Get into the habit
In my experience, it is best practice to start a habit by doing a small amount of work, in fact a laughably small amount of work as an every day minimum. For example, to start back writing, I started with the goal of writing one sentence a day. That's it. And you know what? I still sometimes was fighting myself to start. But once you have started, you have made a giant leap. As is pointed out on All Japanese All the Time (AJATT), "1 isn’t just slightly bigger than 0. 1 is infinitely bigger than 0. "You've got to start somewhere.
Track.
Next, engineer follow-up and follow-through. One method is Seinfield's trick where you take a calendar and mark each day you follow your goal, eventually forming a chain. You get a little attached to the chain, and a little more so the longer it grows.I don't print out a calendar, however. I simply make my own chart by turning a piece of lined paper on it's side. Each line becomes a day, and in this way I can make a chart tracking as many habits as I'd like. It looks a little like this:
Here's a sample chart of the goals I tracked over a 10-day span. I must admit it was the best 10-day span I have had as of the time of this writing; I have never had a perfect week, nor have I needed one in order to watch this improve my life greatly.
If you have some burning life-focus that you just can't seem to get started I would use the Seinfield trick. I find a chart is better for tracking several goals in a general course of self-improvement.
Procrastinate Your Evaluation, Not Your Action
When I was a speech coach, one of the keys to my success was to take the pressure off the novices. Specifically in the event extemporaneous speaking, I instituted a rule that a student wasn't allowed to say whether or not they thought they were good at the event until they had given 20 practice speeches.
You can apply some version of this to whatever it is you are working on. At first, your focus should be on building the habit. You could set a time in the future that you will allow yourself to evaluate (this Ted Talk is an illustration of why 20 hours is usually sufficient. But even better is to allow yourself the luxury of growing slowly while maintaining faith in the knowledge that you will improve.
When Inspiration Strikes, Do More
This step more or less will probably happen on it's own, but it might be worth a few words to encourage it further.
Before you started you project, you were still filling your days somehow. While, yes, it is possible to squeeze more out of time, at some point you will eventually have to push something away. That's your real test. Once you've allowed inspiration to guide you past some distraction, you can safely say that you have formed a habit. Keep going, keep tracking, and one day you may look up and notice you're where you wanted to be when you started dreaming and setting goals.
Everything Else is Optimization
There are a lot of bloggers who gain eyeballs (and ad revenue/book sales) by in effect saying "Look how great I am, and look how fast I can learn anything!" From my own experience I can say that it can be very discouraging to consume too much of that. It's a kind of pornography of other people's productivity. I would look to them when my passion was at its highest, but then as my passion waned, their examples would only lead me to see my efforts as a failure. Eventually I realized that these amazing, better-than-you-and-me life-hackers are really only talking about optimization. Oh . . . they can learn a language in 3 months? Cool. However, I probably can't do that because 1) I don't want to move to another country, 2) I don't want to study 8 hours a day and 3) I'm probably not as talented as them (also, read the fine print, so to speak, about what they are willing to count as a "successful mission").
Another example is exercise. I have at times only lifted one day a week. On the plus side, this protocol allowed me to optimize for muscle growth and cycling my diet. However, it made it too easy to get out of the exercise habit. When I wanted to start back exercising, I set up my tracking for every day and broke up exercises so it was possible to exercise everyday without soreness. Optimal? I don't care; I'm building back up a habit.
It is certainly good to read up from time to time about techniques for things you are working on. It can show a healthy interest in the subject. But my advice is to not give up on the system you are tracking while you are experimenting with new techniques. For example, if you have been learning a foreign language by going through a certain number of flashcards a day and then you learn about a whole new philosophy of language learning involving just talking to natives (ie wasting their time so that you may benefit), I would recommend that you keep up with your flashcard discipline and experiment with the new moves. In this way you absolutely prevent being a wannabe. Whether acting optimally or not, you are always a work in progress. Which is what you should be.
