Effective habits, or stale routines?

‘Personal development’ authors often recommend us to “un-learn” old routines, and make space for the effective habits they are about to teach us. These books then spend hundreds of pages to describe habits that promise to turn your life around. Having tried many of these habits myself over the years, I started asking some questions this morning as I was showering. Have I learned effective habits? Are they still effective, or have they become stale routines?

Forgetting about my commitment to water conservation, my mind drifted. I started reflecting. I looked back to the last 5 years or so, and started analysing the little routines and habits I have developed. I scrutinised those I abandoned, like a wrecked ship at the Bermuda triangle. I tried to answer the question: Where they effective? Would they still be effective? Should I bring them back to life, or change current ones for new ones?

Over time, many of the habits, routines and techniques have become ‘guiding principles’ rather than habits. I adapt them and use them as required, depending on the situation. There are, however, some habits that have stuck as habits. For example, I have developed the habit to wake up at 5 AM, before the rest of my family. This is a habit that allows me to have some ‘me’ time. I manage to fit in my meditation, exercise, and writing routines into my day. They are, at this point in time, very effective habits I developed and maintain. That was also the case just before the birth of my youngest boy. But these same habits were woefully ineffective during the last 8 months. My smallest decided not to sleep through the night until he became 9 months old. During that time, getting enough rest became a much higher priority than meditation; and my early-rising habit just dropped off.

What are your habits? Why do they work for you? How do you develop them? Do they still work for you, or is it time to ’spring clean’ the attic of your mind and start collecting new routines?

As you reflect on these, remember that the only constant in life is change. No matter how much we try to model our world on industrialism and machination, we just can not make anything predictable. Especially our lives, our behaviours, or ourselves. Our environment changes every day. Do do our job, our friends, coworkers, enemies, and even our passions. Within this environment, a habit that could work for you extremely well today is destined to become dead-weight on your shoulders tomorrow.

Bugger.

I encourage you to reflect on those habits, and then make some decisions. Good luck in your journey. Even better, make your own luck by developing the habit of regularly increasing your self-awareness.

Is spell-checking making us lazy?

These days, I write for a living. Rather weird, considering I work in ‘marketing analytics’. But it’s true. “The word is mightier than the digits”. And in my trade, communicating what our customers want into clear and articulate documentation is part and parcel of what I do.

I also write for myself. Some time back, I was on holiday. Walked into a bookshop, down at Batemans Bay. A title caught my eye. “Creative Journal writing” its’ name. Stephanie Dowrie its’ author. I grabbed it. Flicked its pages. Looked at the table of contents. Read a few pages. I was hooked.

Since then, I have been writing my own journal for a while. I guess that is why I had not posted back again in this blog for a while. I still write my journal. Not every day; I did yesterday though. And today I decided it was time for writing more in my blog. Give back to my small but loyal readership. Get back into it.

As I was writing in my journal, Microsoft word corrected a number of spell-check errors as I typed. A very useful feature, but after a while, I realised one that comes at a price. I noticed some words I always mis-spell. Those pesky ones where a ‘double-m’ can and sometimes does show are the most prominent examples. And I almost always get it wrong. But MS Word does its efficient correction, and I am in the clear.

So why am I worried? I guess because my pen does not have auto-correct on it. Neither does facebook, the customer service website I used yesterday, or my mobile phone’s email client. And I am pretty sure that I make plenty of mistakes in those electronic and normal communications I do every day. MS Word has made me ’spellcheck-lazy’. It’s not its’ fault. It’s not even mine. Call it a ’secondary effect’ of using “productivity improvement” tools in our everyday life.

Then I started thinking. If that’s how it is affecting me, how is it affecting others? I have over 20 years of accumulated experience (‘duoble c’s are another tricky one for me) in writing without spell-check crutches. Others, like my children, have none of that. Will it make them not just spell-check lazy but spell-check illiterate? Who knows. Only time will tell.

This reflection reminded me of the endless arguments we had with our algebra (and later on calculus) teachers at high school. They argued we should not be allowed calculators in tests. We argued that the test was about our knowledge of the theorems and other mathematical knowledge, not a test of our ability to compute manually. But maybe they were right. Maybe they knew that maths literacy depends on some basics, and if you don’t know them well; don’t exercise them, you loose those abilities. You may be able to establish how to calculate the first derivative of a function, but your maths will still be awful if your ‘core maths’ skills always rely on crutches. Or at least that is the old argument.

Not sure who is right. I guess I will get a better idea as my children grow older. But based on the fact that young people around us are starting to use SMS-speak in their normal written life, we may have some strong evidence of the direction things are taking.