Overall I consider January a resounding success.

Outcome of Goal 1 (Accountability)

I successfully decided upon a set of goals for the month, wrote them out into a doc, found a group of peers to send the doc to, and wrote out a public blog post. The retrospective (this post) is coming out in February instead of January, but I called out ahead of time that this would be fine if it actually came out in February. Since you’re reading this now, I’m not going to consider that an issue. So the “baseline” for Goal 1 was met (which I assigned 80% likelihood), and the additions for the “full” set were half met (which I assigned 50%).

My primary update related to this first goal is that blog posts take significantly longer to write than I expected. Based on the amount of time I spent writing the posts that I published in January, I would have expected to also be able to write this retrospective. I may be able to speed this up in the future by getting better at writing posts, or by making my initial doc-based version of my goals closer in format to what I publish here. Despite the time investment, I still didn’t put that much effort in editing or improving writing style, which is a trend I plan to continue (sorry). At least until I decide that “improve my writing skills” should be one of my goals.

Outcome of Goal 2 (Weekend Productivity)

January Goal 2 involved spending a couple of hours being productive at the library each week, and that went off without a hitch. A friend agreed to accompany me on the first week, which removed almost all the uncertainty around whether I would actually follow through. I estimated 75% chance of success if someone accompanied me the first week.

Starting the second week, I scheduled the library time to immediately follow a different weekly event, mostly just for transportation efficiency. This turned out to be unexpectedly helpful. Having some event scheduled right before my planned library time made it feel surprisingly trivial to actually get myself to go. I expected a great deal of procrastination and resistance when trying to pull myself away from whatever I was doing, but if I was driving back from a completed event I didn’t notice any aversion in going to the library. I expect it would have been much harder if I was actually coming from home beforehand. It also may have been harder if I hadn’t had the first week’s success under my belt already.

Outcome of Goal 3 (Weekday Productivity)

The third goal for the month was spending at least 45 minutes each weekday (barring any unusual schedules or sick days, etc). I did get sick for a few days in January, and didn’t work on those days, but all “normal” days went as planned. At 65%, this was the goal I was most uncertain about, but it turns out that TAPs and straightforward habits like this work better than I anticipated. After the first couple days I no longer had to put conscious effort into remembering that I was supposed to be in this kind of productive mode, though I’m sure it also helped that I have a 45-60 minute time block conveniently carved into my schedule to stick this into.

Outcome of Goal 4 (Cross-Training)

The fourth and final goal for January was to do 3 days a week of various types of strength training and conditioning, one of which was already habitualized. I moved my schedule around so what used to be a running day was now a strength-training day instead, which felt easy because I was already used to exercising. I missed one scheduled day because I was sick, but made it up a couple days later when I felt better, which feels reasonable. The final goal was attending a group exericise class, which would primarily be if I forgot an extra pair of clothes. Phone reminders and an extra backup pair to keep at work made this easy as well.

Keeping a backup set of cloethes at work turned out to be nice for other reasons as well. At one point I got a bunch of stuff on my clothes and it was nice to have a change on hand. Highly recommend, and would continue even if I stop doing the same exercise goals that led to it in the first place.

Other Takeaways

On one of the weekends I used some productive time to finish up reading some rationalist/programming fanfiction which I had mostly finished beforehand. My justification was that my desire to just finish it was quite distracting, it wouldn’t take that long to finish, and it was plausibly more “productive” than reading other types of fiction because of the technical subject matter. This stretches what I had intended the productive time to entail. I only spent a very small amount of time relative to the monthly total, and it is entirely plausible that the reduction in distraction saved time overall that day, so I don’t plan on making any adjustments based on this. I do plan to keep an eye out for future similar situations.

At one point I thought a month was too long of a time period, because it felt obvious that I was going to succeed after I had nailed the first two weeks. I considered switching to a 2-week cadence, but I think 2 weeks would be too fast, especially after my later updates about the time necessary to write these posts. It also feels more fragile, in the sense that I’d need to be constantly trying to get new habits off the ground, and wouldn’t have long enough to entrench them.

Most things felt much more aversive before I started working on them, and once I successfully got myself into the mindset of working on that task and started making progress, it became much easier to continue working. There was at least one big task that I worked on that did not follow this pattern, and continued to be quite unpleasant throughout the entire experience (and the feeling of unpleasantness often built up while working on it). The former insight seems to suggest that building this type of habit doesn’t violate some deep intuitive mental process, but rather just lowers to cost for starting, which is exactly what I was hoping for. I will have to re-evaluate what to do if too many tasks continue feeling unpleasant.

As a final note, I did much better than my probability estimates would have suggested, so I should update my credence on my own ability to follow through. I think this makes sense both because it indicates my initial estimates were underconfident, but I also expect that succeeding in January will make me more likely to succeed in the future for various reasons. For example, improved general competence skills and a desire not to “break the streak”.