The power of daily rituals (2021) | Hacker News Reader

The power of daily rituals (2021)

bbc.com

53 pointsandsoitis34 comments

Every morning for the past 14 months or so I've sat down at my desk with a cup of coffee and spent ~20 minutes writing out a page of thoughts in my Hobonichi Techo journal with my trusty Pilot Metropolitan fountain pen. I try to write plainly and honestly about whatever pops into my head, and before I know it, I'm done.

It hasn't been super life changing, but I do enjoy doing it. Sometimes during the course of the day I'll think back about an aspiration I had that morning, and actually do something I might not have done otherwise.

About a year into this practice my hand started hurting a bit, so I've slowly trained myself to write using the muscles in my arm and shoulder rather than moving the muscles in my hand. My handwriting quality took a nose-dive in the short term, but my hand stopped hurting and I have moments now where my cursive looks nearly as good as it used to.

I do this too but on a laptop. It is more beneficial to use paper but I don’t want readers to think it isn’t incredibly important even without the gear. Like how good running shoes are not important to start running.

I was honestly just thinking the same thing. Like...damn, why is OP advertising such expensive gear to people who might want to just try something?

You can do exactly the same thing with a mead spiral bound and a ticonderoga pencil...

Or text notes on an existing device

Or audio notes on an existing device

Or for the price OP is advertising, get a whole drawing tablet to plug in

Or for the price OP is advertising, get a used android tablet

There are both cheaper options and, to me, better options that are also cheaper as they offer search, cross linking, algorithmic analysis (what have I been writing about lately, what have I stopped writing about), and easy duplication so that I don't lose my notes.

Personally, I use an obisidan vault in a cloud folder...easy duplication on any device, easy review, easy search, easy cross reference...

To do what I do on with my notes with a pen and paper, I'd be spending half of my time indexing and notating rather than producing results driven by the notes...which, I guess is valid if the entire goal is spending time with your notes, but I just personally feel like I've got to get something out of the process other than staring at shit I used to think about.

For instance, on paper, I'd have to underline or otherwise mark key words and maintain a live index in order to find: what's been worrying me lately, what was that dream that one night, what's my second most common topic of thought...and a million other things. Whereas in reviewing my obsidian vault all of those things are at most 30 seconds away, and I didn't have to do any work on top of writing the notes to get that functionality.

I know there is a lot of value in these indexes but I’ve never actually reviewed anything except sometimes the previous day. For me, this is more about taking a moment to check up on myself and the writing is a means to an end rather than a meaningful output.

Different people engage in different ways. I think OP is telling us what got them over that initial habit adoption hurdle. Sometimes spending money on something makes you use it.

My example case is I paid for a year of gym membership up front so I could feel the total I'd spent more tangibly. That got me to go regularly, even if I was just showing up to recovery stretching at first. Now I enjoy going and I look forward to it, and I didn't need a PT to motivate me this time.

I started doing this too after reading The Artists Way by Julia Cameron. She prescribes these “morning pages” as one of principal tools for overcoming internal creativity blocks. I also really enjoy drinking my coffee and writing these pages with my pilot fountain pens.

I used to play Counterstrike competitively, and it's become commonly known that pre-match routines can help a lot with consistency. Often something as simple as warming up for 30 minutes in an offline server with bots.

Some of the benefits are physical, you're literally warming up the muscles in your hand and arm, but it also has psychological benefits. If for instance you're nervous about the upcoming match, going through the warmup puts your mind in a context of "alright, we've done this a thousand times before, nothing new, just got to go through the motions". It also removes noise from your mind as your attention is going into the warmup instead of overthinking the task ahead.

I think there's a predictive phenomenon in the brain which primes us for activities when the precursors are present. For instance, working at home versus at the office - my experience has been that the simple act of physically going to the office puts me in a better emotional state to get to work than staying at home, almost like during that process it's killed the tasks associated with home and booted up the ones associated with work.

Show and tell daily helpful rituals? Here's mine:

I shower before bed and put out my clothes for the next day before bed. When I wake up, I roll out of bed into a predetermined outfit and not have to waste precious pre-coffee clock cycles picking one out.

The pre-day outfit is a great idea. Not that I spend all that much effort on how I dress, but that is needless extra effort when I am just trying to make it to work on time.

