Repetition. Routine. Ritual.
Three words the modern mind tends to find uninteresting. They're the antithesis of novelty, change, excitement, of moving fast and breaking things. Or are they?
At least in my world, the three Rs are slowly but steadily gaining prominence. Earlier this year in spring, I started to recover from a dark night of the soul – a story for another day – and a big part of it was prioritizing consistency of practice over quality of execution in my newly formed meditation habit. Showing up every day for a session, even if short or seemingly unproductive, felt much easier than trying to make wholesale changes through effort that then would get thwarted by some other habit or situationally important task taking precedence.
I now understand not just intellectually but emotionally that I exist as an ecology of interdependent rhythms and habits, each filling a niche in the overall structure that I may or may not understand. Additionally, I am strongly intertwined with whatever physical space I find myself in: staying at my parents place with a brother playing Call of Duty until three in the morning has an impact on my sleep, which has an impact on my work, which has an impact on my self-perception, and on it goes.
Conversely, arranging a room to hold cues for specific activities I want to do regularly has a different effect. For example, selecting clothes for the next morning and laying them on the chair the night before takes away the friction of making that decision when I rise for my morning exercise. But how do I remember to put those clothes out every evening? After all, this itself is a habit I have to establish initially...
I have started to use explicit reminders on stickies to act as environmental cues.
I suspect that these work best when taking the form of self-designed and drawn symbols rather than text. There is something about the act of taking an intention, converting it into an image, and making it into a visible reality that feels powerful to me. Especially if repeated over and over.
This becomes a bit more difficult when I want to do this for the digital environment many of us spend a considerable amount of time in every day. After all, computers tend to be grid-based and thus don't really lend themselves well to leaving drawings everywhere.
There are a number of ways I have experimented with to overcome this:
scheduling dedicated time slots for specific activities,
using multiple browsers or browser instances for separate types of activities,
using multiple monitors or virtual desktops toward that same end,
arranging the smartphone home screen and its wallpaper to support certain intentions,
etc.
More recently, I've been using a relatively unknown tool and platform to help me translate intention into artifacts that support me in advancing those intentions. Futureland lets you create private or public, solo or collaborative 'journals' to document and share process.
When I was attending a web development bootcamp earlier this year in May, I used Futureland to document my daily progress on the meditative writing app I was building for my capstone project.
Every day I would work on the app, take a screenshot or make a short recording, jot down some notes and commit it all as an entry to the log. I felt much more motivated to demonstrate serious progress and gained motivation from seeing my streak develop against that simple black background.
But the real power of Futureland lies in the new feature 'Daily'.
Daily allows you to select journals that you want to make entries in, well, daily, and presents those to you in a dedicated space. Every time you add an entry to one of them, a counter inside the circle representing that journal goes up, the circle turns green, and the journal slides to the bottom of the list, connecting up with other entries of that day in a lit up chain.
In their alpha release of Futureland for iOS, I can even put a Daily widget on my home screen. Every time I pick up the phone I see those greyed out circles, reminding me gently of the intentions my past self had for me. This makes it incredibly easy to do at least one thing, however small, for each of those intentions and avoid restarting the streak.
I've been in touch with InternetVin, the creator of Futureland, since I first found the platform. In a call with him the other day, Vin told me how doing this consistently for hundreds of days has resulted in him getting fit and lean, eating healthy, sleeping better, drinking more water, and connecting more with the important people in his life. He even quit Twitter because of this!
When I asked him how, he said that focusing only on his core repeating activities became so much more interesting, rewarding, even satisfying, than scrolling a slot machine timeline engineered to addict him. All of these chosen core activities are acting as cognitive guardrails to recirculate his attention on the same ‘space’; this is the basic principle used in magic and alchemy to generate and increase quality.
With social media addiction rampant, this signals some important things to me:
it is possible to quit social media without remorse, if you gain absolute confidence in the viability of your chosen path as well as your personal capacity to steer it in fruitful directions in the future;
intelligent software design can make a big difference in the ability of its users to aim for worthwhile goals and achieve them consistently.
Perhaps most importantly, it matters more to get right the few things in your life that probably won't change in importance like sleep, exercise, and social connection, than you could ever hope to gain from chasing every shiny new object you encounter. My Twitter friend James Stuber calls this pattern in the productivity world 'mastering the boring fundamentals', and I think it's a key strategy in dealing with the constant change the modern world exposes us to. Put simply, it’s the creation of reliable routines, making it easier to follow it than not.
The next step from there is to ritualize the most important rhythms and transition points of our lives, turning them into personal sources of meaning to hold up our personal mythos. I've seen glimpses of the power this holds here and there, but am myself only beginning to discover and practice it.
The past three years have been a period of constant change in my life, averaging about 40 trips a year. The only thing that didn’t change was the psychological continuity of my experience! With no consistency of places or people to get my reps in and build routine, building and keeping momentum on my own initiatives definitely has been harder than it needed to be.
For that reason and others, I’m very happy to have finally landed in Portugal as my place of residence for the foreseeable future. Growing roots may be precisely what I need to progress down that pipeline of Rs and I couldn’t have picked better surroundings than these.
If my writing sparks something in you, hit reply and let me know. I respond to every email.