Reviewing My Own Advice
In the last year I have written various blog posts of the "self help" style. I noticed that some of the advice I gave in these blog posts I still do to this day and they have continued to be extremely valuable to me. Others I have discovered to not be as beneficial as I had thought at the time. I would like to go through some of these blog posts and give my updated opinions on the advice that I previously gave.
Managing your Phone Time with Peer Pressure
This is still a big one for me. Being able to know how much time you are on your phone and then setup pressures upon yourself to avoid phone usage is incredibly helpful. The embarrassing text message social pressure might not work for everyone but it certainly will work for some. For others some other form of pressure to not use your phone might be more effective. In either case setting hard limits on your phone usage is something that I think will become more and more necessary as time goes on.
The caveat here is that this is the most recent blog post that I will discuss. I will need to come back and do another review of this concept at a later time and see if it still as important to me as it is now.
Conclusion: Incredibly helpful but time will tell if it sticks
Get Ready for Tomorrow, Today
This one continues to be extremely important to my daily routine. On most evenings I lay out my clothes for the next day, prepare the coffee pot so I can start it with one click, set out a glass of water with my vitamins, and have my back pack prepared. This means that I can wake up and every step of my morning is set out for me in advance. In addition I have a simple one or two sentences written down for each day in a weekly agenda. This gives me some very simple direction on what I planned on doing that morning. These habits massively increase the likelihood of following through with waking up when I had planned.
This is simply another habit that I highly recommend to people. It lets you take control of yourself during the time of day where you are least self conscious of what you chose to do. What you do in the moments immediately following waking up are almost entirely determined by unconscious decision making. Hacking into this decision making by preparing the day before allows you to take back control of your mornings, and therefore your day. It creates hours that would have otherwise been lost.
Conclusion: Absolutely necessary to create and maintain productive mornings
How to Enjoy the Taste of Any Food
This one has proven to be difficult to prove. Does fasting before eating really increase the odds that you will be willing to eat foods that you otherwise would find disgusting? I have no doubt. Does this then make it more likely that you will enjoy this food in the long term? This is harder to determine. I do think that fasting and low carb diets generally help you broaden your taste for food and certainly trying foods you do not like after a fast makes it more likely that you will eat them. What long term affect his has on your taste in food is much harder to know.
The long and short of it is that I think this is worth trying if you really want to expand you taste in food, but it certainly does not seem to be a silver bullet.
Conclusion: Difficult to prove but likely of some benefit
Offloading your Willpower with Google Forms
This one has been a total failure. I like the idea of offloading will power however the specific process that I setup in this blog post failed for me. The habit of filling out the forms eventually faded despite the phone reminder. Also, even if I had kept the habit, it is hard to say with certainty how effective it would have been in forming new habits.
I would like to review this concept and maybe try out something different. Maybe a daily form is too much? Maybe monthly and yearly forms are too long of time spans? I already have some ideas forming on a round two for this so I might come back to it. However for the moment this simply did not work for me.
