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Make Write Learn

Musings about grad school and personal fulfillment.

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Tag: lifehack

A tutorial on how to use habit helixes to gradually build up big routines.

How to Use Habit Helixes: A Tutorial

November 15, 2016November 15, 2016 sauvikPersonal development

I’m going to teach you how to use habit helixes. If you don’t know what those are, read my previous post. In short, habit helixes intertwine multiple success spirals into a domino chain and embed them into a tigger-routine-reward habit loop. They should be useful for people who already know how to use success spirals […]

An introduction to the habit helix productivity tool that embeds success spirals into a trigger-routine-reward habit loop.

Habit Helixes: The case against small change

October 18, 2016October 18, 2016 sauvikPersonal development

I’ve had some conversations with people about success spirals. Expectedly, some are skeptics. A common counter-argument is that success spirals are unexciting and slow [1]. Start with writing 1 minute a day? After a month, maybe do 10 minutes a day? How long will it take to write a novel with that level of commitment? […]

Use Success Spirals to Overcome Inertia and Accomplish Anything

Live Success Spiral Walkthrough Conclusion & Recap

March 14, 2016April 24, 2016 sauvikBlogging

[1] A success spiral is an immediately usable, powerful tool that can help you overcome inertia and make effortless progress towards living your ideals (e.g., exercising regularly, playing an instrument). The concept is simple: start small — so small, in fact, that it is effectively impossible to fail — and gradually build on your initial […]

A Tutorial on Goal Selection: Focus on Effort, not Results

November 5, 2015January 23, 2016 sauvikPersonal development

It’s easy to set yourself up for failure with poor goal-selection strategies. In this post, I hope to provide some specific actionable insights to help avoid that. I previously wrote a tutorial for creating effective success spirals. One core component of that tutorial is creating a spiral structure: A comically low starting goal that is impossible […]

How You Can Use Success Spirals: A Tutorial

October 24, 2015January 23, 2016 sauvikPersonal development

In my last post, I talked about one of the tricks I use to realize my ideals: success spirals. In this post, I’ll go into a bit more detail of how to create an effective success spiral. Success Spiral Summary To recap, a success spiral is a concrete instantiation of the principle of constant improvement: […]

Spiral Into Control: Using Success Spirals to Achieve Anything

October 19, 2015January 23, 2016 sauvikPersonal development

In a previous post, I discussed how to realize your ideals with constant, incremental improvements. The key idea of that post was that drastic change, in theory, need not be drastic in practice. Rather, we can build up to drastic change from very modest beginnings. For example, if you want to exercise more, you can […]

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