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 […]
Tag: productivity
Habit Helixes: The case against small change
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? […]
Lessons Learned From Proposing My Thesis: Writing
Once you’ve got your committee sorted, it’s time to get to work. You’ll need to write up a document and then present it to your committee. But, you already know that. Really, the first step is to discuss your plans with your committee. I’m going to assume you’ve done that already because I’m probably not […]
5 Ph.D. Survival Tips
I recently had to give a short presentation on “survival tips” as a Ph.D. student [1]. I thought I’d summarize that presentation in written form, too. Now, there’s a lot of material out there on how to succeed as an academic and as a professional. This post is going to be a rehashing of those […]
Live Success Spiral Walkthrough Conclusion & Recap
[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 […]
Live Success Spiral Walkthrough: Update 1
Right now, I am keeping track of some of my success spirals publicly on this spreadsheet. You can read more some details about why I’m doing this in a previous post, but the basic point is to do a live walkthrough of using success spirals to fight off procrastination and actually accomplish things. My plan […]
Live Success Spiral Walkthrough for 30 days
When I started this blog, I posted a tutorial on how to set up and use success spirals to live your day-to-day ideals. Ever since then, I’ve wanted to do a live walkthrough to share exactly how I use these spirals in practice: From the inception of the success spiral through to its review phase. […]
A Tutorial on Goal Selection: Focus on Effort, not Results
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
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
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 […]