What I learned in 1 week

I started my journey Monday, March 21, 2022. It is now Sunday, so it has been a week.

I learned that goals, good habits, food, and exercise are fundamental. I learned that it is tough to change, but small changes quickly give a lot.

Watch this video for a small resumé of this post, or keep reading if you want to know it all.

Setting goals and building habits - How to start

I started deep-diving into Youtube to find out where to begin self-development. There is a lot out there! But I found out about two books which sounded promising to start with. The books are "Atomic Habits" by James Clear and "How will you measure your life?" by James Allworth & Karen Dillon. I looked more into Atomic Habits and found a fantastic review by Ali Abdaal, a YouTuber I have followed for the last few months. Check him out! He is great.

Here is how I have started to implement some of the theories in the books, even before I have finished reading them.

Atomic Habits

The book is all about change. Its foundation is in the math that if you improve yourself 1% each day, by the end of just one year, you will be more than 37 times better than when you started.

I thought, "well, that sounds too good to be true, right?". Anyway, I wanted to see what it was all about.

Sure enough. As easy as it sounds to "just" improve a single 1% every day, it is just as easy to worsen yourself every day. Being 1 % worse every day will take you to almost 0% in just a single year.

It all boils down to good and bad habits. What are good habits?

Finding Goals - Take a walk

Good habits are what drive you toward your goals.

I took a good long walk and thought about what is my goals?

Goal number 1: Do more of what makes you happy.

Do I want to become rich? Well, sure! But only if it could give me the freedom to help people and enjoy life. So yes, I like the money to be more accessible, but not at the cost of happiness and freedom. I couldn't use money as a goal. But happiness and freedom were essential to me, I thought.

Goal number 2: Get more energy for yourself to have enough for others.

I want to be a better person. That sounds nice. But what is a better person? For me, a good person cares about others, takes his time to help, and is a person who tries to understand and listen. That doesn't sound too hard, right? So why don't I just do that?

When I thought about this, I found out that I was not in a place myself where I had the excess energy to do this. But this is something that I want to do.

Goal number 3: Find a flexible job that gives enough to go around.

At this point, I thought that two personal goals were enough for a start, and I didn't want to overload myself here. But money doesn't grow on trees, so I have also to make a financial goal. Here I think that whatever job I should have, it should take up as little time as possible so that I can get by. Fancy cars, big houses, and expensive clothes are not on my goal list. I want to live at a minimum budget to work less and do more of what makes me happy.

Good and Bad Habits

Now that I have my goals, it is easier to look at my habits. The definition of "habit" is: "a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up." I simplify it to everything I do regularly. Hourly, daily, weekly, or in specific situations.

Using my goals as the base for my thoughts, I looked through my last couple of days. Which habits aligned with my goals? Which did not, and were there any new habits I wanted to do because it would lead me toward my goals.

From my point of view, my most important goal to start with was to get more energy for myself. I found myself often drained of energy and didn't want to get the ass off my couch. I thought back in time to a point in my life when I had more energy. What did I do right at that time that I didn't do now? I found a few things but decided that these three were the easiest to implement at first.

Clean house

It takes a lot of energy out of me when everything at home is just a mess. When I lived in Denmark and had a good wage, I hired someone to come and clean once a week. But now I live in Spain, have a meager income, and can't afford that expense. Cleaning and tidying is something that I don't look forward to, so I usually end up procrastinating as much as possible. But everything just ends up a mess, and it's even harder getting started. It's a downward spiral. So I had to end this circle and turn it into something better. I saw this as an opportunity to take two goals into one habit. One of the things I love is learning new things. With the start of my new life, I found so much content out there I want to read and listen to. So how did I motivate myself to get a more clean and tidy house?

• Make it bearable. I realized that an excellent way to get more knowledge is to listen to audiobooks and podcasts on exciting subjects. So I thought that cleaning could be a bit more fun if I promised myself I would do something I like at the same time. Learning new stuff is something that I enjoy a lot.
• Set a timeframe. I know I cant do everything in just one day. It would wear me out, and even with a podcast in my ear, I would feel bored and start to procrastinate. So I decided to block off 45 minutes daily to do household stuff. Taking dishes, vacuum cleaning, doing the laundry, and all that stuff. Doing this meant that I actually had a specific time for it doing the day, and I also had at least 45 minutes to myself where I could just listen to books or interesting people. It didn't matter to me if I didn't finish everything. I just wanted to start the habit of doing at least something every day. 45 minutes was what I thought was necessary, but it could have been just 15 or 30 minutes. A little is better than nothing.

Exercise

One thing that got on my mind when thinking about what makes me happy and gives me energy is exercise. I have always been an active person, and suddenly now I wasn't anymore. But why? Well, I thought it was hard to make time. Put on clothes, drive 10 minutes to the gym, spend 15-20 minutes finding a parking space, do some workout, get home again, take a bath, and put on my everyday clothes. It would easily take almost 3 hours from start to finish. So let me tell you how I changed up a few things to make it easier.

