Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

The phrases of habits

Last night I started writing an outline for a new video about habits. The goal of that video is to share the frameworks from “The Power of Habit”, “Atomic Habits”, and “Tiny Habits”.

Maybe I can draw some sort of chart showing how the frameworks are related.

Here’s a draft of that:

Black is for “The Power of Habit”, blue is for “Atomic Habits”, and red is for “Tiny Habits”. It does help me see the similarity between frameworks.

Here are the groups of phrases:

  • Cue, obvious & attractive, prompt & motivation
  • Routine, easy, ability
  • Reward, satisfying, motivation

Motivation is shown twice because it’s baked into the beginning (attraction increases motivation) and end of the habit (reward increases motivation).

I’ll keep working on this.

How not to save $40

Right now I’m mailing out a bunch of packages to the groomsmen at my wedding. (Like the rest of the world, they don’t read this, so it won’t be a spoiler.)

I printed out some stuff and am on the last leg of mailing these things out.

Of course, I want to procrastinate, so I put a 7-minute timer on and am writing the draft of this post.

Today’s lesson: break projects down into smaller tasks.

Actually, that’s sort of the lesson. That’s what I got forced to practice today. I ordered 4 things and mailed them to myself to then mail them out to my friends.

It crossed my mind at the time that I could just have them sent directly to my friends. The message would be less personal, but I could still include a couple lines.

I should have done that in hindsight.

Some tradeoffs of not doing that:

  • Have to pay shipping to each of them, which looks like it might be $30 per person instead of the $7-15 guess that I had.
  • Mental cost of the packages sitting in our apartment for a couple weeks because I knew it’d be a pain to pack and ship these things out. (I was right!)
  • The hours I’ve spent today getting these things all set up.

I’ll break down all the things I needed to do today, which I’ve slogged through likely because it’s a Saturday and I’m in no rush. (Remember: time box things!)

Here are all the speed bumps today:

  • Getting all my friends’ addresses
  • Finding pictures to send to them (this was actually fun, but then it ended up taking longer than I planned)
  • Figuring out my FedEx account
  • Resetting my FedEx password
  • Finally getting to shipping estimation and then learning I needed to create a shipping account within that account and then finding out it can’t be created online right now
  • Didn’t have enough packing tape. (this was just a stupid one that felt like the straw that broke the camel’s back. For a few minutes, I really thought I was done for the day.)

Now to take a couple trips to FedEx to carry the boxes.

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Update: After finally shipping things out like an hour after writing the above…

Two trips to FedEx, not bad, even carrying boxes each time. It’s a short walk.

Two times waiting in line at FedEx, pretty bad! It’s a long wait.

While the estimates I had were off, one of the packages rang up at $80 to ship. That’s when I remembered that it costs more to ship if it’s farther (further?) away. And it does seem to be mostly by volume rather than weight.

Update: After some light research on this, I definitely could have cut the cost in half with a smaller box. Which I had, because I shipped these in different sized boxes. And picked the nicest, largest box for the Miami package.

There’s a measurement called volumetric weight that’s used. You’re not charged for volume and weight. You’re just charged by the higher of the two, after volume is converted to volumetric weight. I didn’t realize it’d be double.

I could have said no when it rang up so that I could go home, unpack two boxes to get a smaller box for the Miami package, then taken an additional trip.

Anyway, all this reminded me “Happy Money”, one of my favorite books about money. Here’s a quote:

Whether driving for an hour to get gas that is five cents cheaper, waiting in endless lines to get a free sample of the latest PowerBar, or taking an entire afternoon to abscond with a cheap umbrella, we too often sacrifice our free time just to save a little money.

In this case, I did the opposite. Paid to save an hour. It seems worth it right now. My willpower was completely gone. FedEx was closing so this would have been either (1) a very stressful hour to try to rush to make it in time or (2) an hour the following day and many hours in between being annoyed that I’d have to go the next day.

Much like this packing and shipping project, this post is too long.

Writing, starting from a spreadsheet (sort of)

Okay so quick update on the whole waking up thing. Today I tried waking up with the Apple Watch, which is great because it vibrates your wrist. This means it doesn’t disturb my fiance when I’m waking up.

It also means it’s easy to turn off and go back to sleep, which is exactly what I did this morning. Still was able to get kettlebell swings in though.

I have a todo for writing a post about how I want to write 64 posts by the end of the year. It’s a post per day starting with the post I wrote the other day about posting just to post.

To get back in the swing of things, I’ll need to have some sort of system to fall back on when I don’t have a topic to write about. Today, I’ll try this: Open up my recent Readwise emails to find a book highlight and then I’ll write about that.

So here’s the highlight I picked, from “Storyworthy” by Matthew Dicks:

Moreover, by placing these most storyworthy moments in a spreadsheet, I could sort them for later use. I could copy, cut, and paste these ideas into other spreadsheets easily, allowing me to ultimately separate the truly storyworthy ideas from the ones that merely had potential.

I happen to be writing the first draft of this post in a spreadsheet. (Sort of.) It’s nice to see an overview of the different topics I have in mind so that I can slowly work toward those 64 posts.

