Personal Growth — Developing New Productive Habits
A variation of this is public at my extroverted medium blog https://medium.com/@taboca/personal-growth-developing-new-productive-habits-a5773361e2da.
This is a series of concepts and ideas that seem to be helping me with learning of new habits.
Key concepts as reminders
While reading 4-hour Workweek, the book from Tim Ferriss, I was really immersed in the ideas, while reading. But over time, I noticed that the concepts went blur, specially also because I am always reading new amazing stuff. So the question comes: How to make them to stick?
Tim Ferriss himself gave me an idea — he asks the reader to stop reading books, except his. And when I reflected about this I understood the notion of order, or priorities. Well, his book have a point — it’s about productivity. So then I inserted in my calendar reminder systems with some of the key productive idea — literally, the author calls me and speak a recommendation, a thought, an advice.
An example is Tim’s request to *Remember, 3 times a day, to check if you are not inventing things to avoid working in the real important things*. That became my alarm clock at 8AM. The way I did this was connecting Google Calendar in the Android with a Clock Alarm system that is able to speak loud repeating until I buzz or accept the event.
Flashing random concepts
The above was nice, such as to have Tim Ferriss to remind me all days. But then suddenly I noticed that I could well use the time in favor of me just like distractions can work too — so I decided to visit my future calendar, interleaving Tim with other concepts and making test prompts.
The benefit of going ahead in time is that even if I put them in the natural order of learning, assuming I would forget a concept, they would naturally appear quite random. Also keeping these reminders “open” for more time allowed me to reflect about them in contrast with new books and thoughts. It was like a “paper work” open and subject to the influence of the other bibliographic research of the future.
Goal Concepts in the framework
The problem with the above is that these are so nice at the same time new things are coming my way — for example, I realized that I had to be better in assimilating new words such as words that I would read from book (an example is the history book The Power Makers).
With that I noticed that some of the new concepts, specially some of them related to productivity, could be actually be part of my routine and weekly framework — like defining a culture of working or behavior influencing a benefit.
An example of this is *The Weekly Journal* a concept that I learning from the course Learning How to Learn. The journal idea is a reflection and planning effort, implemented in writing, that occurs weekly and is an opportunity to check what have worked and what didn’t work in terms of the methods and behavior for accomplishing the weekly tasks.
Therefore, the notion of goal concepts are items in my agenda that evaluates other items under certain lenses, norms, methodologies (related to the concept that is new).
Routiners tag system
This is, in a way, related to the above. Here, and as shown in the following video its about using tags to the moments of work in my agenda with things that would indicate good practices. Routiners are tags that indicate the value of an effort in time — they add an attribute of a characteristic, one also that may related to a new management, productivity, or learning oriented concept.
Framework to Culture Norm
All this is yet fresh, the “planner journal” at the end of the week is also there to help me evaluate all. Nevertheless, I am feeling that the more I move concepts to the framework I may be stumbling in reflecting about habits, about norms — maybe even being able to cross them with the business goal so I would expect some culture insights to emerge. Right now this is about self productivity.
