Discipline wasn’t an obvious focus for 2019. I’ve historically been a curious and easily overwhelmed person that used creativity as an excuse for procrastination and disordered thought. My daily routine was indistinguishable from laziness, and I had no idea how unhappy it was making me. It turns out that spending your days without rhythm or purposeful activity is a fast track towards depression.
This year, I wanted to stop scrolling past my life. I looked for a way to get myself off the couch but had no idea that the productivity books and Reddit exercise threads were the start of something much bigger—a life lived purposefully, a sense of mattering. A three-part harmony between the person I want to be, the person I present to others, and the person I actually am.
The following daily disciplines changed my life in 2019. Each is powerful on its own, but together they filled my life with gratitude and strength I’ve never known.
The foundation: A 9 to 5 Work Schedule.
In graduate school, I had a hard time using unstructured time effectively and spent a lot of time in a foggy limbo between work and play. I thought I valued the freedom to set my own hours, but as decision fatigue and self-doubt set in, I discovered that the “routines stifle creativity” road led nowhere.
The 9 to 5 of full-time employment was a godsend. This schedule rewards you for setting a healthy rhythm for each day—waking up in the morning, going to bed at night, working through the energetic morning hours and relaxing when the day is done. For kids fresh out of school like me, a 9 to 5 provides a solid template on which to build and customize our lives.
The engine fuel: Reading 62 books in one year.
How many times have you heard this sentence: “I used to love reading books, but I don’t anymore.” Or maybe this one: “I mostly read articles.” That was me. I spent my leisure time scrolling through a mountain of stuff that could only be described as content. A lot was good, a lot was forgettable, but the 20% of straight trash did more damage than I wanted to admit. Take Twitter, the ultimate mystery-meat content smoothie: it hops from puppies to political satire to live genocides in the same bite. It’s exhilarating. It’s easy. It’s very, very bad for me.
On a whim in December 2018, I enabled the “Screen Time” iOS feature that limited my time on social media to 30 minutes per day. But I wasn’t ready to give up the extra time scrolling on my phone—not by a long shot. So I added new apps to the rotation with no time limits: Kindle, RBDigital, and Reddit. For extra motivation, I set an ambitious Goodreads goal to read 50 books in 2019.
These apps made it easy to transition phone time into reading time. RBDigital is a virtual library service run by actual libraries, and anyone with a library card can access thousands of books and audiobooks for free. Kindle isn’t free, but it has a great feature that enables vertical scrolling instead of turning pages, which makes the transition from Instagram even easier. Reddit ties to another habit that I’ll cover later in this post.
Switching from Instagram to reading worked because positive habits (adding something to your day) are easier to institute than negative habits (quitting something). I used Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit to reframe my scrolling habit like this:
Trigger: Feeling bored or stressed.
Action: Scrolling content.
Reward: Distraction from discomfort, controlled stimulation, and feeling of social achievement.
Those triggers and rewards aren’t bad. So making a tiny swap in the middle—what I was scrolling—could transform that time from neutral/harmful to the most valuable of my day. It’s still challenging, especially on days when I’m working from home or wanting more time to perfect an Instagram caption. But the more I do it, the better it gets.
The future-saver: How I stopped panicking and learned to love the budget.
Budgeting is hard in multiple ways. First, the blank canvas is terrifying. Money is flying around everywhere, and there’s only so much of it, and how do you know where it goes? Then, once you have a system, it’s hard to keep it from falling into disrepair. A good budget is a living, breathing thing that you build a relationship with. It’s basically a pet. Some budgets operate more independently, like cats. Others crave daily attention.
I tried every budgeting app under the sun. I was looking for something robust enough to handle multiple accounts and categories without overcomplicating the user experience. My search was made harder by additional requirements I discovered along the way: this budget would need to be accessible by both Eric and me and not have massive bugs that lose our data. Those two things ruled out Mint and Honeydue, respectively.
Finally, I bit the bullet and fell in love with You Need A Budget (YNAB). YNAB is terrifying to look at and kind of expensive at $84/year, but it is absolutely, top-of-the line thorough, and I love the way it does most, but not all, of the work for you. YNAB requires you to set category amounts based on the money you actually have instead of the money you think you’ll make this month, and you have to sort each purchase into a category. For me, that was the perfect amount of interaction: consistent accountability with no calculations required.
Two tips that you can ignore unless you want to start a new budget right now:
- YNAB is free with a .edu email address, but you have to be actively enrolled in school for the discount to work. And yes, they check.
- Nick True has a great explainer video for how to use the software. It’s half an hour long, but your patience will pay off—literally.
