How To Create A Habit In 15 Days

Most of our life is lived by habits. We learn how to ride a bike, how to drive a car, we even learn how to speak and read. And then we do all of these with minimum effort and implication. Basically, all of these are habits. They allow us to focus on other things while pushing the routine into background. It would be quite difficult to learn to drive the car every time you need to go shopping, isn’t it?

As any other things in our life, habits are just tools we use in our joyful exploration of life. Habits are not good or bad, they are just ways of handling repetitive tasks that would otherwise require a lot of energy. As such, the master habit of creating / breaking your habits can be quite an asset.

In today’s post I’ll share some of my experiences with habit creation using one of my favorite activities: journaling. It’s a simple way in which you can assess, decide and then implement any new habit. There’s also a free downloadable journal template for you but let’s take the things one at a time.

Why Do You Need A New Habit?

Well, let’s say you want a new habit in order to:

• write on your blog more often
• update your twitter status daily
• write each day a page from your new book
• start a fitness program
• start a new eating habit or diet
• learn a new language

All these new activities are made by some repetitive tasks, a set of moves you have to do daily in order to get some positive results. So until you are proficient in that new language, or until you are that new blogging super star or until you publish your new book, you need a scaffold for your intentions. You need to create a habit of being there. (more…)

Therapeutical Talking And Writing

Every time I talk about something that was on my mind for a lot of time, I have the tendency to forget about it shortly after. Just talking about things that really were on my head seems to make them disappear afterwards. I had this impression a lot of times. Lately, I experienced this almost on any topic I am thinking about. Expressing my thoughts in words, written or talked, made the topic vanish. It’s like giving the thought some shape pushes it out of my brain, into another realm.

I had this going on for many years. I ruminated about something for months, making it bigger and bigger in my head, and then, all of a sudden, expressed it violently. Either in form of a journal entry, a blog entry, or sometimes in a fight or controversy with somebody else. After the eruption, the inside volcano magically disappeared. I even forgot that there was a volcano in that place. Shifted my attention to something else, and of course, started another ruminating session on a different topic, soon to be ended with another eruption, in several days, weeks, or months.

This chain of reactions lead me to the concept of therapeutically talking or writing. In today’s blog post I’ll try to understand what are the reasons for this therapeutical dimension of talking. Why is this happening, what are the triggers and what are the limits of this behavior. Is this a good thing, a bad thing or just a thing that I have? We’ll see about that together.

Healing Talking

During the last 5-6 years I started to pay more attention to this phenomenon. I monitored those “eruptions” and the subtle mechanism behind them. Gradually isolated similar events and tried to build on a pattern. It seemed that every confusion, fear, worry or lack of trust was in fact a root for a ruminating session. Not being able to express in the very moment my feelings about that confusion or fear pushed it back into my mental backyard, converting them in seeds of some huge wild-growing plants. 

Without paying attention to those plants, they grew until they started to shade my normal thinking patterns. They grew so big that they took some of the whole garden light. So big that I was forced to confront them. And the only immediate action I could take was to cut them out. Talking them out loud, writing about them, bringing them into conversations or fights. I just cannot leave in the dark, so I had to eliminate the obstruction, most of the time by violently expressing it.

After I eliminated those huge ugly wild-growing plants, the backyard was clean again. No need for another confrontation, my mental clarity was not obstructed anymore. Those wild-growing plants were out for good, so the very topic that generated them was forgotten.

This pattern was so powerful that it become my way of life. Almost everything that wasn’t managed was staying somewhere back, waiting to reach an “explosion” point. After expressing my feelings out loud, the problem disappeared. I went on this rollercoaster for years, until I started to feel annoyed about something.

I didn’t realize in the beginning what was my annoyance. But things around me started to lose consistency. I was forgetting stuff, more and more stuff and more and more often. If there was something that I was already “erupted” on, I even avoided direct confrontation. I knew from the beginning that this will lead to a huge wild-growing plant that will need to be cut in a painful storm of words, so I was keeping the distance. I didn’t engage in a lot of activities, started to work less, to keep honest relationships away, to avoid social interaction. All of that was before a source of pain expressed by words, so it had to be avoided.

But that was even worse. My way of dealing with negative emotions or situations was keeping me from experiencing a true and sincere life. Everything was thrown back and vomited weeks after in order to keep me clean. And between those periods I was almost invisible. I wasn’t doing much on my own. It was this chain of non-confrontation and therapeutical talking that took command of me. It was an auto pilot. (more…)

Power Blogging With Mac Journal – GTD Style

I started to use Mac Journal 2 years ago. Initially I was using it only for my journaling activities. I needed something a little more versatile than my plain text file structure, and with some searching facilities integrated. Fortunately, Mac Journal proved to have all this, and even more. I soon discovered that I can remotely publish to my blogs from within Journal, download posts into it (for backup or just convenience) and brainstorm my future posts.

