Short term verses long term planning
I had a fancy habit tracker that synced across my computer and my phone.
It had little emojis to represent each habit and a smart piece of code that showed me my progress with across the month.
It didn’t stick.
This week, I stuck half a refill page to the wall and listed my habits for the week. Beside each one was a space for each day of the week. As I did each habit I could colour in the square marking it done.
The refill page is nearly completely full- meaning I’ve done a week of near perfect habits.
I don’t think the secret is lower tech. I think it’s time horizon.
The first incarnation of my habit tracker I tried to create the ‘master document’, the be-all-and-end-all of habit lists. “These are the ones I’ll do for the WHOLE YEAR!”
The refill version is just this week.
The takeaway, I think is to shorten our time horizons. What are you doing just this week? And how can you track it?
Yes, we have to know what it’s in service of, the big goal.
But what makes it actually work is when we can simply do whats right in front of us.
What you like is what you become
What are the things you like to do?
The things you find yourself consistently doing.
Now times those things by 365 days of the year that you do them (give or take)
And multiply that by how many years you want to live.
Question- are you happy with the person you’ve become after all that multiplying?
The phone voice
Ever notice how people change their voice when they answer the phone?
Have you ever noticed yourself do it? Having a terrible day and then suddenly a phone call transforms your whole disposition.
I guess the stakes are too high to stay in the funk when we’re talking to someone who is completely disconnected from your environment in that moment.
It’s great to remember we can change how we are at any moment.
Learning and emotion
As an actor, I’ve often been challenged by learning lines. Yesterday in acting class I had a breakthrough.
The theory was simple: We absorb, learn, retain and are better able to recall things we learn in a highly emotional state.
Makes sense, right? We all remember minute details of where we were when we got the news of major life or world events.
It soaks in.
So in practice, our teacher Jon had a person feeding us a line auditorily. They held the script and read each line to the actor who was learning the text.
Importantly, when you’re the one learning the lines you have no visual reference of the text. So you’re not reaching internally to create an image of the text to recall it. You are hearing it, but that’s not what this technique encourages you to do either- you aren’t supposed to hear the word in your minds ‘ear’.
Instead, as we’re being fed the line, we are working extremely physically inside one of five actions that relate to emotions; essentially variations of pushing and pulling.
While we are working physically in this way, the line is fed to us, and we repeat the line over and over, using the words we’re saying to help us play our action of pushing or pulling. We are generating physicalised emotion with the body.
We continued this for 15 minutes per actor. And the lines went in, yes… but not in a way I’m used to.
When it came time to recall the text, I wasn’t grabbing at it the same way I usually do, it was more… seeping up from underneath. Coming up from underneath to support me. Much more like how ideas form into sentences for me in real life. It didn’t feel like I knew them, but as I said the first line, the next one came out and then the next and the next.
The best part was they came out differently every time (which is gold for an actor)
It changed a fundamental building block of my whole craft as an actor- how I learn lines. If this fundamental thing changes, I wonder what the trickle down effects are?
It takes way less time than you think
There’s a great discovery waiting for you. If you’re like me, you have a lot of things you’d love to get done across a day.
The ones that take precedence are the ones like cooking dinner, getting ready for work, doing the washing, showering and a hundred other things a human has to do to function daily.
The things that tend to take a back seat are the ones that will actually make a difference to your life.
Things like meditating, planning some healthy meals for tomorrow (because you know you won’t have time tomorrow), reading a book.
These things don’t seem urgent, and they aren’t really- urgent is for things that you need to do to survive or at the very least to not experience too much unpleasantness…
But who wants a life of just surviving? The good life is about finding ample time for the things that aren’t urgent but that really matter.
For me, it’s my daily voice bubbling exercise, it’s taking time to actually plan my day (before merely reacting to email), it’s the breathing technique I learned that I really want to get better at.
Today, I happened to have Spotify playing while I did my non-urgent but important tasks.
I realised I had a very limiting thought about all these tasks “They take too long”
Well, Spotify disagreed:
My bubbling exercise took two songs to complete.
Planning my day? One song
The breathing exercise? Yup, that was one song as well.
Three tasks that will change your life over time in the span of just 4 songs.
The big discovery is this: the things you want to do that you’ve been putting off take way less time than you think.
To prove it to yourself, put on your favourite song and do the pile of dishes you’ve been avoiding.
I bet you you’ll be done by the end of the song.
Once you beleive me, choose one of those magic life changing tasks and put another song on to find out the exciting truth:
It takes way less time than you think.
Mind the first thing
Ever heard of getting off on the wrong foot?
It’s like when you see that aunt and the first thing she says is that you’re looking a little round.
She didn’t mean to, but the first thing she said to you coloured the whole interaction.
So a simple trick is to mind the first thing you say to a person. Don’t let it be a criticism or some boring logistics thing. Make it something that sets you up well
The story about your day
When it’s a particularly hard day you get to ask yourself: what do I want the story of my day to be?
If I were in a movie and there was an audience of cinema-goers watching along, what is the character I’m playing?
Am I the angry guy getting annoyed in traffic?
Am I the gray faced man going through the motions at work?
Or the father not really listening to his kids?
Each day is an opportunity to live into either the disappointing side character, or the vibrant hero.
Live the story you’d want to tell and accept nothing less.
You have to see it all first
He was in debt up to his eyeballs- so much so he didn’t know the exact number.
It suffocated him, worried him and provided an underlying dread that coloured his whole life.
One day when he’d had enough he pulled out every owing receipt, email, debt collection letter, bank statement and credit card bill.
He avoided it for so long because he imagined this moment would have confirmed that his life was now over.
The oposite happened.
He saw all his demons in broad day light, and better than that he had a single total amount he was now working toward.
$62,367
Seeing the true extent of the ‘damage’ freed him.
Your freedom is waiting for you in the thing you’re avoiding.
Go and take a look.
Success is showing up
and if you can also be prepared that’s a bonus.
And if you’re in a good mood that’ll help too.
Show up, be prepared and be positive.
PRetty simple really