Ask HN: How do you operationalize life-advice books you read into your own life? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you operationalize life-advice books you read into your own life?

5 pointsdv35z6 comments

Hey HN gang-

I’ve been reading books lately on improving life (e.g. Atomic Habits, the Artists Way), and what I’m finding is that these books offer so much great “do X action every Y time interval / trigger ” advice -and while reading it, I think “wow yes, I definitely ought to do that”. But… Naturally, time passes and if I’m not deliberate about thinking of those great ideas, I tend to forget about them. I had this idea of using a knowledge base tool (eg Notion, but preferably an open source tool like Hugo) to take notes on the book, and to break out all the “do this” into useful checklists for the day. I’ve found that a good (printed!) checklist can boot up a new habit quickly, and in about 2 months, it feels naturally integrated into your life. With some of these business/life advice books - I want to open Linear.app and start making a backlog of stuff to do, hire a product manager from Upwork and have them work with me on actually DOING all these high value activities. Haven’t done that yet, but it feels like it could be effective. Team work makes the dream work, accountability partner, and all that. Back to the books.

I would love to approach any new book with Intention & a System (I recall there was a post on HN on “How to read X books at once”, where the author had a great system on how to systematically “extract” knowledge from many books at once, perhaps someone can find it). Usually, when I read a book, I’m take notes, in the margin, etc. But where does that really Go? I’d much prefer to add all the “to-dos” to a document, group by recommended interval, and get them on a calendar, along with an easy checklist. Ideally, I’d then review my day - nicely formatted into a presidential-briefing-ish “one pager” - it would list off all the important “to-dos” which apply to the day. I can feel confident that the good advice I’m reading is actively being main-lined into my life, should I choose to perform those actions. Analogous to doing a weekly retrospective, making changes, and then adding those “action items” to the team backlog for continuous improvement.

I’d love to hear from others who have been down this route, built something like this for their own life.

Thank you.

I like to focus on my "hell yeahs". These are my one to two focuses I currently have in my life. So when I read a new book or receive new advice, I try to think about how it contributes to my current hell yeahs. In the past, if I tried to incorporate ~all~ of the advice I'm consuming at one time, it just mostly slips through the cracks. With this method, I've found that it sticks a bit more.

Functionally - I put in my calendar actual time for certain tasks. This has helped me stay accountable, as even if I forget, I'll see the calendar notification.

For apps, I've used todist.com. It's really easy to set up, create different tags for categories, and easy to check on a daily basis. If you're reading a book, instead of writing in the margin for instance, you could set a to-do for it, and then whenever you check your daily "todoist", you'll see them. The functionality of the app/website might be a bit too simple for what you're looking for, but I'd suggest checking it out.

So while I'm reading a new book teaching me something I can apply, I try and think about what my current goals are, regardless of if it's a professional goal or personal one.

Good luck with your journey!

Todoist - such a great idea, thanks alexdh. Combining it with the comment below by rawgabbit[1] about time blocking, what tools exist which can automatically time block tasks, and make a holistic schedule. For example, if the advice says “visualize your dream for 10 minutes”, do yoga every morning, “write 1 page every day”, “drink X glasses of water a day”, and so on - is there a tool which can take all of these tasks, and automatically build out a 2 week schedule? Right now, I’m imagining manually time blocking, shifting & stretching events in Google Calendar, manually linking Todo’ist to the calendar invite, and linking the checklist from the calendar invite. A bit unwieldy…

I would love to have a system which sets out to have a “perfect” month - all the various habits and to-dos are dialed in & time blocked, logically ordered (eg certain errands are logically grouped together, perhaps based on tool and location), but is flexible to adapt to real life stuff.

“Yes you wanted to do yoga today, but turns out the dog’s gotta go to the vet, etc. But don’t worry, the “system” will automatically shuffle your schedule to get you back on track…”

Have you come across something like that?

* [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32513380

Personally: I bullet journal. It doesn't have to be full fledged diary entry, warts and all, just a few concise points that I can execute on later. It doesn't matter to me that I don't execute on each bullet, as long as some of the bullets are checked, I have made progress.

The harder tasks typically will eventually bubble to the surface, so I keep that in mind. It's easy to batch together all the easy stuff/low hanging fruit, and execute within a day (or week!) or so, but the harder stuff will leave you with feelings of regret, so I make a pact to myself that they will be executed on.

Some hard tasks can get rejected for simply being 'too hard'. I mean we only have certain amount of hours in a day, and all the madness/chores of life get in the way, but at least we tried right?

Not to refer you to another book, but The Power of Habit [1] might be helpful here. While you should read the book, the basic summary of operationalizing any habit is Cue + Routine + Reward.

In your case, there is the Cue (You read a book on the topic) and the Reward (building a new product), but it appears you are missing a way to integrate it into your Routine.

Just understanding that framework was helpful for me, because I started to understand how to operationalize what I was learning. It also made it clear to me that, if I don't integrate it into my routines, I will never use that knowledge.

I either need to change my habits so the integration of the knowledge makes contextual sense or be at peace with not using that knowledge. You can't have both essentially.

Using your examples, instead of an extensive knowledgebase or series of 1-pagers, try to match what you are learning to the Cues that naturally come up. If you want to get meta, try doing a retrospective each week on what you learned from your reading and where you spent your time, and determine where you can apply what you have learned to the cues you currently have.

Some examples: Most people have a goal to sleep more and more consistently. For me, I trigger the lights in my room to automatically dim at a certain time. That is my (Cue) to start my wind down activities (Routine) to get in bed at a reasonable time (Reward).

Most people have a goal to exercise more and more consistently. For me, I have a calendar event (Cue) that reminds me to work out on specific days with specific activities (Routine) to exercise more (Reward).

My point being while knowledge is great for its own sake (I love it too), if you are trying to operationalize it, you need to attach it directly at the moment you are going to use it (Cue). Not in some Word doc that has a large amount of friction attached to your utilization of that resource.

Not my quote but I think it applies "If you show me someone's calendar, I'll show you their priorities". That might be a great place to start - are there activities you are already doing where you can apply your knowledge?

[1] https://charlesduhigg.com/the-power-of-habit/

There libraries of books written by management gurus on this. The best advice in my opinion is to block your time. The only thing you can control is your time. For me that means, if it is important, I would schedule 30 minute blocks of time on my daily calendar to remind myself to do X, Y, or Z.

Streaks for iOS

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