Daily Habits

June 8, 2022

At the moment, Iā€™ve accumulated a list of aspirational daily habits:

  • Publish a daily blog post, like this one.
  • Publish a technical blog post.
  • Read 3 articles that Iā€™ve saved for reading later (I use Feedbin).
  • Read 5 pages of a physical book (currently Iā€™m slowly making my way through The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green).
  • Write a daily journal entry.

Iā€™m not sure how I got here.

I started with the daily journal entry, which Iā€™ve been doing for a couple years. Then the daily blog post.

I had the ideas for the bits of reading a couple of weeks ago. Itā€™s a small enough amount of reading that I get it done most days, but Iā€™m still making incremental progress towards good habits (especially the book-reading one).

And the daily technical blog post is a quite recent addition. I had let the technical side of my blog stagnate a bit, but I have a long list of programming posts Iā€™d like to write, so I decided to add a bit of pressure so Iā€™d actually write them.

But now, Iā€™ve ended up in with quite a long list of daily obligations. In effect, Iā€™ve increased the difficulty level of baseline existence.

The difficult part is that I really like this list of things. I think theyā€™re all worthwhile things to do, and I really want to do them each day. I feel great when Iā€™m able to keep these habits. Theyā€™re important to me.

But at the same time, it creates a list of tasks that I canā€™t escape each day. I wake up feeling like Iā€™m already behind on my day, because my to-do list literally already contains a list of things that I have to do.

Thereā€™s a site called Futureland that I find very interesting. I donā€™t use it, but itā€™s a site for creating public ā€œjournalsā€ for habits that you want to document (usually daily). You can see that Futurelandā€™s creator has a long list of habits that he maintains each day (take a look at the ā€œTodayā€ tab).

I wonder how he, and other people who use Futureland, think about the pressure of these daily habits. Does he also feel, to an extent, that each day is attached to a list of obligations that need to be done in addition to the dayā€™s ā€œrealā€ work?