On checklists and building habits
It pains me to slowly realize that checklists may not be effective in my life.
I love making checklists. I’m obsessed with it. It gives me the illusion of productivity while subconsciously procrastinating and doing nothing about the list itself. An idea for a habit or task usually goes directly straight to paper or digital notebook and lives in an abandoned to do list.
In my defense, I still need it to aid my annoyingly short term memory. It helps my brain remember and solidify the existence of the task (except I never remember past the day I wrote it as I often forget to look back and read it lol).
But after using Obsidian, watching some productivity videos, and being inspired by blogs and indie web, I’ve slowly found the current most effective way for me to do the small things I need to do. As soon as an easy task pops in my head, I let it marinate in my brain and force myself to try it as soon as I can.
I caught myself brushing my hair the moment I got up from my bed. It felt weird that my hands worked on its own without a single thought, and that’s when I realized that I form habits by being intentionally present in the moment.
No amount of writing to do lists and plans and habit trackers could help me develop actual habits. It’s the mindset of being there, something I often struggled with as my brain tends to either crave to fill the silence with doom scrolling social media or fantasize and daydream about any and everything. I’ve written countless of checklists and restarted new pages on Notion for just a single task (like walking on a treadmill, or waking up at 6AM), I’ve listed it all in every habit tracker I downloaded, but no matter how hard I type it anywhere, the force to act upon it never came. It was only when I started thinking and impulsively doing things that got me into building the routine without the need to note anything down.
Another realization I had is that change is gradual. It’s not an overnight phenomenon that can happen instantly with a snap of a finger. I’ve always fantasized about waking up one day and being a completely different person with a new set of personality and an unknockable fortress. Unfortunately it doesn’t happen that way, at least to me it didn’t. I’ve been consciously working on my small habits, like how I slowly stopped using Twitter and lessened my social media usage, that turned into reading blogs from my RSS feed as a substitute, to walking in the treadmill every morning, and as days pass by I think of another small thing I could add to my routines to slowly build my habits and feel better day by day.
And lastly, make sure the task is something you really want that fulfills you inside. It’s so much harder to do tasks that are boring, stressful, or you have no interest in, but shifting your mindset to how beneficial it is for you or how it will make you happy and going with that mental flow will turn the task into something seemingly less tedious and annoying. Associating activities with a primal emotion like happiness or survival (or doing something that already makes you happy together with the difficult task) will trick your brain into wanting and slowly craving it.
For example, I’ve always felt lazy to walk on the treadmill, but once I started associating walking = blogging, daydreaming, and switch gaming, I started to look forward to that time everyday now.
For now, I’m going to take advantage of this discovery while it’s working. It’s not a perfect ritual. I sometimes forget (or deliberately skip) these little acts, but I always try to be mentally present and overthink less to avoid stress. And if I don’t get to do it, I try not beat myself up at all, since there is no such thing as perfection and we’re only humans after all.