Category: Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

So here’s a neat variation on the to-do list I’ve picked up from Mark Foster’s Secrets of Productive People, where he replaces what I have to get done with what I’m going to focus on as the primary entries on your notepad. The 5-2 The process goes like this: Step One: Put five tasks you want to give your focus to on a sheet of paper. Works best with a mix of complex and simple tasks, but you do you, etc. Step Two: Work down the list in order. You don’t have to finish a task, just do something to progress it. Then: If you start a task and don’t finish it, cross the first entry off and add it to the bottom of your list.  If you finish a task, just cross it off. Step Three: Keep going through the tasks in order until you’ve whittled the list down to two, then add three new tasks to the end

There’s been very few stretches of my adult life where I haven’t woken up and reached for a cup of coffee first thing in the morning. It’s a core part of my daily routine, as non-negotiable as urination and feeding the cat, and I’m hardly alone in the habit. One of the easiest ways to make my spouse happy is having a cup of coffee waiting for them the moment they wake up, perched on their bedside table beside the phone delivering their wake-up alarm. Fortunately, this is pretty easy for me to provide, given that we live on slightly different schedules (I get up early to write, they sleep in because they find it harder to fall asleep than I do). Unfortunately, drinking coffee first thing in the morning is actually a pretty terrible thing to do to your body. The logic here comes down to cortisol, aka “the stress hormone”. Despite it’s nom-de-plume as a stress marker, bodies

For a few years now, I’ve lamented the death of blogging as a form with a widespread readership. While there’s still a few formats that have similar broadcast capabilities — a lot of my blogging impulses moved over to my newsletter around 2017 — none of them have the same capacity to provoke conversations and follow them as blogging once did. Newsletter responses are private and one-on-one, rather than conversation. Twitter threads move fast, and quickly disappear beneath the surface. Patreon, which is probably my favourite platform at the moment, has the drawback of being a walled garden, which means the people who read and comment to you really want to be reading your stuff,, but can’t share content around as easily. Blog still have some legs as a long-form medium, but there’s a mid-range kind of blogging or journaling that’s largely invisible these days. The kind of content that once used to appear on LiveJournal, where you could just

It doesn’t take much to disrupt a habit once it’s established. Our habitual behaviours are often context specific, triggered to run in response to a particular form of stimuli. Go on a two-week break from work and those routines that run like clockwork go out the window — making it easier to adopt new habits that felt impossible a week before (or lose the thread of good habits that you’d like to keep ) . Your morning ritual that gets you up, dressed, and out the door can be thrown off by the simple act of leaving your shoes in the wrong place, or running out of shampoo while you’re in the shower. Morning routines are often a chain of habits, each one triggering the next, and one small crack will echo through your morning. Those shoes you left in the wrong spot mean you’re thinking instead of doing, watching the clock to check times and fretting about what needs

The negative effects of stress are magnified by a lack of self-efficacy and control. The more you feel like you’re unable to shift the needle in a stressful situation, the faster you inch towards stress induced burn-out. We often advise new writers to focus on the things you can control. You can’t control whether publishers buy your work, or how many people end up reading your book, but you do have control over how much you write, what sort of stories you tell, how you revise, and how you build up parts of your author platform. You have control over how you respond to setbacks and what ideas you put into the world. The hardest part is learning to let go of your ambitions, all the big picture hopes and dreams, and narrow your focus on what needs to happen today in order to progress your career forward. Writing 500 words never feels as exciting as releasing a book or

What does a recipe look like? If you looked one up in the old pen-and-paper days, there’s a familiar layout: ingredient lists; procedural instructions; a photograph to make your mouth water. These days, on the internet, the recipe has all those things… and a long, digressive story up top that contextualises how and why the author is writing about and cooking this particular meal. To the aspiring chefs at the Culinary Institute of America, a recipe is a three-column format. One lays out the timeline for the entire meal, logging what needs to be done when; the second column lists everything they need to produce, and the equipment needed to cook and serve it; the third column breaks down the ingredients needed for each recipe on their docket. (Example 1; Example 2) It’s the first column that makes the difference, logging everything from prepping ingredients to turning the oven on to gathering equipment for every stage. There’s no space here

I’ve used RescueTime to track my computer and phone usage for a few years now, and it continues to be a surprisingly underrated tool in my kit. Today they sent in my year in review for 2020, showing me how I spent my screen time throughout last year, and it was really interesting to note some of the ways the data is different to previous years. Case in point, the little egg-splat they produce that visually represents your time by month and category. I’m used to these being an irregular shape, but the April-through-May bulge is one of those aberrations that tells me just how different 2020 was to a regular year. There’s a massive blow-out in “general utilities” time, which proves to be the endless hours spent learning to use Zoon and teaching online when the university closed the campus. It’s accompanied by a bulge in my purple “research” hours, which is basically how RescueTime logs “hours spent reading