Organize IT

Several years ago I signed up to a gym. My attendance was patchy at best, despite all my intentions and it took a further two years, and changing to a different gym, before I finally got into a routine of going every week. Looking back, I think a lot of the problem was that I expected immediate results. I tried so many routines both at the gym and at home, from trying to go for regular jogs to simply doing pushups at home, only to ditch them within a month. My motivation would disappear because it was so heavily dependent on short term results. As any regular gym-goer will probably agree, results don’t happen overnight.

This is a guest post by Jo Walters of 250 Things While I’m 25.

On my 25th birthday I decided to spend the whole of the next year coming up with, and doing, 250 random things. I wanted to have some interesting stories to tell, to try new things and force myself to get off my sofa once in a while, so I came up with my silly challenge…

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I try to avoid thinking about luck, and just generally try not to use the word nowadays. To me, it applies some sort of deity granting fortune and fame to one person and misfortune and ill health to another based on some mystical roll of the dice. In other words, it removes all personal responsibility. If something bad happens to you, well, you’re were just unlucky – nothing to learn, no lessons to be taken from the experience. And if you were lucky with something, that detracts from whatever you had done to achieve it.

Getting things done, being productive, identifying your big goals and doing something about them regularly… it’s all easy and simple compared to habits. We spend all of our time lamenting how we can’t stop snacking on chocolate, we can’t stop smoking or we can’t stop idly browsing pointless websites and pissing our time away. Unlike a simple little activity or project, you can’t put a habit on your to-do list. You can’t write down “Do not do this habit today” and expect to tick it off at the end of the day. You can’t break it down, clarify it or do any other fancy productivity trick. In short breaking habits is a whole different challenge.

Simplifying your life is very popular idea nowadays. It’s been popularized, I think, by people like Tim Ferriss of The 4-Hour Work Week who pushes ideas like the 80/20 rule and the low-information diet, and Leo Babauta of Zen Habits in particular. Simplifying your life is good. No, it’s actually great and I believe everybody should have a go at it just to filter out some of the crap in their lives.  Modern life is complicated and hectic enough without us blindly letting in and taking on board everything that comes our way.