• Limit the time. Three hours was too much for me. But exercise is something that I want to prioritize. I couldn't do it in less than 2 hours simply because of transport. So I set a two-hour limit. No matter how much time I used to find a parking space and other stuff, I decided that I would only use a maximum of 2 hours. Setting a time limit enabled me to get out of the door and give it a shot. Some days I had better workouts than others, but the most important thing is that I did something.
• Lower the expectations. I used to think that I went to the gym to build muscles and lose weight, and I often don't do things half-heartedly. So I would do this long 2-hour program, and also I had to eat super healthy to get the most out of it and all that. But after setting my goals, I could see that "super buff" wasn't really on my list. All I wanted from the gym was just to get some exercise done so I could have more energy for the rest of the day. So I lowered my expectations of how much I should work out. Instead of "I have to finish this program," I made a new mindset to "follow the program for 45-60 minutes". Suddenly it didn't matter if I finished all the exercises. As long as I got to the gym and did just something, it would be a success because it would be enough to start giving me more energy.

Learning new things

Some best stages of my life have been when learning something new and challenging myself in the process. It has been a while since I stopped in school, so the "learning new stuff" part of life is not on autopilot anymore. I have to do something consciously about it. It is hard to find time to explore and learn new stuff on a busy weekday. But searching youtube, I came across the concept of "time-blocking." It means that you have to block out time during your day for specific tasks. I tried doing this a few weeks ago, but it was hard to organize every day like that, so it quickly fizzled out. However, I learned that I had a lot more time in my day if I saw it as 30-minute blocks instead of just one whole day. So this idea of time-blocking was fascinating but just required too much management. But this is where I came across Motion Calendar, which I will cover in the next chapter. All in All, I found a few things that I wanted to prioritize during my week.

• Learn Spanish: I moved to Spain in November 2021, and I want to learn the language. But since I moved here, I haven't found the time to do it. Time is about priority, so now I want to prioritize this.
• Read and listen to books and podcasts. I wanted to find free time to enlighten myself on this topic of self-development. But what I found instead was that some of my other tasks would align super well with an audiobook or podcast. Doing the dishes and working out are excellent times to plug in those headphones and just listen. Reading books is a little harder to make time for, but doing this for 30-60 minutes before sleep relaxes my mind and lets me get an excellent night of sleep as a bonus! Also, toilet reading is something I am a big fan of. So many hours every year are used on the toilet just sitting there, and you could at least make it a little enjoyable.

Making a calendar to free up time

Motion is a calendar app that automatically schedules your day. Just put in different tasks and projects, choose a timeframe and let Motion do the rest.

As you can see, I can set up different projects and add various tasks. Then I just set a timeframe and deadline. Deadlines can be hard or soft deadlines, as you can see here:

As you can see, I try to do this blog every Thursday. I had to move to a new house this week, so I didn't get time before Sunday. So I have set this task to an 8-hour duration but allowed Motion to slit it into chunks of at least 60 minutes. 60 minutes is the least I want to work at a time on this project, as it requires some start-up time to get into the right mind-space to write good content. I have set it to "try to finish" so that if I have other more important tasks, it will not overwrite.

By adding different tasks and setting my day time from 8 am to 9 pm (I don't split my time in work/free hours), I got an excellent schedule where I had time for everything. Let me show you what it looks like:

As you can see, it can match everything quite nicely. Some things like workouts and eating lunch are more static than most of my other tasks, as I like to do these at more specific times. As you can see in the example of "write on my blog," it is set to last 8 hours during the day, but Motion still makes space for all of my other habits that I want to improve. It even has some spare room during the day for me just to relax or get a headstart on the next task.

If I miss some tasks or others take too long, I have made sure to have lots of free space during the week. So when I miss tasks, I just press a "reschedule"-button that shows up, and it automatically finds a new fit for my tasks.

If you are interested in trying out Motion for yourself, you can use this link to get a 2-week free trial. After that, it will cost 156/year, but compared to how much time I get to do things I genuinely enjoy, I would say that it is well worth it!

Free 2-week Motion trial

Ok, so enough talk about Motion. I just wanted to show you guys because I am very impressed by how easy it was to set up and use.

Back to where we came from. Learning new stuff requires time, and a calendar schedule like this lets me keep track of everything I want to do without forgetting anything. Suddenly I found time to learn Spanish, work out and do household while still having spare time to read a book or just relax.

Three tips for beginners

This has been a long post already, so let me just end it with three tips so you can get started yourself:

1. Setting goals gives you a direction to move towards
2. Making good habits. Making just one new good habit that pushes you toward your goal is all it takes to get started.
3. Be consistent. Change doesn't happen overnight, and it is hard but worth it. I am really excited to see how far I will come in a month, a year, or even ten years!