Category Archives: Starting

Learning new things is hard

Drawing, Running, Starting, Writing

I’m a process kind of woman.  I like following a set procedure whenever possible.  It increases efficiency and reduces errors.  This is similar to my love of habits.  Having to think carefully and then motivate yourself to do that thing is hard.  It takes away from the energy that you could be spending on actually doing the thing.  Learning new skills is hard because you are usually spending effort on multiple fronts- learning how to physically or mentally do the thing, thinking about the best way to do the thing, figuring out how to fix your mistakes, etc.  That is why I really like courses for learning new skills.  Some people may chafe under the rigidity of a course, but I find the structure freeing.  I just follow the instructions/lesson plan and I can focus the bulk of my energy on learning the skills I want.   It is all execution and no overhead at that point.

That is part of the reason why I describe my process in so much detail, such as in my recent post on diagnosing my calf problems or my posts on revising my novel.  Are my processes the best ones?  Probably not.  But it is likely sufficient for a novice.  A beginner doesn’t need the best system.  They just need one good enough to get them to the next level.  As I build my skills, I will likely optimize my processes.  I may abandon them entirely.  But I hope that my posting my processes here, I can provide a shortcut for the next person.  Right now, I have three big projects: revising my novel, learning to draw, and improving my fitness level.  I let my novel draft sit for over a decade because I didn’t know what to do next.  I haven’t drawn since high school, and I was never good at it.  I didn’t understand what I was supposed to do.  And fitness, goodness, that is a complicated subject.  Couch to 5K is simple enough, but try to figure out a simple weightlifting routine, and things get complicated fast.  There are tons of resources for all these topics on the internet, but sifting through them is time-consuming.  So, hopefully, my work on these projects will provide

Right now, I have three big projects: revising my novel, learning to draw, and improving my fitness level.  I let my novel draft sit for over a decade because I didn’t know what to do next.  I haven’t drawn since high school, and I was never good at it.  I didn’t understand what I was supposed to do.  And fitness, goodness, that is a complicated subject.  Couch to 5K is simple enough, but try to figure out a simple weightlifting routine, and things get complicated fast.  There are tons of resources for all these topics on the internet, but sifting through them is time-consuming.  So, hopefully, my work on these projects will provide a set of great resources and a framework to accomplish these projects efficiently.  Obviously, everything will be filtered through the lens of what works (and doesn’t work) for me, but I’ll try to provide an alternate approach if I find one.

Starting again…

habits, Starting, Writing

So, I haven’t been writing or blogging at all for the past, what, month?  6 weeks?  Something embarrassingly long.   So, I thought I would restart this habit, and do a public postmortem of why it failed the first time around.

I had two separate, but related habits for this year- the first was to blog 3x per week, and the other was to write 30 minutes each day for myself (not work related).  I’m going to talk about the writing one today and the blogging one later in the week.

Writing 30 minutes every day

Initially, I thought the writing would mostly be blog related, but I expected that eventually there would be space to work on a book or some sort of writing that would become a second source of income.  I also wanted to create more this year, and I thought that writing would be a natural and easy way for me to express myself.  So this tied in to two bigger picture goals (second source of income and creating) that I set for myself.

So why did setting this habit fail?  There are two things I identified.

  1.  No solid home on my calendar.  I didn’t like writing in the evening, because I was tired after work and it felt more like a chore that had to be accomplished before I could do something fun (like surf the internet).  I moved it on my calendar to the morning before work, but I never actually managed to write in the morning.  I mostly overslept and had no time to sit down and write.  Then I didn’t do it at night because I already over-scheduled myself there as well.  🙂
  2. Weak sense of reward or accomplishment.  I had a few different things in place to provide a reward.  I’m unusually motivated by checking things off a list or getting a sticker or whatever other trick you would use to motivate a 5-year old.  So, I set it up as a recurring task on my on-line habit tracker (I’m using Habitica currently) and I wrote it on my planner as an entire block of time that could be colored in when completed (yeah, weird, but this is almost as motivating as a sticker to me).  Apparently neither of these are sufficiently motivating given the magnitude of the task.  I also thought that starting a blog would serve as accountability.  However, the only people who read my blog are spammers and that is (unsurprisingly) fairly demotivating.

