My habit structure at 41

tl;dr

  1. Habits are commitments with yourself that feel somewhat uphill.
  2. Motivation for habits:
    a. Generate an abundance of energy, timespace and focus.
    b. Habits as the wellspring of arete. Or you can see them as base camp.
    c. Also, there’s a tamagotchi aspect to them that can be leveraged.
  3. The seven habits I practice: meditation, journaling, exercise, learning, focused work, sleeping habits, eating habits, disconnection habits.
  4. It is far easier (and also more rewarding) to do a habit 5-6x a week than 2-3x a week.
  5. Front load the day: most habits can be done in the morning or early afternoon, when your willpower is replenished. Johnson’s law: regret action increases exponentially with the time of the day (resets when you wake up). This doesn’t mean you have to wake up early, though.
  6. Frame negative habits (don’t-do-this) as positive habits as much as possible.
  7. Whatever habits you missed one day, don’t carry them over to the next one. Always start fresh.
  8. Tracking your habits gives you a consistent dopamine hit and therefore increases compliance.
  9. Take an asymptotic view: years and decades, not weeks or months.
  10. Habits are plants. Even when borrowed, they must take root in your mind and adapt to new soil.

Summary’s over, now goes the whole thing.

“Watching Zorba dance, I understood for the first time the fantastic efforts of man to overcome his weight.” — Nikos Kazantzakis

“It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing, but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.” — Feodor Dostoyevsky

“Self improvement is masturbation.” — Tyler Durden

Entering my forties, it is likely that I’m already entering the second half of my life. Here I want to share my current habit structure, on which I have worked for at least ten years. It is far from perfect, and I still have a long way to go with it, but it is stable and it works well. Hopefully some of it is valuable to you.

What’s a habit?

Broadly speaking, a habit is something you do regularly. Here, we’re looking at a narrower definition. We’re not talking about being in the habit of picking your nose or smoking two packs a day. But rather, about being in the habit of daily exercise or writing down your thoughts to clear your mind.

But to call them “bad habits” or “good habits” would presume that one can tell good from evil, which is usually a stretch. For example, I used to believe waking up at 5am was a good habit, but it turned out to be a bad idea in the context of the rest of my life. Who knew?

It is more constructive and stable to define habits as something you do regularly that feels somewhat uphill. That is, something that requires a nudge on your part, some effort, and that you do because of what it brings after you started doing it. Only time will tell if those were indeed good or bad things to do.

Why develop habits?

Why cultivate habits? The usual (and I believe correct) way to look as habits is as an investment. Put in the effort now and regularly, and enjoy the benefits later today and for the rest of your life. In particular, habits can create an abundance of health, timespace and focus in your life.

As for energy, the stark truth is that leading an average life in an industralized country (which is probably attached to a sedentary lifestyle) makes you age badly and quickly. We evolved to survive in the wild as hunter gatherers. Our current lifestyles are very, very far from that original template. While we cannot go back to 50000 BCE (no matter how strong our suspicions grow that that it could be a swell idea after all), we can still do something about it. The reason we lack in energy is that our lifestyles are constantly chipping away at our health. While we cannot control our health, or our lifespan, we can definitely tilt the odds in our favor. Good health gives us good energy to seize the day and enjoy it too. The best way to go about it is to put solid habits in place concerning sleep, food and exercise.

Concerning timespace: we live flooded by information and choices, most of which are irrelevant. This will be especially clear to those who check their email ten times a day. The day lasts the same for everyone, but how much time you can have in it to do what you really want to do – to have open space, so to speak, varies from person to person. Deliberate choices can increase this.

Focus is just a variant on time: it is a place where you go to work at the limit of your ability, to do something of value for others and yourself. The current flood of information we live in is mostly distraction. Habits can mitigate this onslaught, and make you sharper and stronger in your focus.

For the ambitious, habits can be seen as the ultimate performance enhancing drug. To live the best possible life that we can live, we need to perform as well as we can, like an actor or musician would do. To perform well, we need structure to keep us healthy, ordered and focused. Habits are this very structure.

For the adventurous, habits can be seen as base camp. A constant background from which we prepare as best as we can to tackle the challenge before us.

For those seeking freedom: habits are engines of abundance. Deliberate actions that, over time, give us more than enough time, energy and money to live the life we want to live.

