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New habits and useful landmines
Merlin Mann | Jul 22 2005
Installing a new habit and breaking an old one This article's advice on “installing” a new habit is really quite good, but it's also useful just for its inspiring examples of what Danny and I have called “useful landmines”-pre-emptive ways to make failure in a given situation as difficult as possible. A few I especially liked:
As with things like The Forehead Ticket Trick, I know a lot of folks find it easy to laugh this stuff off and think it's all sort of dopey for such theoretically sophisticated customers like you and me to spend time on (“Just do it,” says the ambitious poster). But, personally, I'm attracted to any idea that takes a burden off of my mind and puts it squarely back into the physical world. 8 Comments
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 At age 15, with a...Submitted by Keith in Tokyo (not verified) on September 7, 2005 - 11:06pm.
At age 15, with a morning paper route and extracurricular activities that kept me in a state of permanent exhaustion, my morning (pre-dawn) wake-up procedure included the following:
I would plug the lamp timer into the electrical outlet, then plug the boom box into the lamp timer. The lamp timer would be set to the target wake time. Then I would stack the kitchen chairs and other furniture on top of one another, put the music stand and the French Horn case near them, and put the whole thing between my bed and the boom box. When the boom box turned on at the appointed hour, it would scream at full volume and risk awaking not only my parents and brother, but the entire neighborhood as well. So I instantly shot out of my bed, desperate to shut it off. The kitchen chairs, music stand, and French Horn case naturally got in my way, and so I would dive right through them on my trajectory toward the boom box's "stop" button. I generally wound up lying amongst a pile of overturned furniture, bruised, scraped, panting, naked, and sometimes even bleeding -- but always very much awake. My first life hack. » POSTED IN:
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