During the past few months, since I decided to make from blogging my main activity – after selling my online publishing business – I started to use Journal intensively. In this post I’ll share how I use Mac Journal for blogging, how I set up my blogging environment and how I applied, using Mac Journal’s powerful “smart journals” feature, a GTD-like blogging scaffold.

Setting Up A Remote Blog From Within Mac Journal

This is not a mandatory step, as you can always use your online blogging admin interface, but it might be of interest. You can add a blog to your journal by selecting the option “Edit blog server” from the “Journal” menu. A pop-up with some simple options will appear. If you’re on a wordpress set up, as most of the people, you should check the “Movable Type” type of your publishing method. A good idea is to add “xmlrpc.php” to your post URL and the admin username. That’s it, you’re now connected to your blog and can start publish remotely. You can even download the entries from your blog into Mac Journal, by choosing “Download entires from blog…” from the same “Journal” menu. Of course, you can have more than one blog set up, if you have more than one.

Establish Your Blogging Habits

Mac Journal lets you apply some sort of meta data to your posts. That will not be transferred to your blog, but it’s a convenient way to organize your blogging habits. Some of that meta data is: status, priority and ranking. There are also others like: tags, annotations or even colored label, if you want, which can be used for some neat visual effects. Let’s see how we can use this meta data in order to set up a more productive blogging environment.

First of all, you need a congruent blog routine for this to work. If you’re going to use this on a daily basis, you have to establish some rules for your idea brainstorming or future posts. My data input set up is like this: whenever I add an idea for a post, I also add the status, which is most of the time “Not Started”, for ideas that are just popping out of my head, the priority, which can be any number from 1 to 5, and a rating and color label (this is only for internal auditing purposes).

The priority number is used for slipping up posts into “Next Posts” and “Someday / Maybe” posts and it uses a 3/4 threshold. Meaning any priority between 1 and 3 (inclusive) will go on the “Someday / Maybe” posts, and any priority between 4 (inclusive) and 5 will go into “Next Posts”. “Someday /Maybe” and “Next Posts” are smart journals. And they can get really smart, you’ll see. The rating and label are just metrics for auditing my blog activity. With a color label I can see at a glance how many working post I have, how many published, and so on. (more…)

Journaling versus Blogging

Back in 2004 I started to keep a journal. It was basically a folder on my Linux powered laptop, with a bunch of unorganized files floating around. Everything was written hastily using vi, an editor which may be considered somehow cumbersome by the average computer user. Those were the days when my programming skills were sharper than ever… 4 years later I look at blogging from a serious business perspective, and made from eDragonu.ro blog my main activity. It was quite a process. Not always simple or even visible, sometimes pushed in the background by other, more urgent activities, but it was constant and evolving. It was like a subtle awakening. In this post I will try to outline some of my experiences from an emotional journalizing attitude to a much more fulfilling approach like blogging.

Getting emotional

Keeping a journal is a fantastic therapeutic activity. It literally keeps depression away (but don’t talk about that to your therapist, or you can notice a sudden increase in his bill). Most of the people think about journaling as a very normal and maybe even necessary activity, but only until you finish college. You are allowed to keep a journal until your graduation, but if you do this afterwards, well, you might be labelled as a strange person. Journaling is often seen as a weakness or a sign of an unstable personality.

But in fact, it is quite the contrary. The vast majority of famous people had a journal. Almost any important personality, from physicists like Albert Einstein to writers like Marcel Proust, they all kept a diary. And that seemed to enforce their inner balance and to boost their creativity resources. Having a journal is a sign of honesty and courage. You know, meeting with yourself is not always comfortable, and your journal is a continuous meeting with yourself.

I started journaling mainly because of my emotional overflow. I needed a safety valve, other than escapism, denial or alcohol. I used those safety valves before, until I actually rend them useless. They were not safety valves anymore, but addictions or psychological delusions. So I started to write whatever I felt when I was in a frustrating mood. I just wanted to know who I am and why some things are happening to me over and over again. I wanted to identify everything that made me angry, or sad, or even happy and joyful. It was an action triggered by a very high emotional state. It was an attempt to regain the balance between within and without. It was an act of relief and recharge.

After several days in which I wrote all of the pressuring stuff, I started to feel a difference. I was somehow relaxed. I felt like I processed it in some way, it was not on the inside anymore. I managed to get it out, put it in a safer place, and gain some relief over it. The emotional overflow finally found a way to flow. It felt good. But as the number of files started to grow on my folder, I began to actually read them, not only write them. It was the second important step I took. I started to actually understand.

(more…)