For the obsessive, working on habits also has a certain tamagotchi-like feeling, only that you yourself are the tamagotchi and that playing carries a meaningful consequence. This type of thinking can be a trap, but it is also useful because compulsiveness makes some uphills less so.

Habits versus goals

Habits are not goals. Habits guide you into a certain direction, and, more importantly, they are what keep you going in a certain direction. Goals can be very powerful. But, in my experience, habits are best seen as a steady state you will approach. Rather than becoming fit, it’s better to be fit. And the way to do it is, quite simply, to work out effectively and consistently for at least 3-5 years, and then for the rest of your life.

Perhaps because I’ve failed to reach almost every single goal I set for myself, I’ve grown somewhat suspicious of goals (though I am still tantalized by tem). Most of the success I’ve experienced has come from systematic action towards a direction, and that’s essentially what a habit is.

Habits versus others

Habits are not usually mandated or enforced by others. Sometimes, they align with what’s expected of you, and most of the time they don’t. It’s up to you to protect the time and energy you devote to your habits. Most of the pushback you’ll get from others is about going against convention. This pushback is best ignored, unless someone gives you a thoughtful objection.

But, being a bit blunt, I’d say that habits are usually done in spite of others, not because of others. The common exceptions are supportive partners, and those who also practice the habit you’re about to do and just “know” that what you’re doing is more important than whatever they were going to ask of you. This is not to predispose you against others, but rather to tell you that part of the uphill tilt of habits is ignoring convention.

My seven habits

Here’s my overall habit structure. They are seven habits, split in three:

The positive habits are mostly about things I do, whereas the negative habits are mostly about things I do not do. Focus is also a mostly positive habit, but it’s big enough to be in its own category.

The positive habits require me about two hours per day, six times a week. This is a significant time requirement. Luckily, the negative habits save at least an hour a day. Still, if I didn’t cultivate these habits, I would have more time for other things.

I encourage you to start small, but still maintain an almost daily cadence on your habits. For me, it’s 10x easier to do something every day than to do it 2-3 times a week. I’ve observed that pattern in most (not all) the people I met that had a successful habit. Consider this counterintuitive finding with an open mind.

I’ll cover the positive habits first.

Positive habit 1: base

As its name implies, the base habit is intended to put a solid base on my day. It is the habit on top of which I built the entire structure (with the partial exception of workouts, which also started really small and then grew).

The base habit, like almost all of them, is split in three parts:

Meditation is an essential part of the day. I set a timer for ten minutes and just do it. As with workouts, the only bad meditation session is the one that doesn’t happen. Meditation helps bring space between something happening and my reaction to it.

Journaling takes anywhere between 5 and 20 minutes. I start by writing things I’m grateful for (I heard this one from Oprah). Then, I write impressions about how I feel, what I want to tackle in the day, things that happened at home. Some days I’ll write little, some other days I need more time. What this does is to let me express my feelings and thoughts in paper, in an eloquent (though not publishable yet) level. This clears up my mind, gives me peace of mind, and let’s me tackle the day with more clarity. Journaling also includes tracking: I weigh myself, measure my waist (notice a pattern here?) and check how much I slept in my Oura app. Then I write it down in my journal. Other things I track during the day are my workout, what did I do in my learning, and other things related to habits. Tracking somehow habit compliance more likely. Perhaps it’s that dopamine shot you get when you mark down what you actually did. It’s enjoyable and takes very little time, and can give you great insight over time.

Another great thing about journaling is that by writing down the ideas you have, 1) you are more likely to remember them; 2) you get other ideas.

Logistics is the acknowledgment of something inevitable as part of a positive space of the day. Besides the general email checking and supermarket shopping, there are always a few “special” items on my list of todos. These are not work-related, and definitely not something I’d do for fun. Examples: buy a broom, research solar panels to install in my home, apply for a visa for an upcoming personal trip. These type of things my wife and I call “logistics”. The habit consists of doing 1-3 of these per day. Of course, anything that can be eliminated or automated is streamlined. What’s left behind, you do. By making this explicit and trackable, you can work on them more calmly, more proactively and feel less annoyed by them. Working on them diligently (rather than either procrastinating them or cramming it) allow you to reach high-value low-urgency items earlier (like those solar panels on your roof).

I aim to do the base habit every day except Saturday. My compliance is still hit-and-miss on Sundays.

Positive habit 2: train

Exercise is an essential habit. It comes just after base. I aim to work out six times a week. The habit gradually grew and now I train about an hour a day (except for Sunday, where I run for 3-4 hours, but that’s just madness on my end).

