Everyday Systems

This is great:

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/j/james/w ... pter8.html

I'll pull out a few favorite quotes when I get a minute...

Reinhard

Yes, it is great.

The two quotes which are most striking to me, and whose wisdom I am most in need of are:

Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up: a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again.

In a few of the new habits I am building right now, I have been getting a little too relaxed in interpreting success or failure. I am now switching to strict mode. Where necessary this means clarifying the rules of the habit so that daily success or failure is clear cut rather than requiring a judgment call.

So my Early Bird (getting up early rather than sleeping in) is defined as "get up when the alarm goes off, no snooze button, no changing the alarm time" rather than "well, I kind of got up earlier today than yesterday and it wasn't too late".

Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty

I like this idea a lot. Most of the Everyday systems seem to fit this ideal, but it makes me think of doing some more random and arbitrary things as well, such as declaring a "no drinks but water" day, wearing my watch on the other wrist or swapping my comfy desk chair for a fitness ball. Not as permanent changes, just random one-day changes to keep me on my toes.

Also, the book is available for download from Project Gutenberg for offline and/or eBook reader reading.

DC,

Those are great lines. The second I hadn't noticed till you pointed it out.

"systematically heroic" -- I love that.

Reinhard