June 8, 2022
At the moment, Iāve accumulated a list of aspirational daily habits:
Iām not sure how I got here.
I started with the daily journal entry, which Iāve 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. Itās a small enough amount of reading that I get it done most days, but Iām 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 Iād like to write, so I decided to add a bit of pressure so Iād actually write them.
But now, Iāve ended up in with quite a long list of daily obligations. In effect, Iāve increased the difficulty level of baseline existence.
The difficult part is that I really like this list of things. I think theyāre all worthwhile things to do, and I really want to do them each day. I feel great when Iām able to keep these habits. Theyāre important to me.
But at the same time, it creates a list of tasks that I canāt escape each day. I wake up feeling like Iām already behind on my day, because my to-do list literally already contains a list of things that I have to do.
Thereās a site called Futureland that I find very interesting. I donāt use it, but itās a site for creating public ājournalsā for habits that you want to document (usually daily). You can see that Futurelandās creator has a long list of habits that he maintains each day (take a look at the āTodayā 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 dayās ārealā work?