I need a strategy that bends, not breaks, while still holding me accountable over time. It should supply pressure smoothly and flexibly. So now I start each habit with a low weekly goal: e.g. meditate once per week, any day. That bar is low enough that I don’t have to schedule it or do anything special. Once that stabilizes, I ratchet up the target frequency.

Sunday nights are all these confrontations, these dug-out trenches, and Sunday nights are prestige television. ​ and we watched the second season once a week every Sunday night, along with the rest of the world, unable to access the relief of that long lightless escape, but showing up every Sunday for a fractional hit of it, to sniff at the memory of the one time it had worked. ​ Game of Thrones has been a placeholder, an empty center. Its point has been to talk about it, to feel about it, to focus a Sunday around it. The noise and ritual around the show has been large enough that it was not necessary for the show to be good, and hardly necessary for it to exist at all.

Moving away from a city won’t change your relationship to work. Neither will meditating, or facials, or any of the other solutions to burnout that are actually about focusing you just enough to make you a better worker, instead of admitting that trying to work more — and focusing all of your self-bettering energy on that goal — is the problem itself. ​ rather, community, and reorienting oneself away from the American god of capitalism, might. ​ It’s going to take me a very long time to unlearn the idea that I’m only as valuable as my ability to work more than everyone around me. But I’m trying.

“Our habits tend to fall into local maxima. We choose well compared to similar alternatives, but ignore options that are totally different yet possibly better. Machine learning algorithms avoid local maxima by occasionally testing random permutations, with techniques like simulated annealing.”

This domain may be for sale!

I was recently asked on Twitter for practical examples of how I use Tally, made by Greg Pierce of Agile Tortoise. My response is way too long, even for the new 280-character limit, though, so I thought I’d write it up here. Note: This is not a paid endorsement.

The problem really happens when you assume that what is helpful yesterday is the same thing that is helpful today. And they both can be different from what’s helpful tomorrow. ​ Are you working out too much, because that’s just what you do? Most athletes have gotten to the point of needing to step back and admit that whoa, I shouldn’t actually run this week because my knee is pretty fucked up right now, and I kind of wish I took it a little easier last time. Maybe then I wouldn’t have gotten to where I am now.