Okay, this is going to be woefully underdeveloped, but I had to get something up before the end of the week because I know some people have been waiting for me to post something on this! Thanks to those of you who keep asking me about this, really motivating to get something up!
Hopefully this can act as a simple overview that I can then use as a jumping off point to dive deeper into specific sections/concepts. Comment or message me with any questions/comments/things you want me to elaborate on in future posts!
This blog is about the two main practices that I use every day:
THE RITUAL
Turning discipline into discipleship, I set aside a chunk of time everyday to be in service to my higher self. Perfectionism and productivity are eschewed in favor of a more zen-inspired awareness of the present and simply doing things for the sake of doing them. This takes the form of a flexible-duration series of quick habits that allow me to do things that are good for me every day.
BuJo (BULLET JOURNAL)
My daily planner that serves as anchor for the Ritual and external hard-drive for my brain. Absolutely essential to my life now; it tracks my schedule, to-do lists, brainstorming, research, budget, memories, and miscellaneous lists.
I’m gonna post some pics of the BuJo through the ages (selected pretty much at random, I’m sure I could find better examples to post later), along with a habit tracker from when I first started using the BuJo. I don’t use habit trackers anymore, but I thought it looked pretty. The daily pages are pretty sloppy, which I think hammers home the idea that perfectionism and spending a lot of time on the look isn’t the point.
Then I’ll just have a brief list of general concepts and sections for each. Each of these points will hopefully be it’s own post when I get around to them.
Jan 24 2019
Feb 3 2018
Oct 4 2017
Habit Tracker for Month of Sep 2017 (click to see whole picture, Idk why it’s zoomed in)
THE RITUAL
Talking about this practice in a concrete way is sort of tough, because it’s really amorphous and changes to suit my needs/availability at that time in my life. So I’ll go over some general through-lines, some past concepts, and the current iteration.
What my Ritual looks like now:
Indeterminate amount of time, flexible depending on how much I have to do that day. Could be 5-10 minutes on a busy day, or three hours on a relaxing weekend.
Set sections, but some of what I consider to be the Ritual takes place outside of the scope of the Ritual time-block (i.e. drinking water, exercising, not snoozing my alarm). The set sections now are: Meditate, Bullet Journal, Read, Research, Brainstorm, Research, Vitamins, Communicate, Clean, and ToDos. I can do most of these things in about 15-30 minutes. It’s a much more practical Ritual now that I’m back in school, though I miss the long Rituals I did when I first started that included stuff like: Work on a Creative Project, Practice a Skill, Learn a New Language, “Fill the Creative Well”, Research topics your Passionate About, and stuff that is a little harder for me to do every day, but that I’m constantly considering including again.
I used to be very rigid with completing each section in some capacity, but now (as you can tell by my half-done ritual ToDos) I sort of do whatever I feel like. Which is fine, but I definitely think I got more out of the rigid structure. It’s just tricky trying to do that with my busier schedule now that I’m in school, but I think writing this is making me want to try it again…. We’ll see >:]
Speaking of school, I just want to note that the single biggest factor to me getting in grad school was the Ritual. When I graduated undergrad, I had a very aimless next couple of years that were very important and fulfilling, but not moving me quickly enough towards my dream life. After only a year of doing my Ritual, my life had become totally focused, fleshed out, directed, and fulfilled, all either directly or indirectly as a result of my Ritual. When I started, I had no idea what I wanted to do next with my life, but just by spending a little bit of time everyday to focus on the things I cared about, my mind and my efforts naturally gravitated more towards those things. The concrete chain of cause and effect went like this:
(FEB 2017) I start the daily section of researching things I care about (art, tech, games, community, etc.).
(APR 2017) I find a summer school teaching “Machine Learning for Artists”
(JULY 2017) At that program I meet my professor, Gene Kogan, who tells me about NYU’s ITP program and convinces me to get a twitter to stay up to date on events in our field.
(SEP 2017) Two months later on twitter, I see an ad for “Creative Coding Fest LA” and go. Lauren McCarthy is the keynote speaker and mentions ITP in her speech. I spend all day ignoring the workshops in favor of going through every class in ITP’s course catalog. I decide that day to apply.
(OCT-DEC 2017) Because of the Ritual structure already in place, I spend the next couple of months fleshing out my portfolio, working on projects or directly on the application as a part of the Ritual.
(MARCH 2018) I get in — about 14 months after I first started the Ritual. I seriously don’t know if I would have ever even found this program on my own, it was only by spending a little time every day inching closer and closer to my passions that it seemingly appeared out of nowhere.
When I look back on the single most important thing that led to me being able to do a daily ritual, it’s all about gateway habits. For me, my gateway habit is….
