This is The Nooner, a short daily (Monday - Saturday) newsletter slash podcast that has its very own section within Dispatches from Inner Space.
To see the first post, which doubles as an explainer, click here.
Also a quick reminder that you can listen to the podcast version of each post wherever you listen to podcasts.
Good habits are allergic to travel
Most of our routines are rooted to predictable life patterns that we don’t have to think about. When you’re traveling, the patterns change. Things like what time you go to bed, where you keep your stuff, the first people you see when you wake up, etc. Changing something as simple as where you put your phone at night can completely disrupt the typical course of your day.
Recently, I spent almost four straight weeks traveling. More than halfway through, it felt like my whole life had fallen apart. I was behind on everything. My email inboxes were overflowing. Important things were falling through the cracks, which had widened into chasms.
I had a choice between two options. Either just accept that things were going to get worse and more chaotic, while I got further behind in every category of my life until I could finally get home and do damage control; or I could try to come up with a travel-sized solution for my most important habits.
I went with the second option, and it served me very well for the final week I was out of town.
Here’s what I did:
I wrote down a list of my most vital daily habits, including things like journaling, exercise, and writing, their order of importance, and the minimum amount of time I was willing to devote to each of them.
Then I digitized this list as an agenda that would pop up at the top of my to-do list every day, and committed to using any discretionary time I could find to work my way through the list, starting from the top.
Since each task would only take five or ten minutes, it was relatively easy to squeeze the next one in during an odd opening here or there. The problem was that, up to that point, any discretionary time I got was wasted on worrying which of the dozen or so urgent-seeming things I should be focusing on. Now I could just look at this list and move on to the next thing.
I called it The Daily Order of Operations, or The Daily-oooh!
(Naming productivity hacks is not one of my skills.)
After only a couple of days, The Daily-oooh! helped me reclaim the better part of my sanity. And now that I’m home again, I find it’s still a very useful tool, especially on those days when, for whatever reason, normal routines get wrecked.
Consider this another silver bullet in the clip.
Click at least one of these or else…
…the rest of your life will become one long vacation, during which you cannot escape the haunting notion that you’re forgetting something terribly important.
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