Ask HN: What's one small habit you started that surprisingly changed your life? |
Ask HN: What's one small habit you started that surprisingly changed your life? |
The health benefits are very nice too if you’re just starting out. There are diminishing returns as your body gets used to it.
15 minutes in the morning/afternoon is my usually habit while at work. But on particularly tough days or just ones with nice weather I’d go for much longer walks.
It’s nice to explore the spaces around you when on these walks. You’ll end up discovering more of your surroundings than you’d ever expect. One nice benefit I’ve found is that I can do a 35ish minute walk to the movie theater I’d normally drive to. Doing this lets me just go see a movie on a whim, eat at one of the many restaurants near it. Maybe get a little drunk and be able to walk off a meal/buzz on the way back. I’ve had many epiphanies in this state of mind. You’ll just be a more relaxed individual if you adopted this.
This has at least two benefits. First, it ensures follow-through (completion of what most people consider to be the last action). And second, it lowers the activation energy to start the next cycle.
Examples:
- "You kill it, you fill it." When I make a cup of instant coffee and then the electric kettle is almost empty, I refill the kettle and start heating the water again before I grab my cup and return to my home office. As a result, the kettle is always full of hot water when I go back for another cup, and I don't have to go through the aggravation of refilling it and waiting around for it to heat up before I grab my next cup. (And refilling at the end is easier because I've already started doing the activity.)
- Putting a new roll of toilet paper on the spindle. Likewise, if the replacement roll is the last one under the sink, restocking rolls under the sink after finishing in the bathroom. And if the package of rolls is almost empty after I restock the rolls under the sink, I immediately add TP to my grocery list.
- Clearing my desk at the end of the work day and setting up my initial work materials for the morning.
---
Another simple but great habit: using take-off and landing points at key places around the house to optimize in-home logistics and to avoid losing or spending time searching for things. I wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41220059
Pair with the evergreen "A place for everything, and everything in its place."
Stronger, leaner, fitter, healthier. Been doing this for years. It accumulates over time.
From there just got more and more into reading. For some reason I thought you could only read 1 book at a time but that's not true at all. I will have a few on the go at anytime. Just going to the library to sit and read is a nice break from everything. I have so many books I want to read now.
This plays out in all areas of my life.
At home there might be a cluttered area. Most people would buy a shelf, maybe head to the Container Store, and try or organize it. I tend to get rid of it. This removes the clutter and opens up a new area of the home with new possibilities.
At work when something goes wrong there is a whole call full of people suggesting on additional process, approvals, etc to add so it doesn’t happen again. I’m often the lone voice asking if we need to do the thing at all. If we stop doing it, it won’t break again and there is less work, not more. Everybody wins.
This is summed up in this quote I quite like.
“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Or more simply, “less, but better” —Dieter Rams
But I started a habit of re-framing it instead like "well if you don't understand why people like something, that is your own failure to understand human behaviour and culture, if you were smarter you would understand why its popular"
That habit of re-framing stuff like that made me look at things a lot more like a neutral observer/anthropologist and not be such a hater
Trying to understand why they like that thing is a more connective and productive path. Maybe at the end of it you end up more informed and still don’t like the thing, but for me often times it turned a knee jerk “that thing is dumb” into a thing I love with people who also love that thing. What a great life hack.
With every step I became a little more focused, and not just on work.