It’s been just over a month since I completed my first marathon. One thing has become clear to me during this time: I’m not very good at running just for the sake of it. Many people talk about a low after achieving a goal in athletics. I haven’t been feeling down, but I have found myself wondering what is next. Do I keep running long distances? Or longer runs (marathons aren’t that big of a deal in our age when so many people are doing ultra marathons in extreme climates)? Get into running wit…
Way back when I first started using Strava, I came across this excellent post on Reddit by Jimmy Daly (not a source I link to often … Reddit, that is). In it, he describes how he exported all his Strava runs to Airtable and uses IFTTT to add any new ones (his base is listed here [https://airtable.com/universe/expBjY9LXuoVoerz9/running-log]). > I am perpetually dissatisfied with training logs. For years, I used notebooks, then Google Spreadsheets and more recently have relied on Strava to track…
When well designed, AI and timely reminders can help us develop better habits.
A lot of smart peple are blocking off entire days in the week in order to focus. Untouchable days [https://hbr.org/2018/03/why-you-need-an-untouchable-day-every-week], so to speak. But I hear you saying to yourself, “A day doesn’t feel like it would be enough.” I’m with you. So too is John Baluch. Rather than regular untouchable days, he schedules think weeks. Okay, in his case, it was a longer think weekend … but the idea is the same: > Taking the time to think is a powerful thing, regardle…
The Doist team continues to put out good content about topics that interest me. Single-tasking is the focus of this one and while they do not make any surprising points, it’s a great summary of why this is an important habit to develop. They do give one tip that I personally don’t agree with: using multiple spaces on the desktop (a macOS feature). > I limit myself to four desktops only: one for communication windows (Gmail, Slack, Todoist, Sunrise Calendar) and the other three for the windows…
My most read piece on Medium is How I Journal [https://chrisbowler.com/journal/how-i-journal]. Since writing that, I’ve received a lot of questions about my journal, Day One, and how I put it all together. But there is one question that comes up more than all the others. How can I start journaling and make the habit stick? A lot of people see the value of keeping a journal, but struggle to fully adopt the habit. It’s very easy to try out an app like Day One, add several entries over a week, th…
In order to benefit from whatever system you use to be productive and sane, regular reviews are required.
I loved this piece from Rands in Repose. If you’re familiar with his writing, he often talks about flow and how to get into the zone in order to achieve it. > The Zone is a place, and Flow is an activity that occurs within this precious mental place. Flow is the ability to consider a project or a problem deeply. In Flow, you can keep a superhuman amount of context in your head and can traverse that context with ease. With Flow, you can produce extraordinary value. In this article, he describes…