The ABC’s of 365
The 365 Challenge is a very simple and effective practice. The basic tenet is to do something every day.
To make it effective those things that you choose to do every day should be things that are important to you. Primary things. Things that you want to construct habits around.
The reason it works is that your brain changes, grows and creates new pathways when you create repetitive patterns of action – in other words habits. The 365 challenge allows you to reprogram your own brain to your own benefit.
After the new habits take hold you create a daily positive feedback loop that burns these habits into your life.
It also forces you to step back and think about what habits you would want to engineer into your daily life? What is so important to you that you want to make it not only part of your daily life but part of every day’s priority?
The 365 day challenge also forces action. Even if it is small action, the daily action adds up. If one of your priorities is a project that takes a lot of work or many component building blocks or is a skill that requires consistent practice – the 365 Challenge is a great way to get these things done.
On the flip side taking on a project that you have been dreaming about for years may reveal that the project was more of a gossamer pipe dream than an actual project. It’s a bit of a reality check on what you really want versus what you think you want.
I took on this project three weeks ago as an experiment. I thought hard about what I could and should do every day. I went out and got an app for my iPhone called Today which allowed me to track daily the things that I wanted to do. Nothing complex just a way to write it down and check it off each day.
I’m 20 days into this experiment and here is what I learned.
I came up with the following daily things:
First I decided that it would be a great thing if I could get up a 5:00 every day and get going on my day early. I figured my body would adapt to this and eventually it would be easy to get up and I’d get a lot more done. I made it 10 days before I had to get some sleep. Towards the end of the second week I couldn’t get my eye to focus at work after lunch. I was a mess. For the most part I was still getting 8 hours of sleep but my body hated the new rhythm. I certainly got some things done but at the end of the day 6:00 AM is much more reasonable for my biorhythms. Lesson learned.
The second thing I wanted to work on was my mindless eating at night. For this I came up with two things I would do every day. The first would be to log my food no matter what. And the second was to not eat anything after 6:00PM. For the most part this has been a success. I had to adjust the 6:00 PM to 7:00 PM on a couple nights or else I wouldn’t eat. I’ve steadily been losing weight without losing energy or dieting just by being mindful of my eating and not mindlessly eating at night. I’ll write up the details of this in a future post.
Along with the mindless eating project I also determined to weigh in every morning. I have done this and it has given me some insight into causality between food and body.
Next I decided to capture and codify something I was already doing. I made exercise every day one of my daily tasks. Not so difficult for me because I do this anyhow but perhaps it kept me from skipping a day over the last 4 weeks.
Along with this I decided to do the 100 pushups program. This is a methodology the Steve Speirs created and we interviewed him about it in a past episode. I decided to take on 4 exercises. Pushups, Situps, Squats and calf Raises. I do two on one day and two on alternate day, 6 days a week. Technically it’s not every day but it is a daily macro cycle with a schedule and a plan. So far so good. I’m up to Day 9 and it’s getting pretty hard. As of today I’m up to 120 pushups and 180 crunches and 137 Squats and 137 calf raises.
That’s the simple stuff that I was for the most part doing already. Next I wanted to focus on some goals. I created a daily task to review my goals. This sounds easy but in order to do this you have to have goals. I go through periodic goal setting so I had some ready-made. I loaded these up and read through them every day.
Unfortunately I quickly became dissatisfied with the goals I had brainstormed up at the beginning of the year. The more times I read through them the more they impressed me as aiming too low and not being exciting enough to drive any real positive change. Now I’m considering doing another more compelling goals setting exercise. Would you call that a success? I think so.
I believe in feeding my brain with positive and compelling thoughts so the next daily task I came up with was to review a list of positive mantras. What this morphed into was adding some positive saying or mantra to the list each day. It’s becoming a bit unwieldy but it’s very effective at refocusing my energy when I do this.
One of the projects I decided to take on this year was to write a science fiction novel that I’ve had in my desk drawer for 20 years. I created a daily challenge to write for 30 minutes on this project every day. I wasn’t able to keep that pace up but I did get a fair amount of progress when I was able to. I probably scored about 60% percent on this one. There were days when I would just be staring at the blank screen and painfully pushing words out.
It got me to thinking that maybe this is something that was better left as unrequited love? Maybe the idea of this novel is more important to me than the actual execution of it. Interesting. Eventually some really good work started to slowly flow and I’ll probably stick with it.
These were all things that I was doing for myself. Parts of my goals are to connect with family and friends, especially family. How could I do something every day that would strengthen my relationships? I decided on a daily compliment for my wife and kids. Whether a text message or in person to say one nice, thoughtful or inspirational thing. My kids think it’s funny but they’re used to me being a bit crazy that way. I can only hope that It’s having some sort of positive impact. All I can do is try.
A week into the program I created a new daily task that was to remove one thing from my cluttered house every day. I’m starting to see some holes. The thing is when you live in a house you don’t see the broken stuff, the stuff you’ll never wear again or the stuff you’ll never use. By focusing on one thing daily it forces you out of your familiarity haze to take some action.
That’s what my 365 Challenge project has been. Has it been successful? As an experiment? Yes. As a life changer? Time will tell. It’s definitively worth trying to give yourself some great insights into how your brain works and have an opportunity to rewire some of those things.