I cannot overemphasize how important it is to work out almost every day, and how much easier it is to build a workout habit if you do it every day (rather than the fabled 2-3 times a week). I don’t know why. Every single person I come across that has a solid workout habit always seems to work out almost every day.

My training is focused on three things: strength, endurance and flexibility.

For strength, I do 40 minutes of calisthenics, Monday to Thursday. 20 minutes of upper body exercises (pullups, pushups, dips, handstands), then 20 minutes of lower body (squats and kettlebell swings). For upper body, I recommend Chris Heria’s tip on working out every-minute-on-the-minute, which means you do a single set every minute. Not deciding how much to rest makes the workout more challenging physically and it frees up mental cycles, as well as time.

What type of strength training you do is far less important than your ability to be consistent with it. The path to fitness is to keep on doing it and figure out the details along the way. The main strength of calisthenics, from a habit perspective, is that it only requires a pull up bar and perhaps parallel bars, so it’s far easier to take it on the road and remain doing it year round.

For endurance, I run twice a week. If I was just focused on health, I would just run for an hour each time.

For flexibility, I do a few yoga postures at the end of the day, for about 20 minutes. This part is absolutely critical: if I didn’t do this, I’m pretty sure I’d no longer be able to run and would have issues with my joints. Stretching effectively removes all sorts of problems with the body. Joe Hippensteelsays that there are optimal ranges of motion for the differennt parts of the body, and that once you reach it, any pain you experience goes away. My experience agrees.

Things that have helped me out working out consistently are:

My inspiration for working out is Tony “The Naturalist”, a calisthenics practitioner in his seventies. You can see him here.

Positive habit 3: learn

Learn: a workout, for your mind. The base habit also does this, but this is different. Learn is about proper input.

Learn is also split in three parts:

Read a new book: read something new for 5-30 minutes a day. Fiction, non-fiction, doesn’t matter. If it’s non-fiction, I usually take notes. The main rule is to not re-read books. I found that for many years I read too few new books because I was constantly re-reading older ones for pleasure.

Play music: not exactly input, but playing an instrument (or singing) takes me out of the daily rut and allows for a creative moment that requires physical dexterity. I suspect that dancing or woodworking would work just as well for other people. The habit is about doing something creative with your hands.

Learn a language: take time to learn a language or read/see something in it. I’m taking a low-effort approach in that I just read in my target language (Russian) for a few minutes per day. I want to be more active in my learning, but at least by reading I maintain what I have and slowly extend it.

I do the learn habit 5x per week, from Sunday to Thursday. I spend anywhere between 20 to 40 minutes on it, so about half an hour per day. I’d like to do more of it. This is currently my weakest habit, and I tend to give it the least priority.

Focus

Focus is the cornerstone between the positive and the negative habits. The other six habits (three positive and three negative) support focus.

Focus is the only habit that directly produces work output.

The essence of my focus habit is to turn on a timer when I’m focused. The moment I am distracted, the timer has to be stopped.

Measuring meetings is tricky: some meetings require very little focus, a few precious ones are very focused. Sometimes I simply retroactively select a percentage of focus and multiply it by the length of the meeting to get the real focused time for it.

Ideally, focused time is spent on working on one thing, without looking at notifications or emails. Focused time can be time where I’m working at the edge of my ability, building something valuable.

The idea of using a timer to measure net focused time comes from an article I read about John Carmack, who used to do this back in the day by playing music and pausing it when he wasn’t focused.

I’m of the belief that a solid day of work for a knowledge worker is four hours of pure focus, particularly when working on difficult work. For me, the sustainable upper limit is about six hours. There is an interesting echo of this 4-6 hour limit elsewhere: elite classical musicians practice about four hours per day. Another echo is research that says that hunter gatherers worked about 30 hours a week, which is about 4 hours per day.

These 4-6 hours of focused work take about 6-9 hours of clock time, when you add the breaks and interruptions. I think these focused hours are far more important than warming up the chair for the 8-9 hours that most jobs normally require, and which based on my observation are mostly filled in by people being distracted. With that said, I suspect I’m essentially lazy and I think there are plenty of harder working and more focused people than myself; it might be possible to do hard focus for 7-9 hours per day, at least for some. I wonder how much John Carmack focused per day when he was on his prime.