~ * ~ * ~ * ~ FLOSSING * ~ * ~ * ~
(not the pre-teen kind, the calcium kind)
I call flossing my gateway habit because it’s the habit that led me to believe I could do something everyday. I hate flossing; I don’t particularly believe it’s this hugely essential thing for my health (mainly because how many people do you know that really floss? Do you floss every day?) But the point was it was something I had to push myself to have the discipline to do every day, no matter what. It served as a microcosm for what doing the daily ritual was like, something I had to remind myself to do at a certain time, something I had to plan ahead for if my day was going to be structured differently than normal, and something that would be a pain in the ass to do if I was super tired. The important aspect of flossing was that it was super low effort and not time-intensive. I could check off the box in 30 seconds if I had to.
The other important thing for me with these habits, and something that may not be true for you, is that I LOVE streaks. I’m super motivated by the idea of keeping a consecutive daily streak — often times the only reason I do a thing is so I can keep that arbitrary number in my head growing. I’m super competitive, so this helps fight against those days where I might think, “oh what's the point of doing it today if I only have time for 10 minutes”, because then it can just snowball from there. So when I started flossing, it was with a challenge to do it every day for thirty days. Then I challenged myself to do it for 100 days. Only after that 100 streak did I think for the first time, hey I could do something else every day. Building that muscle was essential. (Also I know the obvious contradiction to the focus I have on keeping things present-focused, but you know, double-think…)
On the flip side, it’s important (and I struggle with this) to not be discouraged when you break a streak, go a day without doing the thing. Sometimes for me, the first thought is, well that’s it, it’s over. And I have to push back against that to remind me that it’s just a regular day. A day that I start at 1 or a day that I’m at 101 is still just a day and it’s up to me to do the thing that day. Shit happens, so every day is an opportunity to start fresh.
If I can stress one thing to someone interested in starting something daily like this, it’s to not bite off more than you can chew. And by that I don’t mean what you have time for (because technically we all have enough time for this kind of thing, even if it’s only 15 minutes, even ER nurses or parents with 7 kids could do it, right?), because it’s not about what you COULD do, in theory, or what you technically have time for, but what you realistically WILL do, which is usually not much. Discipline is a muscle. You can’t all of a sudden dedicate a huge chunk of your time to a habit unless you have super-human willpower, which even then, was probably developed by exerting will over smaller habits. So you need tinier habits to help develop your discipline without getting burnt out and quitting. I can talk about this forever, and there are some interesting studies on how willpower is literally like a muscle, so I’ll hopefully expand on this in a future post.
Looking back on why/how I started, I think the main motivator was disgust. I had tried daily or weekly regimens before and never lasted (because I was focusing too much on quality or specifics instead of valuing the practice as a goal in itself). I was just so frustrated at myself for never being able to stick to the habits that I wanted to develop, so I decided I needed to develop a habit that would just be about developing a habit. So with this, even though I was writing or meditating or whatever every day, it didn't matter if I only wrote one sentence or closed my eyes for thirty seconds, so long as I was taking the time everyday to take time for myself every day, if that makes any sense. Obviously I did get a lot out of it, and more often than not I would spend way more than the bare minimum time on each activity, but I never let myself get caught up in that, the focus was always just to do it. I found that carving out that time everyday got easier, and then I was just there holding space for myself to allow whatever else to come.
When I started it was much more rigid, with an hour each day divided between meditation, exercise, reading, writing, researching my passions, and reaching out to loved ones. I had a timer that rang a bell to tell me to switch sections. It's fluctuated wildly over the past two and a half years -- at one point when I wasn't working that much I was doing a three-hour a day ritual with a ton of stuff, and that was clearly super good but not sustainable haha. Now it's much more flexible, and I don't always do everything I wish I could, but most days I at least read, organize my daily planner, clean my email inbox, do research on one thing, and reach out to a loved one. If I have a super super busy day and I don't have any free time, I'll at least spend ten minutes before bed organizing my planner, and then maybe on a weekend day I'll spend a little more time and do an extra long ritual.
