Boring fundamentals 🧐

I think I’ve got it. My prob­lem with per­sonal growth is that I can’t do things that need doing regularly.

I can get inspired by an idea and carry it through for a month or two. I’m good at tasks where you have to untan­gle a prob­lem, find ways to solve it and put changes in place. With daily habits I’ve made some progress in recent years, too. But things that need doing once a week, a month or a year are a disaster.

And yet that’s the only way any long-term progress is made: small steps over a long distance.

In prac­ti­cally any area of per­sonal growth, one-off efforts won’t do. Be it health, weight con­trol, build­ing skills or man­ag­ing per­sonal finances, every­where you have to come back to the ques­tion after a while, check against your plans and assess progress. It looks like until now I’ve been doing this terribly. In busi­ness I have sim­i­lar prob­lems, but there at least you can put other people on the process, make them respon­si­ble, and it will some­how work.

In other words, I’m not sys­tem­atic enough. Why?

Why a nerd isn’t nerdy enough

Maybe it has to do with my psyche, my per­son­al­ity, neu­roti­cism or sharp mood swings. I don’t under­stand these things. Maybe every­one’s like this. Or the oppo­site: other people don’t need life hacks to exer­cise every morn­ing and write down their spending. I’m some kind of nerd who has never been nerdy enough.

What’s notable is that the rit­u­als that help you keep going over a long dis­tance don’t take much time. They take mental energy and a calm mind. I notice I can only get round to things like review­ing my per­sonal finances on days when I haven’t worked on busi­ness tasks, have slept well and am in a good mood. Maybe until now I’ve simply been work­ing myself into the ground all the time, so there was no energy left for what matters. Hello to Maxim Dorofeev, a Russian pro­duc­tiv­ity author, who explains this well in his talks and books. I like this expla­na­tion better than the pre­vi­ous one, because it sug­gests a solu­tion and doesn’t let me write my prob­lems off as “well, that’s just how I am, what can you do”. On the sub­ject, see Carol Dweck on fixed vs. growth mindset.

What helps when you’re not systematic enough

Short-term things, like daily habits, are easy to mon­i­tor with a self-observation jour­nal (I learned about it from Dorofeev), a habit checklist or a tracker app. For sev­eral years I used Habit Loop Tracker, but now I’ve gone back to paper.

For long-term con­trol I try to do a weekly review of my systems. I call it the Weekly Review. I’m going to try a Monthly and a Quarterly Review, but I’m in no hurry to load myself up. I used to write up “the month’s suc­cesses”, but I man­aged it three or four times a year at most. Maybe I’ll bring it back. Once a year I draw up a list of values (that works).

Another prob­lem: you have to remem­ber all these reviews or set up reminders. I used to change task man­age­ment sys­tems all the time (Trello, Todoist, Podio, Wunderlist, too many to count), so long-term reminders didn’t help much. Now my per­sonal GTD system has more or less set­tled, and a recur­ring Weekly Review task with a simple check­list is already working. I hope I don’t blow it off.

Now an impor­tant dis­cov­ery that ties all this together. I real­ized that rit­u­als and deci­sions need to be cat­a­loged, so I don’t forget what I agreed with myself.

A catalog of nerdiness

Boring fun­da­men­tals are exactly those useful prac­tices, like a plan for build­ing skills, a per­sonal finance system, a read­ing list, a cal­en­dar of loved ones’ birth­days, a cat­a­log of online courses and a pass­word manager.

Last fall I came across the blog of James Stuber, which puts what I’m aiming for perfectly:

First, master boring fundamentals. Then, play infi­nite games.

That’s how “Build boring sys­tems” appeared on my list of values for 2020, along with a “Boring fun­da­men­tals” page in Notion, a cat­a­log of the tools and rit­u­als I’m trying to use. By the way, the page is already moving to the divine Roam, which I hope to write about next time.

Won’t you drown in your systems?

I under­stand there’s a risk of losing sight of what it’s all for: an inter­est­ing life. In every­day life I try to stick to min­i­mal­ism: use fewer resources and own as few things as possible. Same with man­ag­ing my life. I like get­ting results with min­i­mal means. Boring sys­tems are like health insur­ance and a fire alarm: you make the effort once, set it up, and then keep the system going with min­i­mal effort. The effort of keep­ing it going has to be min­i­mal, or the system won’t take root anyway.

Yesterday was the first of the month. My monthly per­sonal finance check­list popped up in my task feed. I went through it in under an hour: entered the bal­ances of my accounts, set bud­gets for the main spend­ing cat­e­gories and made sure I’m moving toward my finan­cial goals. It was easy and pleas­ant: a system that’s set up and work­ing gives you sat­is­fac­tion, and the feel­ing that today you beat chaos a little. 🤘