The best thing I ever learned about money was from Benjamin Graham’s book, The Intelligent Investor. I won’t get into investing here, but the key point is that money is not objective. Money is emotional. The trick to personal finance isn’t managing the market, it’s managing ourselves. When I got started in YNAB, I had physical panic symptoms every time I opened the app—heart pounding, tightness in my chest. I felt sick. Sometimes I called my parents. And after about a month, it got better, and the gnawing, generalized stress about my future began to shift to steady confidence.
The face in the mirror: Taking responsibility for what I eat.
When I started work last January, my company provided me with a new professional headshot. When the photo came back, it looked…chunky. And it was smiling out at me from every one of the new business cards.
People who try to lose weight can usually point back to a single photo that made them do it. Once on the internet, I saw someone complaining a photo of themselves, only to have a friend reply, “Well, buddy, that’s what you look like.” This business card photo was what I looked like. The scale confirmed a 15-pound weight gain over the Thanksgiving-Christmas corridor and I knew it was time to get to work.
If there’s one thing more emotional than money, it’s food. Regardless of our levels of self-confidence, admitting we want to change something so basic about the way we look feels like showing up to school naked. But I knew I was ready. After YNAB taught me to separate numbers on the screen from my self-worth, I wanted to try viewing food the same way: a neutral resource distinct from exercise, social status, or my value as a human being. Spending isn’t wrong—it can facilitate great experiences and help accomplish higher goals, like homeownership. Eating is the same way. I just hadn’t been acting like it.
The basics of weight loss are simple: consistently consume a little less energy than you expend.
The habit building process (triggers + actions + reward) is also simple. Managing myself enough to do it was and continues to be difficult.
But I’m learning! In 2019, I lost 25 pounds, or about one and a half clothing sizes.
The bigger deal by far, though, was accepting the smaller challenge of writing down each day’s food choices. Even after an all-day food festival (October) or a full platter of stress brownies (multiple times). I use an app called LoseIt to measure and motivate my process. LoseIt tells you how many calories are in things and allows you to set your own goal if you’d like to lose weight. Its best feature is the celebratory “finished” banner that pops up after you complete logging food for the day, no matter what kind of day you had.
I’ve been logging my food for 326 consecutive days and am hoping to get to a full year.
That doesn’t mean I’ve made it. 12 of the lost pounds are back for the moment, partly due to muscle gains at the gym and the rest due to slacking off. But I understand the process now, and I’m excited to get back to work in 2020 establishing a comfortable but narrower weight range.
Earlier, when I mentioned switching from social media to reading, I made an exception for Reddit. Reddit can be a content vortex, but for this purpose I made a new account subscribed only to healthy lifestyle support communities. r/LoseIt satisfied my bored / bathroom scroll craving while giving me the most powerful tool of all: community. r/LoseIt is full of active, uplifting stories from people all over the world. Their posts range from the extreme (“I lost 200 pounds and have my own TV show!”) the novice (“Help, I drank water and gained a pound!”), and the absolutely mundane (“I went for long walk today and it was a little windy”). The extreme stories were the most interesting, but I found the average ones to be the most encouraging. People who had an okay day, who felt a little impatient, or who kept going after messing up again. When I was making a change, I didn’t want to feel special. I wanted to feel that I wasn’t alone and that I was going to be ok. r/LoseIt made me—my goals, my struggles, and my new daily routine–feel normal.
Putting it all together
Even though my job is to write, daily writing isn’t a discipline I’ve developed yet. This, right now, is really hard. But I’m learning to not let the difficulty distract from the excitement of new things. And to be okay with writing as a habit, not an impending success or failure.
The theme of the list is anxiety loves uncertainty. Uncertainty is like water: it keeps things moving, even keeps us alive. But early adulthood can feel like drowning, and many of us don’t have anything to hold on to. While we learn who we are, choose jobs, build relationships, and iron out our belief systems, taking responsibility for our daily habits can build our missing foundation. Only through examining habits will we figure out what do to with our thoughts, our abilities, and most importantly, our time. As David Allen asks at the end of Getting Things Done, “It’s 9:22 AM Wednesday morning–what do you do?”
Finally, a caveat
To anyone suffering, this post may read as cringy at best. Life circumstances and privileges of birth influence the quality and direction of our lives. But today I’m speaking as someone trying to take more responsibility for the other piece, the inner fulcrum of our habits, our choices, and the story we tell ourselves.
I’ll try not to be another self-help parrot that was #VulnerableBackThen but is #AuthenticallyPerfect now. Growth isn’t linear, and we need to roast our current selves as much (if not more) than the bad behaviors we overcame.
Finally, all of the habits on this list can also be made ineffective or unhealthy. But instead of including a laundry list of exceptions, I’m just going to explain why they worked for me.
This is part 1 of a series on the habits and tools that are changing my life right now. Stay tuned for part 2.