Live deliberately. That’s my goal for 2020, the blanket resolution that will guides the specifics.
What does that mean?
Like most humans, I tend to do what is easiest and makes me feel good in the short term. I have developed habits that provide the quickest satisfaction of a desire with the least amount of energy expended. Because of this, I have lost too much time clicking around the internet as a solution to boredom or as an escape from a harder task. I eat less healthily than I’d like to because it’s easier than taking the time to plan and cook food. I’ll have a beer more often than necessary because it’s an easy way to feel good. This frustration with my habits was part of what inspired me to stop drinking for a year. I got tired of the habits running the show.
I am taking back my life.
How will I do that?
Will I regret this afterwards? I think that question is one of the keys to living deliberately. I need to examine the short and long-term benefits and consequences of an action and make a conscious choice rather than letting my monkey brain decide. This is tiring to do constantly though, it’s why we relegate decisions to habits in the first place. So really the key will be to ensure that the habits I do have are healthy and in line with my goals. I’ve spent the beginning of this year taking a look at my goals and my habits to see what small, regular steps I can take to keep growing into the person I want to be.
Three books on this subject that spoke to me recently were Deep Work, Atomic Habits and Digital Minimalism. I recommend all three, especially if you have any resolutions for the new year yourself but aren’t sure how to implement them.
You can see my summaries of Deep Work and Digital Minimalism on my book list from 2019. Here is a quick summary of Atomic Habits:
Atomic Habits lists four “laws” of habit formation (or elimination) and expands on them throughout the book. For habits you want to form, those are: make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, and make it satisfying. For habits you’re trying to change, do the opposite.
If you want an expanded summary of these principles, James Clear provides a free download of his “habits cheatsheet” on his website. Putting in ANY email address will get you to the extra documents page: www.atomichabits.com/cheatsheet
I’ve put his ideas (and those of and Deep Work and Digital Minimalism) to work on my specific goals for 2020, below.
Specific Goals for 2020
Computer Habits: Replace surfing the internet with writing and reading
This is the big one that should make the other goals below more possible. I have a tendency when tired (or when home, in general) to play online chess, watch youtube and browse the internet for interesting articles. I also tend to check my inbox even when I’m not in “work mode”, which doesn’t accomplish much except stress me out. I want to replace this habit of mindless computering with analog activities such as writing, cooking, reading or playing guitar. I’m trying to recognize the impulse when I go to the computer to entertain myself and instead make a conscious choice instead.
Climbing: Send 3 different 5.12’s outside.
I already climb as often as possible, often up to 3x per week. However, I have been climbing about this often for a while without seeing significant gains, so I decided to focus on two specific areas this year: strength training and diet.
- Strength: Do 20 pullups. I hate pull-ups. But they’re a big part of climbing, and all the climbing gyms have a pull-up bar. This makes it easy to add a pull-up workout to the end of every climbing session. This is called habit stacking: take a habit you already have (going to the climbing gym) and add your desired new habit to it. After I climb, I will do 3 sets of max reps pull-ups with negatives or assistance to failure.
- Diet: Cook myself healthy food. Since climbing is in a large part about your strength to bodyweight ratio, I want to be more deliberate about what I eat. Specifically, I want to primarily cook my own food, and not eat anything unhealthy unless I’ve made it myself. I examined my cooking habits, and after recently Cooking with Mason again for a week, brainstormed strategies to help ensure this habit survives:
- I’m bad at cooking when I’m hungry. Finding a recipe, going to the store to get ingredients and then actually cooking… not likely if I’m hungry. So planning will be important- thinking of what I want to cook for the week and making sure I have the ingredients to do it. Also, always having quick, healthy snacks (hummus, salad) that I can eat right away to give me the boost to make the bigger meals.
Note: Climbing to me is about more than the grades. I also want to climb a big wall, climb more trad, sleep on a wall, take a climbing trip out west… But I also like the physical challenge of it, and having a specific goal for the grade I want to climb excites and challenges me. It provides a target that will help motivate and sustain the other healthy habits I want to adapt, and will require lots of climbing to achieve, which I love.
Writing: Publish 2 articles per month in my blog, get 3 published elsewhere.
Publishing two articles a month on Beautiful Problems felt like an intentionally conservative number when I chose it, but when I checked last year, I only published four articles throughout the entire year. That means I’m planning to post six times as much as last year, which means I’ll have to be doing a lot more writing and photographing (and adventuring!) and a lot less scrolling. Just seeing the post calendar led me to brainstorm potential articles, and in doing so I dusted off an interview I’d done for a post almost two years ago that I never finished. I called up the interviewee and finished the article the next day, now I’m in the process of shopping it around to try to get someone to print it. This wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t examined exactly what sort of system I would implement in order to fulfill the abstract goal of “writing more”.
In Conclusion
I’m still watching movies. I still play chess online. But I don’t want to look up from the computer and wonder where the evening went. I don’t want to wake up in 6 months and wonder why I’m climbing at the same level, or why I haven’t written as much as I professed to want to.
Two hours a day of wasted time is 730 hours of wasted time a year.
I want to live 2020 deliberately.