One thing that I think a lot of people interested in this kind of stuff feel is this love/hate relationship with “Shoulds”. Like, “I should read every day” or "I should exercise more” or “I should write a letter to my grandma every week” but that gets really overwhelming, because what’s the message behind that? The good version of me does these things, so if I don’t do that thing I should do, then I’m a bad person (whatever that means). Then, when you inevitably don’t do the thing because you don’t have the structure or trained discipline, you’re subconsciously feeling that you’re a bad person. Which, as anyone who gets depressed knows, is the exact opposite fuel for getting things done, and then it’s just a shitty feedback loop. So I think one thing that's helped me when I get into cycles like that is Zen philosophy; reading some of Alan Watts' books really changed my attitude towards those "shoulds". One aspect of zen that helped was the idea that everything is whole in every moment, like you don't derive worth from some imaginary future aspect of yourself, you're worth comes from being you in every moment. So if you're doing work, that's good. If you're sitting doing nothing, that's good. If you're frustrated, crying in your car, that's good -- because that’s what you, in this authentic moment, are doing. I always think about this quote from a Zen master responding to the question, what is Zen? "When hungry, eat. When tired, sleep." I just think it presents a really simple answer to the "shoulds": you gotta take care of what ever you need to take care of. So it's not a bad thing to be playing games on your phone if you want to de-stress, because you can use that as a tool instead of a crutch. It's about shifting perspective from, "I'm overwhelmed by my responsibilities so I'm going to hide in this phone" to "I'm overwhelmed by my responsibilities so I'm going to take some time for self-care and play some games for a bit."
It’s important to come at these tools for self-betterment with the understanding that you’re already enough. Anything better is just icing on the cake.
Really really prioritize the process and not the product. Because it's really easy to make a process perfect, but impossible to make a product perfect. What I mean is -- if your definition of a "perfect habit" is one that makes you perfect, you're setting yourself up for failure from the start. But if instead, you focus on making the number one priority with your habit to just do the thing, then that's a lot more manageable. For example, if I have the goal of writing a book, and I try to set up a daily habit where I write a page of that book every day until I'm done, I'm never going to write the book. I'll run out of ideas, or I'll have a rough day and not have time, or I'll get wrapped up in my own insecurities, or whatever, but I won't write a book. However, if in the back of my mind my goal is to write a book, but I understand the core of that idea is "I just need to write", then I can set up a habit where all I do is write one sentence every day, something for my book, or just a random thought, or just what I'm going to eat for lunch, or whatever, so long as I write a little bit every day. Because that's a lot easier of a goal.
BuJo
So first and foremost, this thing changes so often for me. So the current layout I use is what I’ve liked the best from past iterations, and for what works best for my current lifestyle needs. The great thing about a blank planner (and the reason I’m such a die hard for this system) is that it’s infinitely flexible. You don’t have pages that are pre-structured like in a bought planner, each day you can shape to be exactly what you need. Need a special page this month to write down all your Xmas gift plans and ToDos? Put it anywhere! Need a full page calendar for your hectic month, but maybe a three month spread for the upcoming season? Bam! Totally fuck up one day and need to re-do it? No sweat! Here are some changes I’ve made since I started in September 2017.
A5 notebook to A4 (this was an accident and now I can’t go back, I was so crammed before!) — the specific model I use is a bulleted “Slim” A5 Leuchtturm1917.
Long-Term/Month/Week/Day ToDos to Week ToDos (with four specific sections: General, Project, Relationship, Homework), Daily ToDos, and a Month page with ToDos I do every month (cleaning schedule, change my contacts, exercise schedule, communication logs)
The layouts of daily pages have changed pretty drastically, as you can see above, but the general concept is the same.
Lots of little things
Like mentioned earlier, there is an active push against perfectionism. In fact, the very first page in my first BuJo was just me scribbling all over it (because then, it was ruined from the start and I didn’t have to stress about ruining it any further). I don’t spend a lot of time drawing straight lines, or using stencils, or anything overly decorative, because if it took me 30 minutes to make this every day, I wouldn’t do it.
Even though there is still a fair amount of time you have to spend to do this, the idea is that it helps save you time in the long run. At least for me, spending 10 minutes on this every day saves me SO MUCH TIME that I used to spend just trying to remember everything I had to do! And having one central location for anything I could possibly need to remember (from tasks to movies I want to watch to how much money I have this month) means if I have any question, I only have to look in one place.
Obvs the clear restriction here is…. it’s not digital!!!! I’m sure a lot of you are surprised that for how much I love tech, my external hard drive is purely analog. I don’t even use google calendar. I don’t mind hauling this thing with me to school or on trips, but for short excursions out, I still have my pocket notebook that I can jot notes in or stage things for later input into the BuJo.
There’s also something special about using your hands to do all this. The intentional and relative permanence of the act of writing in a physical book does something in my brain that doesn’t happen when I use an app.
The only decorative aspects I use are colors and headers.
Colors — I LOVE Staedtler porous point pens (.3mm) for my BuJo. I keep a pack of 10 with me that I use to color the different sections of my daily layout. Each month, the colors change, with two colors serving as that month’s primary pair, which I’ll use in all the headers of that month’s pages. The rest get shuffled around to match the vibe I’m feeling that month. It’s really fun to have these different palettes to represent different months, so when I flip through it’s like, “Oh I remember dark green/pink (August)”, or “I’m so excited next month is light green/light blue (January)”. For all main writing though, I just stick to my treasured Uniball Vision Elites in black or blue/black (.5mm I think?)