So, I am approaching this in two ways since there are two problems.  First, massive bribery.  I like pen and paper and ink, but I realized that my rate of purchasing these items vastly outstripped the rate I used said items.  So I’m on a temporary ban until I use up some supplies.  If I successfully write for 7 days in a row, then I get to buy some fountain pen inks for myself.  I already loaded my online shopping cart  with an excessive amount of ink- all I have to do is write everyday for a week and many bottles of ink will come my way.  (The bargain is actually that I need to check off all items on Habitica daily to earn the ink, but in practice, most days the only unchecked task is writing/blogging.  I don’t want another habit to slip as I ramp this up.)  The second approach is to put writing back on my calendar in the evening.  While there were a lot of reasons to put it in the morning, it didn’t actually ever happen.  So, hopefully back to evening will work.

Projects and Habits

Starting

I’m a planner.  Breaking complex projects down in to a sequences of next actions makes me happy.  It was the one part of David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” that really resonated with me, and kept me using a system that did not work for me much longer than I should have.   I’m so much of a planner that I read the “Project Management Body of Knowledge” (or PMBOK to friends) voluntarily.  589 pages of statements like, “A project is temporary in that it has a defined beginning and end in time, and therefore defined scope and resources.  And a project is unique in that it is not a routine operation, but a specific set of operations designed to accomplish a singular goal.”  There’s actually a whole page defining a project, which is amazing, because everyone knows what a project is, right?!  But I think there is actually some important insight that can be obtained from that definition.

Many of us, myself included, treat New Year’s resolutions as projects.  At first glance, they seem like they fit the PMBOK.  Take what my friend google says is one of the most common resolution,  “Lose weight”.  It seems like it maps exactly.  You drop x pounds, and you are done.  Crossed off the list.  Temporary.  Not a routine operation.  And so you approach your goal like you’d build a deck or move cross-country- as a project.

But it isn’t, is it?  Treat it as a project, and next year you have the same project.  To be successful, your approach has to be one of setting up the “routine operation” or as those outside of the world of the PMBOK might call it -“habits”.

Habits are hard.  Much harder than projects.   Projects are so linear.  You break them down to tiny next actions, then work your way through the list.  Common projects don’t even require you to do the work.  Just google and find a plan.  Want to run a 5k?  Download the Couch to 5K app, and just do what it says, when it says it.  In 8 weeks, project is done.

Habits are harder.  Habits require that you carve out space to do something, and then you have to keep doing it forever!  (Well, not really, but it seems like forever).

Resolutions are deceptive.  They sucker you into thinking they are projects, and then as you start breaking it down, you realize all the middle steps are habit building.  Habit building isn’t glorious.  It is a hard slog.   And missing one day doesn’t seem as critical as missing a screw while assembling a piece of furniture.  But it is, though the consequences aren’t immediately obvious.   And so all you can do is do it.  Go run.  Or write.  Or meditate.  Or whatever that vague “thing” is that is foundational for your success.

Because if you do it right, if you really build a habit, then magic occurs.   They propel you without you thinking or deciding or using “will-power”.  If they are strong enough, they just happen.  And that such an amazingly powerful tool that is makes the slog of building the habit worthwhile.

 

The Start…

Starting, Writing

A new year.  A new start.  A stack of resolutions.  By January 3, are you already drowning under the weight of these expectations?

Goals can be a worthy thing.  Grounded in self-compassion and kindness, they can help us become better, richer, wiser people.  Approached rigidly, they can be punitive and crushing- making us smaller, sadder, ‘failures’.

So take small steps and expect failure, but embrace that you took action.  The start is frequently the hardest part…

More concretely, the goal of starting a blog is a huge thing.  WordPress is baffling.  Writing is intimidating.  Time to write is elusive.

But here is the first post anyway.

“The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and starting on the first one.”  Mark Twain