Solving problems with Habits

Hard work is hard to start

One of the most common problem for me is hoarding things, especially when this comes to knowledge and any remotely useful information.

This can be seen in many different mediums.

1. My pocket list has around 150 articles, and it keeps on growing.
2. My bookmarks list have grown to 25 000 pages in less than 2 years.
3. My chrome constantly takes up all of the laptops resource due to the number of tabs open.
4. I have signed up to more than 200 newsletters over 10 different inboxes.

I have been noticing that the main issue is that there is too much information. Most of it is actually new and useful to me. I have wanted to consume everything that can benefit me all my life. The problem is that I wasn’t skilled enough in the topics to understand or that I didn’t have time.

Now, for the most part, I can understand most of the things due to crazy amounts of research that I went through.

So now the only problem that is left is time. I am simply not able to work, complete habits and have some time off if I am choosing to keep on doing the research. The amount of information has piled up so much that now I am unable to even start due to being overwhelmed.

What I have done already

One of the things that I have implemented into my daily routine already is reading scientific books and research every day.

I have been buying books for a long time now. I have many books that I have bought and never got to reading them. Every year it got worse and worse. Right now, I no longer buy physical copies because I know that they will simply rot on the shelf. Now I choose to buy kindle versions to read online.

After buying around 10 books last month and not starting to read a single one, I knew that it was a bad practice. I had to figure something out so that I can start reading the books at least slowly and stop supporting this bad habit of accumulating things.

Daily research task in my habit journal did the trick very nicely.

Even though I have not sent a time limit or any minimum requirements to read a certain amount of words, I have been enjoying it immensely. So much that I am reading overall more than before. Especially when it comes to scientific books. Those books help me understand psychology and world immensely, which in turn let me share news and cool findings with you, my audience.

Habits

I have been doing this trick with habits for a long time now. I have been doing it with many different areas of my life as well.

• I buy a course. I put to go through 10 exercises of the course daily.
• I picked up a language. I put into learning 15 new words daily.
• I read about a great practice that I want to implement into my life, I put into my habit journal.

This has allowed me to constantly remind myself of what I have to focus on and what is truly important in my life.

Now, as I have no found a problem of me accumulating knowledge TODO and not actually applying that potential knowledge, I am putting into my habit journal to go through the pocket, newsletters and bookmarks every day.

Especially pocket, as there it is much easier to archive the done pieces to keep track.

From now on, I will be outsourcing my problematic parts of life from system 2 of my consciousness to my subconsciousness. Clearly, it can do a much better job, together with habits.

Like with everything,

Start now. Get perfect later.

Klim Y