The two enemies of focused work are distractions and low-value work. Stopping the timer helps you acknowledge their encroachment.

Besidess the focused hours, I write down in my journal what I did that day in those hours of focus. It can be a short note, or a series of bullet points. Writing down what you’re up to helps focus immensely.

Negative habit 1: sleep

Sleep is the single most important way in which you can improve your health and performance. Much has been written about this, so I won’t elaborate here. If you don’t think that’s the case, I recommend you do some research to see for yourself.

Sleep is the first negative habit. Sleep is the quintaessential negative habit, because it’s about not doing things. For me, it’s mainly about not doing three things: taking stimulants after a certain hour; being active past a certain hour; getting out of bed before a certain amount of hours have elapsed.

Negative habits, as I’ve read and experienced, are best framed as things you do. So this is what I do for sleep:

Although it’s not a habit, if I work from home, I aim for a 20m nap, which is always restorative.

My inspiration for sleep is Bryan Johnson. You’ve probably heard from him.

Negative habit 2: food

Curiously enough, while eating itself is a voluntary activity that takes time and effort (rather than stopping with something and going horizontal), I’ve found that it’s best understood as a negative habit.

Food and weight have represented (and fortunately I can say this in the past tense, for the most part) big issues in my life. You can just look at the archives of my blog to see how many articles I’ve devoted to it. The key for me has been to understand that eating well is about health. Not looks, not willpower, not shame. Say it with me: food is about health.

Health is not just physical health, but also mental health. For some people, me included, a list of restricted foods, or calorie counting, are gateways into mental hell. Whateveer habits I build around healthy eating, they have to improve my mental health too, instead of deepening my eating disorders.

To throw all rules out of the window, at least for me, is not good either. I’d certainly be overweight, possibly obese, and therefore unhealthy. I’ve been there and it’s not a good place to be in, at least not for me. There is no shame in being overweight or obese (and I wish I understood that much earlier), but that doesn’t mean it’s healthy either.

The question is: how can one eat in a way that makes you healthy, while still being flexible and open to enjoy the delicacies and the social moments we are offered? Food is complicated partly because it’s so social. You cannot socialize when you go to sleep, but you can’t help but socialize when you’re around a dinner table.

Through extensive trial and error, I’ve found something that works for me. It also comes in threes:

These habits can be summarized even further: a 16-ish hour fast between dinner and lunch the next day, plus a completely determined meal before dinner. Dinner is free, in all senses of the word: no calorie counting, no restricted foods. But it’s not a free-for-all, at least not most days. Since it’s my main meal of the day, it’s usually rich in vegetables, delicious and completely social. It’s also a large meal.

This is a very regimented way of eating, there’s no denying it. It could be a textbook expression of orthorexia. Time will tell. Personally, I’ve found freedom in it. I used to be the type of person that wondered every half hour whether it’s time already for a snack, wondering if I could every experience true satiety without overeating. That is mostly gone now. Turns out the compulsion was part habit, part high blood sugar.

I’m curently experimenting with a standard lunch that’s very, very lean, since I want to reach 10-12% body fat (which is on the lower end of a healthy male body fat percentage, and which I personally believe is the optimal healthy level, since most hunter gatherers are between 10-13%). To do that, I simply have a protein shake at noon, then another one at 15. I’ve already experienced success effortlessly maintaining my body weight with a more generous standard lunch that consists of protein shakes, plus almonds, plus oatmeal and fruit. When I hit my target weight, I will shift to the non-lean version of the standard lunch, though I will probably remove the fruit since it seems to make me hungrier in the late afternoon.

I’m not trying to sell you my system, but there might be parts of it that could be useful to you. People tend to be very particular about how they eat. The goal is that, if you struggle with food and weight, you find something that works for you.

Something I didn’t mention, but which I also find liberating, is to measure my weight every day and put it into a system that computes my “real” weight (taking out the noise of daily variations). Knowing where I am gives me peace of mind, particularly when I have the odd intrusive thought that “I am/look fat”. The trend doesn’t lie. At some point I might let go of the weighing, but for now the scale (always combined with the trend) is a net win.

Expect a lot of pushback around unconventional eating habits. Most of it is well-meaning. I recommend you 1) resist the impulse to become “normal” again just because of convention; 2) remain open minded about what they say, because they might be pointing out a legitimate concern. For example, recently I was made aware that having all those protein shakes meant getting a lot of artificial sweeteners in my body, so I switched to stevia flavored protein. But don’t give in to “normal” advice if it’s not based on sound science.

