(2009-11-15) Bowkett Habit Calendar

Giles Bowkett has a paper Calendar system for maintaining momentum ("streaks", "don't break the chain" are the references) in new Habit-s (Self Improvement, CheckList).

Feb'2010: some updating. All that planning now looks counter-productive... My new plan is to develop the next musical idea I like into a complete six-minute track by an arbitrary deadline (Saturday the 27th) and then call it done, one way or another, when that arbitrary deadline arrives. That might work better; if not, I can do another course correction later. In the context of immediate feedback and objective measurement, you can run a lot of experiments. The calendar enables me to catch fail early and modify what I'm doing to eliminate the fail.

Jan'2011: he adds a "habit budget" at the meta level to generate/refine/prioritize habits to maintain. I wouldn't recommend a habit budget at all until you've already spent a good amount of time using my habit calendar system successfully.

• On the calendar approach itself: I'll be using Checklist Wrangler to make the monthly stuff happen, and I'm using it quite happily for a morning checklist - to make sure I remember to floss every day, for example - so I could in theory schedule everything on here, but I think that level of granularity risks overburdening the system and almost guaranteeing failures.

May'2011: I'm trying the calendar. I printed a page with a list of things I'm doing, then drew calendar grid on the back, focusing on 5 habits.