Life Transformation - Organizing Habits

Continuing with the theme of establishing a set of new habits and goals during this new year period, the next topic up is organizing habits. One thing I really have trouble with is setting priorities when it comes to consuming information. I suppose many people with a healthy curiosity about a wide variety of topics have this problem. However, when there is essentially an unlimited amount of free information available on the World Wide Web, the tendency to attempt to consume everything of interest has to be resisted. Otherwise, as in my case, your email inbox will continue to grow without bounds with all the things “you plan to get to as soon as you have more time”. Same with the ever growing stack of magazines on the desk.

The overall habit must be to become more selective in what you try to drink from the fire hose of information coming at us each day. We can’t possibly take it all in, or even any reasonable fraction of it, so there needs to be prioritization about what is important to further your top one or two goals, what is really worth the time spent on it, and be willing to ignore the rest.

So my goals in this area for the coming year are (this is where things get more radical):

• On Jan 1st, I will zero out my email inbox (actually archive the roughly 1900 emails currently in there, ugh!) and start out fresh. I will completely clear out my inbox again each night before going to bed.
  
• The first time I open an email, I will remove it from my inbox. If I can deal with in 2 minutes or less I will handle it right then. Otherwise I will put it in a “To Do” folder, file it in a folder where I save useful information on that topic, or delete it. I will not leave it in the inbox with the intention of coming back to it later.
  
• Many web browsers let you open multiple windows, with multiple tabs per window. This is great for opening articles that you intend to read “later when you have more time”, but it also invites a great deal of abuse. On Jan 1st I will close all the windows and tabs on my web browsers, and do so again each night before going to bed.
  
• I will have at most 3 magazines on my pile of “magazines to read as soon as I have time”. If a new magazine comes in the mail, I will get the pile of magazines back down to 3 before going to bed.
  
• Decluttering: Vertical places (desk tops, table tops, floors…) are not meant to be places to store things. To discourage clutter and accumulation of useless stuff, and encourage focusing on those things I prioritize, I will clear off key vertical spaces each night before going to bed.
  
• To encourage more productive days, I will get up at 5am on a regular basis. The exception is when doing so would result in a severe lack of sleep because I had to stay up late the previous night.
  

That sounds just radical enough to be exciting.

Life Transformations - Health

Continuing with the theme of establishing a set of new habits and goals during this new year period, the next topic up is general health. I’ve done well this past year on hitting some of the big themes: regular doctor checkups, not smoking, wearing my seat belt in a car, etc. My diet was covered in another post, so here’s what I have left to work on this coming year:

• Average at least 7 hours of sleep per day
  
• Take a daily vitamin supplement and fish oil capsule
  
• Exercise at least 4 times a week
  
• Jog a total of at least 500 miles during the year
  
• Minimize caffeine intake. Drink no more than one small cup of coffee per day.
  
• Maintain a positive and grateful attitude (to be covered more in another post)
  

I once took a test on improving my life expectancy, and to my surprise the single biggest factor I could improve on is driving less. In principle that should be one of my health goals too, but I just don’t know how to set a specific actionable goal on that given my current uncertainty over future unemployment plans. It's something to keep in mind though.

Life Transformations - Diet

The beginning of a new year is a good time to reflect on your life and to think about establishing new habits or goals. Many experts will tell you that the best success at establishing new habits comes from focusing on one new habit at a time. However, there is a certain thrill that produces a greater sense of motivation for starting a larger life transformation all at once, which implies changing many habits at the same time. I find myself having trouble resisting the temptation to do this, or at least to contemplate it in some detail. So I’m going to write a sequence of appends about initiating a larger set of transforming habits. The idea is to start these on Jan 1st, 2010. We’ll see how successful such an approach really is.

To start the list, I’ll pick a topic that’s rather straight forward though not necessarily easy – eating. The strategy for eating food should be based primarily on maintaining the best possible health. That’s actually a somewhat radical notion for most people. Granted that there are exceptions where sharing food becomes part of special celebrations or social activities, but this should not in any way be a driving force in your diet habits. Food choices can also be an important part of an effort to live in a responsible and sustainable way, which interestingly often results in making the same choices that would be made if health issues drove your selections.

So here are some new choices that will help transform my diet:

- Eat three healthy meals per day – no between meal snacking.
- Fast one evening per week (i.e. No eating after 3pm).

I will eliminate the following from my diet:

- Cookies, donuts, muffins
- Soda (including diet)
- Candy
- Fried Foods, including French fries
- Bread (except as part of meals)
- All junk food (you know it when you see it)
- Eat lower in the food chain, and eliminate beef
- Anything I’ve seen advertised (with exceptions for obviously healthy food, but such food is rarely advertised)

That’s a good start. If I can pull off most of this, it will be a major improvement in the quality of my diet.

"Live as if this may be your last day

Thought for the day:

"Live as if this may be your last day, and people will judge you based on it."

- Author unknown

Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence

A personal rule that I think we should ALL follow is that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", no matter how much comfort or righteous indignation you can feel by believing in something. Those of you with a background in science should be especially aware of this. It really helps keep you from believing in some rather dumb things.

For example, I recently came across a claim about a pandemic in Ukraine being caused by a bio-weapon being produced by Baxter Intl's Ukraine's Lab. This clearly counts as an "extraordinary claim", though I was surprised at the number of people willing to accept the rumor as most likely true without any investigation. An unusual "pandemic of pneumonic plague hitting the Ukraine" should be something easy to prove, so I'm going to remain skeptical until I hear some other evidence confirming that such a thing exists.

By the way, it would be really nice if anyone reporting on wild rumors would do the rest of us a favor and at least include a comment on what www.snopes.com has to say about it so that we don't all have to look it up ourselves. Unfortunately, www.snopes.com doesn't have anything to say on this one way or another yet. However, according to Wikipedia the "WHO (World Health Organization) issued a statement that there were no significant differences between the pandemic H1N1 strain, and the Ukrainian strains tested", and stated reports that the "mass refusal by Ukrainians to be vaccinated (after several persons allegedly died after vaccinations in 2008 and 2009) was partly the cause for the epidemic." In other words, what apparently happened is that Ukraine got hit by a bad outbreak of H1N1 because people refused vaccinations. At least that's the most viable explanation pending further evidence.