Everyday Systems Podcast

How pandemic proof are the Everyday Systems? A quick review of 14 systems and how they are holding up.

A system for balancing "infinite work" with "first things."

How to ingore both of the evil voices in your head and attain comic detachment from your psychomachia.

Reflect on what is giving you trouble with your self improvement system. Write a contract with yourself on a 4*6 index card. Record yourself speaking it. Listen to this recorded mantra every day.

No S for the soul? 14-Year Jubilee updates on 8 "spiritual" systems: Weekend Luddite, Audiodidact, Chain of Self-command, Low Smoking, G-Ray Vision, Monthly Resolution, Lawful Good Biker and The Study Habit

It's been 14 years now since everyday systems first went online in 2002. And I think that significant anniversary deserves some kind of acknowledgement. So I think what I'm going to do to observe this is give a kind of "state of the systems" check-in episode, a brief tour of how all the everyday systems are still working for me, -- whether they're still working for me -- how I notice they're working for other people, and any additional insights I might have about them

Are my low podcast production values good enough to produce an audiobook? You be the judge! For this episode, an experimental reading of Chapter 1 of the No S Diet book. Let me know if a few tweaks here and there might do the trick, or if I had better rethink this whole project.

Habit is powerful. But is it always the answer? Is there room for one-time, decisive actions in the realm of self-improvement? I think there is -- but perhaps not quite where you expect it.

In which the subtle but crucial difference between S-days and Cheat Days is expounded upon.

Long term planning with index cards is back! You can now capture your entire life strategy, operations, and tactics in three index cards.

No-tech medium term task managment with index cards.

Low-tech, high-psychology productivity tracking gets even simpler.

The "what the hell" effect sounds funny but it can seriously screw you up. How can everyday systems practitioners defend against it?

Hate your S-days because they make you feel out of control? Here's a mod to help you enjoy them again.

Change your biker-alignment to Lawful Good. Be flamboyantly, comically observant of traffic rules.

Shovelglove without the sledgehammer. Or at least, without making the sledgehammer a requirement.

How to roll your own everyday system from scratch. Introducing the idea of Systematic Moderation.

Still want to tweak an Everyday System? Here's how.

Want to modify an Everyday System? It's possible -- but risky, as this episode emphasizes. Subtitled: "In Praise of Vanilla."

Feel like over the top S-days are undoing all your hard work during the week? Here's how to diagnose and correct this problem.

How well do I practice what I preach? What level of compliance is necessary for big picture success? What's the hardest everyday system? I attempt to answer these questions in my first annual self performance review.

Just as your daily task list should fit on a single 3x5 index card (see Chain of Self Command and Personal Punch Cards), your life strategy should fit on an single 8x11 sheet of paper.

You may think you know the answer to this already -- or at least, the answer I am going to give you. But you're probably wrong. Because it's not a sledgehammer. Or even a sledgehammer with a sweater wrapper around it. It's a timer.

Track your habits with this free, simple, and visually compelling online tool.

I've been asked to talk about the top five health and fitness books I've read. Unfortunately I don't think I've read that many health and fitness books in my entire life, and they certainly weren't all worth recommending. So I'm going to have to narrow it down to four. And I'll be cheating a little because one of them hasn't even been published yet.

90% of our increased calorie consumption since 1977 has come from snacking. So snacking is not only the biggest problem in terms of dietary excess, it is almost the entire problem.

Talk to yourself -- and record it. Why? Autotherapy. Catch all those great ideas that would have gotten away otherwise. Nag yourself into doing impossible tasks. Keep an even-keel diary that reflects a broader range of experience. Give serious books the serious attention they require.

No time to read? Hate mindless but necessary chores? Solve both problems at once by listening to audiobooks while you do housework.

Consolidate well-understood routine tasks into compound tasks. Break up poorly understood novel tasks into more atomic components.

How I lost 10 pounds, overnight, without even trying.

Convenience is stronger than you are. Accept this fact. But with a little planning, the convenient thing doesn't have to be too awful. Case in point: "optimize your oatmeal."

Stop using evasive euphemisms. Own up to "failure" or you become it.

Moderation isn't mushy. Learn from extremists by drawing hard lines -- just draw them in different places. Get the clarity of cold turkey abstinence without the sweeping deprivation.

No time to exercise? Get philosophical. Use enlightened self-mockery, a neo-Kantian personal categorical imperative, and an existential leap of action to get you moving.

How to use index cards for todo lists at the three scales of the chain of command: daily, monthly, yearly.

Organize your self improvement efforts on three temporal scales: year=general, month=officer, day=footsoldier.

Make your goals fun, important, and attainable with Personal Olympics.

A month is a much better granularity than the more typical yearly resolution we make on new years, because you can estimate better on that smaller scale, and recover and reset faster. And it's long enough (over 21 days!) for some habituation to occur, even with a slip up or two.

Limit your celebratory eating to the holidays themselves. Adjust your expectations so that your goal is mere maintenance. If you screw up, don't wait till new years to get back on the wagon.

One thing that every self help guru can agree on is that you have to have an arbitrary number in your system. It is a little weird that the most rational concepts we have available to us -- numbers -- are so irrationally inspiring. But it clearly is the case.

Strictness builds habit faster. Dumb down what to be strict about with "fence around the law." Avoid punishment and reparations.

Use the full habit traffic light for 21 days to build your habit, then switch to more efficient negative tracking.

Need to keep track of something? Keep track of behavior, not results, with the Habit Traffic Light. Mark each calendar day with green for success, red for failure, yellow for exempt (S-days). It's cheap and keeps you focused on what you can control.

How to identify behaviors that are easily automated into unconscious habit.

Want results? Frame your goals in terms of behavior. Results goals are just wishful thinking. Automate conscious behaviors into unconscious habits.

Smooth out dangerous and humiliating binge drinking into moderate and pleasurable moderate drinking with a 2 drink a day "glass ceiling."

For every labor saving device there seem to be at least two time consuming devices to soak up all that freed time again. As T.S. Eliot put it, we are "distracted by distraction from distraction." Weekend Luddite is a system that addresses (at least in part) this problem of distraction management.

Reimagine yourself so that walking becomes the most important, the most exciting thing you could possibly be doing.

14 minutes is one minute less than the smallest unit of schedulistically significant time. No calendar has a finer granularity than 15 minutes. No one ever has a meeting that starts at 9:05 or 9:14. You have no excuse not to do this. Time-wise, it doesn't even register.