My experiments with “one good habit each year”
How did I succeed or fail in building great habits
I have started having a theme for each year. Theme is around building or improving one great habit each year. That one habit which requires a tonne of courage, efforts & motivation.
Building such habit is tough! To overcome this, I started with this hypothesis:
To form a great habit successfully, make a drastic change at the start.
And it is contrarian to popular belief of making changes slowly, starting small. I‘m applying this hack to my life and will be sharing the results of this experiment whether it succeeds or fails.
Here it goes (2017–2020)
Update Year 2017: Eliminating distractions and being more productive
As the drastic change and first step towards the goal, I ditched my smartphone completely and publicly announced it. For someone who has built 8+ android apps and being one who can live without food but not internet, ditching smartphones may sound brutal. Yet, I did it. Checkout my tweet
I lived without smartphone for about 4 months. At last I was pushed hard enough to buy one because there was no alternative for using whatsapp and booking cabs without smartphone. Did I fail then?
No. Ditching smartphone was the first step, I succeeded beyond what I expected. Those 4 months changed things completely. I loved spending huge time with my new habit of not getting distracted(smartphone is one major reason of distraction). Those 4 months internalized the process of letting go of distraction. It pushed me
- To let go of urges
- To focus
- To get organized
- To be conscious of little choices that I make every moment
It became a second nature after some time. I took measures to be more productive in work and actually followed them quite smoothly.
The same me after an year, 157% more productive. Even with smartphone.
Update Year 2018: Being more transparent and open
This year I’m planning to be more transparent in every engagement that I have with people. This includes but not limited to being upfront with people about my intentions, my past and everything that I can share without harming anyone else’s privacy. We all can share something that makes us look good or helps in achieving an immediate goal. But it takes courage to share something that makes you vulnerable, gives opportunity for others to judge you and might jeopardize your need to achieve an immediate goal. And it takes habit to be open & transparent where it’s as easy as to be silent to hide your vulnerabilities.
This year, I welcome all those vulnerabilities, judgments and lost opportunities with open hands. With this habit, I expect a big transformation in the way I look at the world and approach solving big challenges.
As a big start, I’m sharing my failure story, about a venture I started(called PepUp) and had to shut it down after an year of bootstrapping. Read the story here.
Year-end update: I did become more transparent. But the change was not so visible except at few places such as “conversations”: I had some best conversations with people by starting it with a disclosure first about what my real intention/expectations from the conversation was, instead of building up the story first. Had better participation from others and saved a lot of time. But I did not do enough of it, I feel. Also I figured that with transparency comes a sense of responsibility and trust.
Update Year 2019: Being more aware and present in the moment
I am so thankful to many new people I met in 2018, many things I experienced for the first time in my life and moving to a new place. That opened many doors for me and brought fresh perspectives.
It also made me realize that I’m so much overwhelmed with things in my bucket list, many half-finished projects, many opportunities missed, many unanswered questions and only limited time. Many of the items in my lists are backlogs of previous year. The list seems to be only growing. I am expecting this overwhelming feeling to grow only. At the same time, with increasing sense of responsibility, I find managing changes to be a bigger task than it was earlier.
Although I have read books on productivity, change management and designing systems to organize myself, I haven’t found any full-proof solution.
One thing that helped consistently is meditation. With that, I learned to be aware of the surrounding and myself. At the same time, it taught importance of being able to get the best out of the present moment.
So this year, I’m going to work on being more aware and be present in the moment. This applies to personal and professional life both. Some examples could be : putting conscious efforts to know more about what’s happening in my industry, networking to get to know more people and their stories, putting in conscious efforts to understand people by listening more attentively and so on.
This might be a meta-level goal, I will review it at the end of the quarter and update if I figure out any concrete plan to do this.
Meanwhile as a big start, I’m taking a pill of serendipity and focus on what I can do today instead of the whole year.
Year-end update: It was an easy task, I should have chosen little more challenging goal. I did get to know more about the industry, get to knew a lot of people. Mostly it was because I organized a conference. So I can say, conferences are great way to increase awareness and network. I know many amazing people now, at least 30x jump than the last year. Also I lost my phone and I was without phone for a long time, which led to more awareness and being present in the moment. Some of the best deep work I have done till now was in those moments.
Update Y2020: 10x learning speed
I plan to do that by first dedicating focused 2-week full-time to unlearn, read, learn, retrospect and organize away from what I do at profession. And then finding more balanced strategies & schedule for daily continuous learning.
In day to day busy life, I find it hard to do some deep learning. So I keep noting down things I find interesting and things that I miss to learn due to busy schedule. It’s a long list but given 2-week full-time, I can be more confident that I did the best I could to learn. I am starting this from first month of 2020 so that I can utilize the outcome of this exercise and I think this will give me better organization and mental models to accelerate daily learning in rest of the year.
Would be interesting to hear your thoughts! If you want me to continue sharing about this little experiment, do click that clap button.
