you cannot do great things, do small things a great number of times”. Smith breaks down the concept of A Habit of Progression - the idea that combining the right inputs with regular optimizations, repeated deliberately over time, will produce great results.
As we approach the new year and the realization that I haven’t accomplished my resolutions yet begin to set in, I realized that I was overcorrecting and looking for dramatic changes that would surely fizzle within a few days. I was falling back on the incorrect notion that an annual tradition of setting resolutions would somehow drive major change in my life when that hasn’t been the case in the last 32 trips around the sun. Also, as Smith calls out, if you’re making changes once a year, you only have maybe 60….80 total opportunities in your lifetime to make meaningful and impactful shots at optimization. Why not stack the deck in your favor by adjusting and course correcting at a more regular cadence - weekly…monthly?
Going back to my Self Journal, I wiped off the layer of dust from the cover and finally dove in. While the concept of this journal is certainly not new, it is a good exercise that is forcing me to put into writing my goals and break them down in a way that I would actually make progress towards them - a habit of progression if you will. The journal is divided into three sections:
End Result Goal - What is the thing you want to ultimately accomplish
Weekly Milestones - What do you want to accomplish this week, what did you learn this week, what was your biggest win?
Daily Target - What did you do today?
I’m still working on defining my end result goal(s) and am not fully ready to share them with the rest of the world just yet. I’m also not used to daily journaling as it’s something I haven’t done since elementary school, but we’ll give this a shot and see how it goes. I like being able to neatly tie every newsletter with a feel good ending, but this will be the first where I’m challenging myself and using this outlet as a way to keep myself accountable. Perhaps by setting aside the 15-20 mins a day that I’ll probably need to tackle this journal, it’ll allow me to accomplish something greater than the sum of its parts. I cherish the few hours of free time that I have after work, but by putting to work a portion of that time, I’m curious to see what I might be able to produce.
I was actually originally thinking if I should save this topic for late December in the spirit of New Year’s resolutions, but quickly realized that goes against the whole point of habits of progression…Here’s to hoping I have some better ideas in this upcoming week.
Have a great week ahead.