My most important personal support habits

I have small-dozens of personal practices and procedures that I use to maintain my efficacy and well-being. The following are my current best guess of the ones that have the biggest effect, and which are highest priority.

This short list was not derived from any rigorous statistical analysis. Mostly informal attention to which things seem to make the biggest difference for my day.

Write (or program) every day

(Inspired by Tyler Cowen, who writes every day without fail, and Bryan Caplan, who gets something done every day, no matter what.)

Everything else on this list is an input, something that I can do to increase my capacity. But all the capacity in the world is not worth anything, unless I'm actually doing something with it. I don't want to fall into the trap of developing excellent sleep habits, and excellent exercise habits, and a solid spaced repetition review system, and psychological spiritual practices, at the expense of doing anything real that has impact on someone other than myself. I'm into personal development, but I don't want investment in personal development to be a self-spinning wheel that never has outputs.

I want to make sure to create at least a little value, outside of myself, every single day.

My first priority every day, after waking up well, is to sit down and write something. I'm not very picky about what I write. Sometimes a strategic document, to share with my collaborators. Often, an essay or blog post. If I'm pushing hard on a goal, I'll usually write something that relates to that goal.

I typically have a long list of writing open loops, projects that are in some stage of writing, editing, or revising, so I basically always have something to write.

Sometimes, instead of writing text, I'll hack on some software project, instead. That also counts.

Writing every day means that I'm always making some intellectual progress. It forces me to clarify my thoughts, and therefore leads me to think new thoughts.

My minimal standard of completion is to work either 1) for a minimum of 40 minutes or 2) until I finish and ship what I am working on.

My goal is to make sure that, when I look back on my day, I know that I got something done, no matter what else is happening. If I'm maintaining good support habits and I wrote something or programmed something, but I didn't manage to do anything else that day, I consider that to be a minimal acceptable day.

Get up immediately, then get dressed and get to work within 40 minutes of waking up

My experience is that the quality of the first hour of my day is highly predictive of how the rest of my day goes. When I get up and get momentum immediately, that momentum caries through to the rest of the day. When I wake up in a slow and lackadaisical way, my day tends to be slow and lackadaisical. So want to consistently start with a jolt of energy, from the moment I wake up.

I wake up to full alertness alert, ~instantly, and immediately get out of bed and start making progress.

I don't usually use an alarm, instead waking up on the basis of my internal clock.

(This takes a couple of days to train: I set the intention before I go to sleep, to wake up at a particular time. When I wake up in the morning, I check my watch. If the time is within an hour of my intended wakeup time, I'll get up. If it's earlier than that, I'll go back to sleep. Over a period of a few days, my actual wakeup time will adjust to match my intended wakeup time, until, typically, I'm waking up on the minute, close to instantaneously.)

As soon as I wake up (and look at my watch to confirm it's my wake up time), I spring out of bed and do 25 push ups (or similar) to activate my physiology.

I'll then have a series of steps in a morning routine (brushing my teeth, getting dressed, taking supplements, sometimes a meditation practice). I want to complete all of these, and get to work quickly, within 40 minutes at the longest (though 20 minutes is more typical).

For some reason it's crucial that I get dressed. Sometimes I'll take a shower in the morning, and instead of drying off with a towel, I'll throw on a robe, and allow myself to air dry. Somehow, wearing a robe instead of pants seems to be very predictive of being ineffective in early work blocks, often wasting the time reading random stuff on the internet. (Wearing workout short or sweatpants seems to be fine.) I make a point to get dressed quickly in my morning routine.

If I get started with work early in the day, I get momentum, and it is much easier to maintain momentum than to try and build it from a cold start.

See also my morning routine

Exercise every day (and every other day at least)

Exercise is approximately the only panacea. Being physically fit and healthy, makes it easier to do everything else.

When I'm in the habit of exercising every day, the activation energy required for going to exercise, even very intense exertion, is low—exercising every day is self-supporting.

I make sure to exercise at least every other day, typically alternating between heavy barbell lifts and cardio interval training. Doing weighted squats, in particular, seems to have a substantial impact on my psychological well-being, for some reason, over and above other forms of excise. So I make sure to do squats at least once a week.

See my exercise policy.

Eat once a day

One of the biggest things that can disrupt the energy of my day, if things have otherwise been going well and I've gotten momentum, is eating when I don't need to. Eating food can cause my energy and alertness to fall, and, in some cases, make me tired or sluggish.

I typically want to eat only one meal a day, around the time of my circadian dip, when my energy levels fall anyway, and when I often nap.

To operationalize this, I only eat between the hours of 2:00 PM and 7:00 PM.

In the past, I've had "eat only one meal a day", as an aspirational target, but in practice often deviated from that ideal. Adopting this time-based operationalization immediately caused me to be consistently hitting this ideal. If I'm tempted to eat, I simply check my watch: if it's during the window, then I eat, if not, then I wait. If I'm very hungry, I know that it won't be very long at all until 2:00, and that I can wait that long.

In the evenings, if I'm inclined to eat, I'll chew gum, or drink tea or non-dairy milk, as a substitute.

See the section on food of my energy rhythms.

Abstain from audio content

Appendix: Some other things things that I do every day

Momentum habits