Headers — if you google “BuJo headers”, there are a lot of fun ways to title certain pages. I found one that was simple enough to be quick, but look cool enough to be used for important sections — the folded banner (not shown).
Current Layout
(See picture below for referenced sections)
Date
So this whole Fibonacci block contains a lot of information that I update at one time when I make the next day’s block. That’s why the “consecutive” numbers are kind of confusing when I reference them — since I typically do this first thing in the morning, almost everything technically references yesterday so I don’t have to go back throughout the day just to update specifics.
I choose a different date layout to represent each year and try to keep that theme consistent throughout the year even if the drawing changes slightly. (i.e. 2017 was an Apollonian gasket, 2018 was a diamond type thing with shading, and for 2019 I wanted to be able to condense some space and include more information, so I figured a Fibonacci box would work well.
Consecutive Rituals (days since I’ve missed a day)
Total Number of Rituals (total days with at lease one ritual)
Consecutive Days Flossed (technically referencing last night)
Consecutive Days Exercised/Stretched (technically referencing yesterday)
Consecutive Days Gone Without Snoozing My Alarm (referencing this morning)
a lil skull — because there’s bound to be one last day that breaks all these “consecutive days”
Good Vibes Bar
Hydrogen Atom — something I’m grateful for today
T for “Tonglen” — someone I’m empathizing with and sending compassion to today (requires a much longer explanation that I’ll do later, but look it up if you’re interested, it’s a type of meditation Pema Chodron recommends)
Heart — someone I’m actively planning to reach out to today (an attempt at making sure I keep in contact with people I care about, since I’m so bad at keeping track of that naturally)
Heartbeat — the thing I did for my body today
$$$ — Daily Budget (cash) // Monthly Budget (credit/savings)
Battery +/- — My high and low for the day (since this typically comes up right before bed, sometimes I fill this out the next day)
Lightbulb — brainstorming space for anything (a project I’m developing, a plan for a task I have to tackle that day, gift ideas for a friend’s upcoming bday, etc.)
R for “Research” — a space to write what I found out when I researched something on my ToDo list or my “Research” Page (seen on the blue tab behind the green “January” tab). Could be something as complex as looking up new software I’m interested in learning about or as simple as “What’s the definition of eschew?”
My Ritual To-Do — since this is the same every day (though changes several times throughout the year), a dedicated section to see how much of my ritual I did that day. See the above Ritual section for some examples of previous Rituals, but the current list is:
Meditate (can be as quick as taking a few breaths)
BuJo (set up tomorrow’s page)
Read (can be anything — a book, an article, a poem, etc.)
Research
Brainstorm
Vitamins (I try and take a multivitamin, b-complex, and MSM/Glucosamine supplement daily)
Communicate (reaching out to whoever was in the “heart” section above)
Clean (This can reference cleaning something in my physical space, but recently it’s specifically aimed at getting my email inbox to zero)
ToDo (going back through previous day/week ToDo’s and making sure there are no empty boxes (will explain below), and updating today’s ToDo accordingly)
A flexible space w/ corner brackets — the “misc.” section; anything random goes here. I typically use it for notes/memories on things that happened that day, interesting insights/realizations, dreams, people I met that day and something to anchor them in my mind, etc.
The Day’s ToDo List
Triangles — events that day (ignore the right triangle to the left of the equilateral, that one’s just a doodle)
Left Column Boxes — priority ToDos (things I really want/need to have done by the end of the day) (these are tough to narrow down, ideally I would only put the most essential tasks here and no day would have empty left boxes, but haven’t gotten there yet)
Right Column Boxes — secondary ToDos (things that I could do today just to get them out of the way, but not a big deal if I push them to a later day) (other ToDos go to weekly ToDos as a staging area for ToDos that would later go on a Daily)
The Arrows and Box Symbols — an arrow to the left of a box means I did not complete that task today, and it requires movement to another list. [ X ] boxes are completed tasks, [ ] empty boxes need to be moved, and [ | ] boxes with a line through are tasks that got moved somewhere else (typically the next day’s list). So During the “ToDo” section of my ritual, I go through the last few daily lists to make sure there are no boxes without either an X or line. Rarely, a box will get a diagonal mark [\], which I don’t like using but typically means I did not do the task, but I completed it’s intention in some other way (I.e. for “Get FedEx”, I tried to pick up the package, but it had been stolen, so I don’t need a new ToDo for that but I technically didn’t do the thing as written. Or for “Call Tona”, I called him but he was busy, so I “called him” but I didn’t do the underlying intention of “talking to him”… Hopefully you don’t care as much about the symbols as me haha, this is ridic.)