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Foundational Habits

One of the frequently encountered challenges to building a productive life is uncertainty over which habits to build. In future posts, we’ll go over how to set short and long term goals for your life and break them down into a series of actions and habits over time. For this post, however, I wanted to highlight a set of foundational habits that should serve well in almost every life situation. These habits are good fundamental tools to have, regardless of the path you’re taking in life, but they also serve as a strong basis for learning how to build habits and can act as hooks to hang future habits on.

Journaling

In order to improve, I need to better understand who I am. It’s for that reason that journaling has become my most important tool in seeking to improve myself. It gives me space for self reflection and to digest the experience of my days and weeks. And because I am forced to articulate them to a reader (if only myself) I am forced to make concrete what was previously just a wash of impulses and actions. Journaling also enables big picture thinking, where I fit my experiences and goals into the larger objectives of my life. Finally, it is a place where I keep track of my progress, whether it be for building habits or towards my larger personal and professional goals. Watching this progress bar increase is a satisfying reward which reinforces virtuous habit cycles.

So, how do you get started journaling? We’ll go into this in more depth in a future post, but the short answer is the exact technique you use doesn’t really matter. I would encourage you to buy a blank journal and use it exclusively for this, buy a nice pen that you like to use, and set up a system in advance that works for you. For a lightweight approach, commit to just writing the date down every day in your journal and writing at least one sentence. Sometimes this one sentence will seem boring or redundant, but sometimes inspiration will strike and you’ll end up writing for pages. It’s from such small commitments that long-lasting habits can be born.

Meditation

Another keystone habit is meditation. Like journaling, meditation helps me reflect and understand myself better, but more importantly for me, it helps reduce the noisy impulse driven part of my mind and helps build focus. This increased focus then allows me to sit down and truly complete tasks to which I’ve set my mind. Reams of papers have been written on the other myriad psychological and physiological benefits that meditation accrues.

Again, one challenge of building a meditation habit is knowing where to start. There are many different schools of meditation, including approaches like mindfulness, zen, and loving-kindness. I would suggest initially picking any school that resonates with you without spending too much time at the decision phase. They all have things to teach and the tools from any are useful in the others. I started with mindfulness meditation and found the Headspace app helpful, although others enjoy apps like Insight Timer or Calm. Like with journaling, start small with just a 1 minute, 3 minute, or 5 minute daily commitment and see where the habit takes you from there.

Exercise

Maybe you already exercise regularly, by going to the gym, playing a sport, or even just taking regular walks. If so, you already know the benefits that having regular exercise can make in your life. If you don’t, let me try to convince you by showing you what you’re missing out on. Exercise is good for the body, yes, but it has also been shown to significantly affect the mind. It relieves anxiety, reduces depression, and improves mental health. For me, when I’ve been knocked out of my habit cycle, the increase in mental health that comes from exercise has made it a great first habit to rebuild from.

Ok, but if you don’t exercise regularly, how do you start? My advice would be to take a broad and shallow approach initially. Try lots of different forms of exercise for one or two sessions and see which one fits you best. Maybe you’ll enjoy the social aspects of joining your local badminton club, or the clarity of thought that comes from a 5 minute run. Maybe you like the measurable progress of lifting weights at the gym or the connection to nature that comes from a short hike. What works for you will depend on a lot of factors, including what’s available in your area. Start small, but try a lot of things, and try to notice which ones bring you feelings of joy that you’d like to have again.

Reading

I stopped reading books for fun in university. I found it hard to keep up a good reading habit after spending my day working through a textbook or academic papers. Youtube and Netflix were just easier ways to decompress. It wasn’t until I’d been working for a couple years that I picked up a reading habit again and rediscovered its benefits. 

Reading is the main way that new ideas enter my life. Reading a book, whether fiction or non-fiction, exposes you to new points of view and new experiences. Because when reading (unlike when watching something) we also have time to reflect, these thoughts and experiences are better integrated into our own experiences and frameworks of thinking. Unlike television, reading also pushes our minds to focus and imagine, growing these skills for our future endeavours.

So, how to get started? After my long hiatus, I set myself the simple goal of just trying to read 4 books in the next year. It was such a small, achievable number, just 1 book every 3 months (that’s like 5 pages a day or so). I didn’t give myself any other restrictions on book length, genre, or even format (audiobooks were critical), but I did start a document where I kept track of the number of books I read and their names. And that was enough. In the first year, I barely scraped by with the 4 books, but every time I added a book to my list, it felt like a huge win. The next year, I set a more ambitious goal of 8 books, and blew through that. Last year, I managed to read 50 books and am aiming even higher. Starting small and building up in any of these habits is a powerful trick.

Best of luck in building one or more of these foundational habits! We’ll dig in soon on a more detailed look at each one and a more holistic set of tips on how to start a habit and stick with it.

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On the Nature of Productivity

Hello World!

As we start a productivity or self-improvement blog, an obvious place to start seems to me to ask: what is productivity? Why does it matter? 

As an economist by training, one definition is the economic one: productivity determines how much output will be created for a given amount of inputs, whether that is labour, resources, or other things. If a farm is productive, the same number of fields produce more wheat. 

Productivity as output

The more productive an economy is, the higher GDP will be, even if the number of workers or the amount of resources doesn’t change. As a result, it’s often a fundamental goal of modern economies: getting more productive, whether through using technology or other means, makes a country richer without it having to discover new natural resources or other inputs. Higher productivity means a country is richer, or a business more profitable.

As individuals, we may have goals beyond just getting richer, but we can use the economic definition to draw some parallels for ourselves. Productivity can be about how well we use our inputs to create the outputs we want and achieve our goals. The purpose of life is a big question, but productivity can be about more efficiently achieving any goal we may have. From that definition, productivity is clearly great: it is a sort of generic modifier that takes whatever we want to spend our time on, and makes it more effective. Tools to make us more productive in that sense will definitely be something we talk about on this blog.

Productivity as time management

There are other ways to think about it, though. When we talk about productivity, the conversation often turns to how we spend our time: are we spending it on the right things? This is less a question of efficiency, and more a question of goals: it starts to relate to concepts around enlightenment and wisdom. We’ve all met people who are frantically busy, but don’t seem to get much done. If the first definition is doing things right, the second is about doing the right things. 

The second definition is perhaps closer to traditional ideals, while the first probably wouldn’t have been considered until after the industrial revolution (the whole concept of productivity is a modern one, and wouldn’t have resonated with most ancient cultures). Still, both definitions have value. 

At heart, for me the point is this: as humans, time is our most scarce resource. It is the coin by which we buy everything else in our lives. We can exchange it for money, for impact on things we care about, for shared experiences with loved ones. Productivity is about using our time well. 

Productivity as meaning

Why should we be productive? Well, if we are using our time well, it may free up time for other things we want to do. It may give us more meaning in our lives, if it helps us feel we are achieving our goals. Perhaps it will allow us to help others we care about. The answer is probably unique to each individual, but if you have goals, productivity can help you achieve them. 

From that, much can flow. We can be more efficient in doing tasks. We can prioritize better, doing some things and not others. We can introduce new habits, such as meditation or journaling. We can try to drop old habits that we feel are not a good use of our time, such as watching too much TV. There is no one silver bullet for productivity, but there are steps we can take and practices we can introduce that will help us improve.

More to come in future posts! To start, we’re aiming for about weekly posts, so you can look forward to more next week.