Habit Domino, the simplest habit-forming/habit-tracking android app that could possibly work

What started out as an audacious idea inspired by a death in the family, to build a game-like habit-forming/habit-tracking android app (codenamed World of Doers), got refined into the simplest habit-forming/habit-tracking app that could possibly work.

The basic premise of Habit Domino is that once you've committed to forming a habit, the simple act of recording the routine and visiting the app once a day, has a sort of domino effect, driven by awareness and emotion, that gets you to complete the routine consistently till it turns into a habit.

No Graphs. No Reminders. Just commit to forming the habit and visit the app once a day.

Ambition is the side-effect of a finite (limited) mind

Since we have a finite (limited) mind we cannot possibly "see" things in their entirety. So we aggregate and summarize. Instead of seeing the journey that is someone's life, we focus on the destinations they're reached. It's little wonder then that we aspire to reach destinations instead of paying attention to the journey and price we pay to get to our destinations.

This post was inspired by Clayton Christensen's How Will You Measure Your Life? TEDxBoston talk from 2010 :

Ask for what you want

I've noticed that in most situations my assumption that what I want won't be feasible (for my employer, family and friends, service providers, business partners)  is exaggerated and just plain wrong.

Have the clarity to know what you want and the courage to ask for it and more often than not you will get it.

Overcoming Fear

For most of my early years, I was afraid of the dark and would not move around the house at night. Till this one day I decided to face my fear and venture into the darkness, and realized that there was nothing there in the darkness to be afraid off. On the contrary, when my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw the house from a new perspective.

Over the years, I've overcome a lot of my fears (funny how every one of them seemed unsurmountable at the time) and each time discovered that when I faced my fear, it disappeared and gave way to a world of possibilities. With every fear that I overcame, I also uncovered a new layer of myself.

There are still a lot of things that I'm afraid off, that are keeping me from fulfilling my potential and experiencing all that life has to offer, but I'm going to take them on, one-by-one, because fear is suffocating; it restricts my creativity.

To be creative, I have to live in the moment, and fear will not let me do that, because fear has its roots either in past experiences or future consequences. Only by living in the moment; breaking free from the past and accepting the consequences of my actions, can I create something new.

Procrastination

Procrastination, it turns out, is an essential skill that we need to develop to accomplish things.

Most people that accomplish something, almost always achieve it by procrastinating lots of other things. So it's not procrastination that is bad, it's procrastinating the wrong things that needs to be fixed.

In the past, I've gone through phases where I do not have any goals (drifting) or phases where I have too many goals (distracted).

Without something to accomplish (drifting), I was procrastinating everything, and with too many things to accomplish (distracted), I was doing only the fun or easy things (instant gratification) and procrastinating everything else.

Here are the thumb rules I use now to figure out what to procrastinate:

1. Choose goals that you want to accomplish. Without goals you won't get anywhere. Duh!
2. If you came up with a lot of goals, get real and trim it down to 2-3 goals at max. If you think about it, most people that you look up to as achievers, have a single minded focus on only 1 or 2 goals.
3. Once you've chosen what you want to accomplish, procrastinate everything that does not help you accomplish it.
4. Life is too short for you not to get distracted by other things that give you instant gratification every now and again, so if you feel like breaking these rules sometimes, go for it - it doesn't mean you have to do it again tomorrow. Break it, enjoy it and move on.

The Art of Achieving

In a cafe mocha (from Barista of course) induced moment of clarity in the middle of the night this Monday (22 Feb, 2010) , I finally understood why, for a while now, I've had this nagging running-in-place-and-not-getting-anywhere feeling. With this new insight, I came up with a simple Personal Accomplishment System for myself. I'll be posting more on this soon, but first I need to check if it works for me.