Matthew Lang avatar

Matthew Lang

Family guy and web developer

No Resolutions, Just Good Habits

I'm not making any resolutions for the year ahead.

In my experience, it's a self-defeating exercise that always ends up with me not seeing it through to the end of the year.

If you're thinking along the same lines, then what's the alternative to making improvements without failing?

Have you ever noticed how bad habits stick like watching television, sitting on the couch, and mindlessly thumbing through timelines on social media? These are not good habits to get into, but the thing about them is that they're easy to do. They just don't require any thought whatsoever.

What if we could just as quickly get into good habits rather than bad habits?

Well, this is what worked for me when I first started building good habits.

I started with just one habit.

I started getting into the habit of writing every day. To help remind myself to write, I set the alarm on my phone to give me the nudge to start writing. When my phone went off, I would then start writing. That's all I did for a whole month. A habit built up every day. And it worked. It's still working. I'm writing this, aren't I?

The following month I added another alarm on my phone to do something else the next month and kept it going through the year. By the end of the year, I had built up some good habits that helped me through the day.

The problem many people face with new year resolutions is that they try to do too much at once. It's like trying to lift weights at the gym. You just can't bench press 100kg unless you've trained your body to get into the habit of being able to bench press 100kg. To achieve such a weight, you need to start with a smaller load and then gradually build up to the target weight.

Habits are the same.

You start small (ideally with one) and then build them up.

Tracking your habits is a great way to build them up. I've tried some habit tracking apps over the last year, but the one that works for me is Productive. It was the first habit tracking app that I tried, and nothing else I've tried has been as easy to use.

The good thing about tracking apps is that they give you a sense of success when you've reached a significant milestone like completing the habit for a week or even a month. Productive and other habit tracking apps have reminders built in as well, so it keeps all your habit building needs in the one place.

So, forget the new year resolutions and set yourself a short-term habit to achieve for the next few days. Once you've completed a few days with it, extend the practice for a few more days and keep at it. In no time you'll find that you've been able to get into your intended habit daily and by the end of a period of a few weeks it will become more of something that you just do.

I’m seriously thinking about coming off Twitter or just making my account private. Seeing less and less value in using it.

For the last couple of years I've been writing every day through a practice called morning pages. It involves writing three pages of anything. Now, I know I'm not a writer. Not even close, but I use this practice to not just write anything, but to draft blog posts, collect thoughts and write up ideas. My morning pages became a time to write before I started doing any programming work.

The problem with this practice though is that very few of this writing will ever see the light of day. The original idea of writing your morning pages isn't to publish what you write. With a full day of work ahead though, I needed sometime in the day to some writing and I figured that using these three pages would be the best time to do this. As I finished each set of pages though, I would usually choose not publish anything from those pages. Not exactly a productive habit and so I decided I need to change my morning pages practice.

For a start I'm returning to publishing a blog post every day. I did this a few years back on this blog. I published every weekday and left the weekend's free. The topics varied from day to day but I'm aiming to keep posts grouped around a theme each week.

To keep my posts consistent and in a good size for reading, I'm aiming to publish in the region of 500 words a day. Some days might be less, some days might be more. There's no strict rule to post length other than it needs to be around the 500 words in length.

Posts will be structured around a theme or topic each week. Now the posts themselves won't form a particular series or even follow on from one another, but what they will have in common is that they will all relate to a single topic. Doing this allows me to plan posts ahead and structure what I need to write about everyday.

This little habit is called my morning stories. A chance to spend some time writing and get myself into a better habit of not just writing, but publishing what I write as well.

So refreshing to have an inbox of positive posts in my RSS reader this morning. I wish every morning could be like this.

RSS Update

It’s been a while since I’ve posted any updates on my blogging habits and where you can find me. Now is as good a time as any to update these.

Here’s the short version for those who just want the links.

Here’s the extended version if you’re interested.

Main blog

This blog continues to run but will focus solely on long-form posts now. It will also remain my central site where people can find me and get in touch.

There have been many changes over the years on this blog. I started doing smaller micro-posts a while back, but lately, I felt that perhaps this blog was not the right place for these posts. More on where you can find the new home for these posts later.

This blog will now only feature daily posts that sit around the 500-word mark and will become more of a regular logging blog. Expect posts on the topics of bootstrapping products, productivity, writing and a few other minor topics. The goal isn’t to be a blog only on a single subject, but instead, focus on topics that I enjoy writing about and am interested in. A public journal might be the aptest description for the blog now.

Microblog

Last year I started using another blog for shorter posts. I mostly use it for links, quotes, thoughts and the like.

I’m using a new blogging platform for this called Micro.blog. It’s a micro-blogging platform that allows you to not only easily run your own blog, but also has timelines where you can follow other Micro-bloggers and converse with them using replies, much like Twitter does.

As painful as Twitter is with it’s muddled timelines, I do still find it of some value. Micro.blog allows me to syndicate my content to Twitter without the added pain of having to post the content myself or get sucked into continually checking my timeline.

Another great feature of Micro.blog is that it posts your whole post as a tweet if it fits within Twitter’s 280 character limit. Otherwise it will post a link to your blog post on Twitter. You get the best of both worlds.

I’ll continue to post to my micro-blog at least a few times a day over the course of 2018.

Programming blog

My programming blog is seeing some changes over the next few weeks. The focus is on more content and I’m gradually getting there.

The DigitalBothy blog was largely ignored last year, but I’ve got plans for groups of content over the next six months and I’ve got a few posts lined up already for January. With a bit of work I hope to keep a head of my scheduled posts on this by a couple of months to give myself some breathing space.

So there you have it. A complete RSS update for all my digital homes on the Internet. Subscribe to whatever takes your fancy.

There’s been a change to Sublime Text in the last release that stops the command palette selecting the last command being selected when you open it again.

It’s been driving me nuts. Roll on build 3157.