I’m wrapping up the eighth month of my year-long Foundations [1] project. This month’s focus was on reflection [2]. In addition to reading eight books about thinking and feeling better this month (which I wrote about here [3]), I also stuck to a habit of daily journaling.
In case you’re interested, you can see my day-one plans, books read and final takeaways for each month so far here:
- Fitness: Start [4], End [5], Books [6].
- Productivity: Start [7], End [8], Books [9].
- Money: Start [10], End [11], Books [12].
- Food: Start [13], End [14], Books [15].
- Reading: Start [16], End and Books [17].
- Outreach: Start [18], End [19], Books [20].
- Sleep: Start [21], End [22], Books [23].
Reflection Reflections
So far, journaling every day is probably the easiest keystone habit of the project for me that I wasn’t already doing. It felt a little bit like slipping into a warm bath—something immediately enjoyable, even if you don’t always think about doing it.
But perhaps that’s a side effect of years spent writing for a living. I’m not sure everyone will have the same experience, particularly if writing isn’t something they do often. But, at least for me, the effort of writing in spare moments was much lower than, say, reading a book—something else I often do during random moments with my phone.
I had a few takeaways from this month of journaling:
- Despite buying a new paper journal, I prefer digital. In fact, I found things even easier once I started using the Journal app on my iPhone. This experience further strengthens my belief that a lot of important life habits basically survive or die on the basis of extremely small amounts of friction. Tiny increments in effort seem to have a disproportionate influence on how much we do of various things.
- There’s an ideal length to journal writing, which is probably 5-10 minutes for me. This was shorter than I was expecting. While I find it frustrating to be interrupted before this mark, I find my ideas naturally peter out after it. Perhaps there’s value in stretching beyond this time frame, but I found the tool most helpful to get organized on a few next steps rather than to exhaustively think through a problem.
- My entries are largely devoid of daily record keeping, and I have a fairly detached, unemotional writing style. I tend to write about problems and then approach them in a more orderly, logical way than I feel my actual thinking is. It’s hard to say whether this is a virtue (helping me keep my cool) or a missed opportunity (restricting my writing to exclude aspects of my mental life that may need some expression).
- Topic choice matters greatly. The format for the iPhone app is to title an entry and then begin writing on it. While I could stick to something generic, I find picking a title for the entry has an irresistible effect on what I end up writing about. Simply stating the topic, problem or idea I want to write about seems to automatically create a resolution.
- Writing is kind of magical. While my ordinary writing for publication has more starts, stops and deliberate problem solving, writing in my journal seems to occur almost effortlessly without any deliberate effort. It sometimes feels a little bit like watching ChatGPT generate text—one token after another. The reflection part only seems to come afterwards when I read what I’ve written to myself.
I expect this habit will be fairly easy to maintain, although I don’t think I’ll be religious about doing it daily—still, keeping journaling as one of my easy-access phone habits seems like it will become a more integral part of my routine.
Updates on Other Foundations
Now that I’m two-thirds of the way through this project, the previous months’ habits and work are starting to accumulate. In some ways, this creates a struggle as it’s impossible to simultaneously manage and attend to seven different things. But, in other ways, I’m happy that my efforts seem to be coming together into a broader refinement of some basic life routines that seem to be more mutually reinforcing than conflicting.
Some reflections on each:
- Fitness. This month felt like a setback. I had a cold at the start of the month, and felt like my overall fitness had slowed down compared to the previous month, which was excellent. Some of this is probably regression to the mean [24], but I should keep an eye on things in case there’s some overtraining or underlying issue.
- Productivity. Good, although this month was definitely lazier than ones past. The full-capture system I’m using now is basically established. Although, I’ve come to accept that many of my “failures” of productivity are simply priorities in disguise. I continue to put off a lot of little side errands and chores, but I’m coming to realize that this is mostly because I value other things more, and time is short.
- Money. I finally got the RESP [25] set up for the kids. This was a bit delayed owing to some extra paperwork. But I’m otherwise happy there are no changes here. Ideally, everything financially should more or less be on autopilot. Set-it-and-forget-it is probably a better philosophy than actively managing things.
- Food. I’m definitely more relaxed here than I was during the initial month. But some of that is simply a reflection that I’m happy with my weight, and the volume of exercise I’m doing right now seems to be sustaining things. Still, I think this is an area to monitor. Results here tend to lag behavior by quite a bit, so it tends to be the case that I only notice I’ve fallen behind far later.
- Reading. Another good month, although project fatigue is setting in a bit, so I’m satisfying myself with around eight books per month rather than my original goal of a dozen or more.
- Outreach. Not much change here. I’m pretty happy with my social life as a whole, given my available time, so I think part of this foundation is simply accepting I’m in a phase of my life that is more defined by maintaining relationships rather than actively expanding into new ones.
- Sleep. Slightly worse than last month. This was something I expected, given that my focus changed. But, if I look at my Fitbit stats, I’m still averaging more sleep than I did in the first six months of the project, so I consider that a win. I’ve been mostly good about following my bedtime curfew and sticking to one coffee each day, but not perfect. Still, I think having the tools to feel like I have control over my own sleep quality seems to be the biggest improvement from last month, where I had a somewhat fatalistic view that I just would be tired all the time.
If I have to give an overall summary picture of the year, thus far, it would be major improvements in fitness and diet, solid improvements in sleep and productivity, with minor tweaks or maintenance in money, reading and outreach.
Next month, I’m moving to focusing on improving my communication skills and habits in the ninth foundation [26], connection. I’ll share some thoughts next week on my self-assessment and plans for the month!