This is recently inspired by David Perell’s daily writing, which seems to be on his blog under tweetstorms: https://www.perell.com/tweetstorms

I’ve done 100 posts in 100 days in the past. Most recently in 2016: http://franciscortez.com/100-days-100-posts

That time, it was probably inspired by Seth Godin and then probably a bunch of other copywriting material I was reading at the time.

Actually… I just read my first post from that series: http://franciscortez.com/two-crappy-pages

It’s inspired by Tim Ferriss (“Two crappy pages”) and then a couple 100-day programming challenges: 100 days of Framer and 100 days of Swift.

It’s a reminder of how memory works. Which is to say: it often doesn’t.

I don’t remember those at all.

So I’m really happy that I have it captured somewhere. And now I’m looking forward to what this next attempt at writing daily will capture.

Actually getting up when waking up (and the steps I took to prep for it)

I got up this morning and, for the first time in weeks, didn’t crawl back into bed. There was a time, probably even less than a year ago, where the thought of snoozing didn’t cross my mind.

It was a win to get one step closer to that.

Here’s what worked:

– I set an alarm on my phone and put my phone on my desk so I’d need to stand up to turn it off.

– Note: I also used to use my phone to listen to a podcast (usually an old Rewatchables episode) to sleep. Last week I got a $30 MP3 player. It’s clunky but it has a sleep function. I threw 2 episodes on it and that’s it and now I can listen to something to bed without being tempted to scroll on my phone.

– I mixed up a pre-workout (BCAA + caffeine) and stuck it in the fridge.

This worked. Why? Here are some hunches:

– The alarm matters but the position doesn’t. I used to wake up on my own before 7AM but never re-adjusted since moving from NY to SF a month ago. So I do need an alarm (trying 6:30 AM right now). I say the position doesn’t matter because I’ve had it at the desk for a few days and will just walk over, turn it off, and walk back to bed no problem. (The problem is that I usually don’t end up falling back asleep and then am both tired and frustrated that I didn’t use the waking time to do something.)

– The $30 MP3 player has been great. I fall asleep when I finally stop stupidly patting myself on the back for thinking of buying it

– Is BCAA magic? Probably not. But the last time I significantly lost weight, I was using it before and after workouts. It might just help curb hunger and that’s a good enough benefit for me. For the caffeine, why not coffee? It’d probably wake me up but I wanted to try to build a new cue. Coffee usually means I’ll sit down and work. I want the artificial pre-workout flavor first thing in the morning to taste like the beginning of a workout.

Another useful step: I started using the apartment complex gym. (Mask on! Empty at the time with huge garage style doors open for ventilation.) I have the same weights for kettlebells at home, but it probably takes 1-2 minutes from my door to the gym door.

1-2 minutes to a complete environment shift. Hard to beat.

(Let’s see if I can keep it up!)

Posting just to post

I am in a rut.

That much is clear. The path out is less clear.

I put The Compound Effect on the other day and listened to some random spot in it It’s a similar book to The Slight Edge (the authors of each have a mentor/mentee connection if I’m remembering right). I enjoyed The Slight Edge more, but there’s no audiobook version of it.

Anyway, one similar story in the books is the diverging paths of separate people.

One makes a bunch of tiny positive choices over a long period of time.

The other makes a bunch of tiny negative choices over a long period of time.

The kicker of the story, of course, is that the person with the diverging paths is the same person, just at different points in life.

A couple years ago, I think I had an okay flywheel going. It wasn’t the most cohesive thing where it’s greater than the sum of its parts. But it was a bunch of different parts in motion—videos, blog posts, the podcast. It wasn’t all aligned and I’d often just blog about blogging and talk about being unaligned.

But, again, it was something in motion.

That seems to have ground to a halt this year.

For the record, in case you’re stumbling upon this post a few years from now, it’s 2020.

Tough year! But plenty of people in similar situations took the new situations that 2020 presented them and became even more productive.

I didn’t. That’s okay. But I can own it and start turning the ship back around. Slowly.

So here’s a quote from The Slight Edge:

What’s more, it’s one that the majority follow their whole lives. Someday, when my ship comes in … Someday, when I have the money … Someday, when I have the time … Someday, when I have the skill … Someday, when I have the confidence … How many of those statements have you said to yourself? Have I got some sobering news for you: “some day” doesn’t exist, never has, and never will.

One of my favorite phrases from Shawn Stevenson (author of Sleep Smarter and host of The Model Health Show) is: don’t live on Someday Isle.

One post at a time and all that. I’ll write, draw, talk, make videos, and work my way off of Someday Isle and out of this creative rut.

Weblog

Really enjoyed this Zach Lowe article on LeBron vs. Jordan. He goes through different arguments about where LeBron falls short. Then points out that Jordan had similar shortcomings or that some of the negative perception of LeBron’s career aren’t actually backed up by the numbers.

Pippen dismisses the numbers as merely proof that LeBron has played too many close games. “I like winning by 10,” he says. “LeBron is not the guy that wants to take that last shot.” Nichols gives it one more try: “But he’s done it more than the other guy!”

That’s from this clip of Pippen and McGrady discussing how clutch LeBron is (or isn’t). The numbers just don’t matter to people when their most important metric is “You can just feel it”.