I put a coffee machine right next to my bed to reduce those pre-coffee clock cycles as much as possible. I’ve found it more helpful than expected to have something close that’s more tempting than the phone.

Everyone showers before bed so that's not exactly novel. Prepping your clothes for the next day is a good one.

Do you not shower in the morning as well?

> Everyone showers before bed so that's not exactly novel.

I hate to break it to you, but this isn’t accurate.

don't tell them some people:

only shower in the morning

shower infrequently

only shower "when dirty"

don't shower

don't have showers

Might blow their whole worldview.

this is a pretty good poem

Evening Me always does as much of the morning things as possible, because Morning Me can't be trusted =)

Bag is packed, clothes are picked and any morning beverages are pre-prepared as much as possible.

My work ritual every morning:

1. Power on laptop (it is powered off every day at 5 PM).

2. Log into VPN.

3. Log into Okta.

4. Log into AWS accounts, one per container (about 7 or 8).

5. Log into Docker Desktop.

6. Log into AWS CLI to get daily credentials.

The whole thing takes about 3-4 minutes. A former colleague referred to this as my "mise en place", or my daily arranging of my working environment. Like the article suggests, I find this offers me a "centering" before I open my email, calendar and missed chat messages and get started for the day.

I'm glad it helps you center.

But does anyone else think it's crazy how many logons you need to do on a repetitive basis?

I know you mean crazy bad, but only needing 3-4 minutes is crazy good.

Go ask your baker how early they had to arrive to make sure your croissan'wich was ready at 8:23 AM.

All of this should be just a matter of plugging in a $device into your computer that proves you are you. Then every other service should trust that and just log you in automatically.

All that should just happen. Unless it is FedRAMP or something insane like that.

I have set my own cli credentials ttl to 8 hours and require 2FA to refresh. Once daily works fine for me. It all takes ~30 seconds, really.

Do those stay logged in for extended amounts of time? Most of my "serious" accounts have expiration times of an hour, so I only ever login when required.

They're all set for the day. I probably wouldn't do it if I had to log in every hour.

What is your VPN setup like?

Hello internet friend. I may be able to make your life easier for 4.

You can use aws vault to open the aws console using roles:

    aws-vault --help
    usage: aws-vault [<flags>] <command> [<args> ...]
    ...
    login [<flags>] [<profile>]
        Generate a login link for the AWS Console.

Which when combined with this plugin: https://github.com/blimmer/zsh-aws-vault

You can just to `avli some-role` and it will pop up in the browser in a new profile.

The only downside here is that you can't combine them into one window.

But it takes the pain out of logging in, and 2 factor, etc.

1. make coffee

2. sun isn't out yet, so read a book for a while

3. make second coffee as it starts to get lighter outside

4. walk in the garden with second cup of coffee

5. fire up my computer and start checking messages

I always feel a little jealous of religious people when they do these things.

I guess us secularised, atomised people should just make our own.

I strongly suspect it is just “obviously alive” things that have any sort of subjective experience. But we can’t really prove a negative, so we can thank our coffee machine spirits as a ritual, if we want.

We'll soon have AI as our God replacement, we can then pray to it.

Remember any unexplainable technology in which we blindly trust might as-well be God.

friction makes rituals stick. if opening instagram takes 2 seconds instead of zero, that pause is where the ritual lives. you notice the choice instead of autopilot. works for building good habits too - the slowdown creates space for intention

n=1 but they help me hit flow states. almost like they provide 'context' before x, helping me to 'prepare' (or be ready?), filter out the noise, focus. similar in group setting - shared context.

i suppose could be 'placebo' but would it matter if the result is what i want, and i can't easily attain it other ways?

i do feel it is somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy - i am essentially practicing something so getting better at it. not enough reason though to 'practice' an alternative, at least for me personally.

Broke up into 2 groups, the first asked to perform some ritual vs the control.

The control were actually placed in what my high school described as detention. Sit still and relax for 30 minutes.

Did they measure how much rituals chill you out or how much stewing in your own juices for 30 mins makes you uncomfortable?

This article sounds like it's written from the perspective of alien artificial intelligences discovering humanity

walk my dog for 45 minutes then make breakfast for my kid

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