Some of the advice, you can consider outright harmful. Anyone that tells you that weight and food are inevitably a struggle, or that it’s impossible to not get fat as you get old are just projecting their limiting beliefs on you. I should know, I was one of them.

My patron saint of not resigning yourself to being overweight (and thus less healthy than you could be) is John Walker, who wrote a very interesting book about this very topic. The idea of the weight trend comes from his book.

Negative habit 3: clear

We live surrounded by ubiquitous, powerful digital distractions. Social networks, news sites, messaging apps. It’s so handy and so easy to get distracted with them.

The clear habit is about doing aside with these distractions, to instead be in the present. Some of that time in the present will be focused, some of it might be meditative (in the broader sense), some of it spent in connection with others. In any case, the value of that time is always higher than that of time we spend distracted. Clearing distraction is a way to increase the meaning of our time, and therefore the meaning of our experience.

For me, my main time and focus wasters are three: email, whatsapp, reading the news. For both email and whatsapp, I aim to check it three times per day (one in the morning, one around noon, one in the evening). With the news, the goal is to just read them at most once per day.

I find that getting off the news is easier than resisting the pull of email and whatsapp. Because email and whatsapp are about others close to you, and sometimes you want to be in closer touch. But there’s no denying that they wreck focus. The wrecking is not just about lost time, but also about a diminished capacity to sustain mental effort over time. When you’re constantly distracting yourself, you get used to that state of mind.

I aim to limit email, whatsapp and news every day, with positive yet far from perfect results.

Timing: front load the day

I’m not a morning person and I might never be one, even as I get older. Still, front loading the day with habits is a great idea, because your willpower is highest in the morning. For me, most of the habits are done in the morning or early afternoon.

On days where I don’t go to the office, I start by working out. During the rest of the morning, I intersperse work and the base habit. In the early afternoon, I read. That only leaves me three habits for the evening, after dinner: music (after my daughter goes to sleep), stretching (after I finished my work in the evening) and reading in Russian (just before I go to bed).

On days where I go to the office, I shift things only slightly (squats in the early afternoon, reading on the commute back from home). For the most part, the sequence is the same.

Bryan Johnson coins what I call the Johnson’s law: the chance of you regretting an action increases exponentially with how late in the day it is. That is, you’re far more likely to make bad choices later in the day, because you’re more tired. That’s perhaps why frontloading the day works well: the odds that you will skip evening habits is much higher.

Start fresh every day

I spent many years struggling to establish a workout cadence because of the following pattern: if my plan was to work out Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, many Wednesdays I would be tempted to move the workout to Thursday. Then, when Thursday came along, I would then try to work out on Fridays and Saturdays. You can imagine how well that panned out.

I find it best to almost never catch up to previous habits you haven’t done. It seems to induce the same perverse tamagotchi logic of lowering your caloric ceiling today because you “were bad” yesterday. Starting fresh does mean that you need to climb the mountain again today, but it liberates you from anything you didn’t climb yesterday.

I ocassionally do half of a leg workout on Friday that I didn’t do on Tuesday, or Friday’s stretch on Saturday, but it’s never mandatory. Today’s workout can only be done today. Moving on and starting fresh is a daily act of forgiveness and tolerance towards yourself.

Tamagotchi vibes

Tracking your habits gives you a consistent dopamine hit and therefore increases compliance. Perhaps this is only for the obsessive. Whatever it is, tracking helps you make the habit more real and more engrained in your life. This can be part of the base habit.

Take the long view

Especially for the young’uns, I recomment to take an asymptotic view: think years and decades, not weeks or months. Life is as short as it is wonderful. Sometimes you can have a berakthrough by having a clear goal measured in days or weeks; but most of the time, the best things come from long, sustained, open-ended efforts towards becoming a better person. And that takes time.

Perhaps that’s just me getting older, or me being a slow runner instead of a sprinter. In everything I do, I find that the daily drip approach always beats the sprint. I only find deep progress when I fall into a good groove.

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Thank you for making it this far into the article. Please take from here only what intrigues you, or what irks you. Do not try to attempt wholesale a transplant of someone else’s habits into your life. Habits are like plants and must really take root into your mind and reality; and once they do, they will be adapted to your own uniqueness.

I wish you success and happiness in your search of habits that will make you live the life you truly want to live.


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