On unbroken chains

Habits help with the important, but is "creating" a habit?

I made a bold claim yesterday to create and write unconstrained. But, here I am writing to not break the chain. That is sad and demotivating.

It’s not that I am not aware of the value of unbroken chains. They are quite useful to do the mundane things that are important. I have a philosophy “Do the important and the urgent will mostly take care of themselves”

Credit: Pixabay

I do know a thing or two about long unbroken chains. I lost over 50 pounds in the 2013-2014 timeframe and one important tool in that process was logging my food daily (and accurately) and my weight weekly which was part of the process that helped. This was coupled with eating right and exercising. I still continue to log my food in MyFitnesspal and at last count, have logged continuously for 2,825 days so far. My profile is also public and available at:

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/diary/perfectoneme

I hope that this habit percolates to the other recent chains that I have been tracking. I used the Streaks app that allows me to track these chains.

Four of the tracking items are food and exercise-related - whether I eat less, whether I walk sufficiently, close my Apple Watch Rings, and exercise sufficiently. Two of them are for waking up and going to bed on time.

And six of them are for creative habits - like writing my 3 blogs (two of them are still erratic) and whether I market myself sufficiently. And two others are to sustain my other habits like personal finances and clearing off pending home-related work.

The idea is to establish balance in all the things I have to do and in order to do that it is essential to be healthy (food, exercise, sleep), focus on creating things (my hypothesis that if you create the rest will come) and also do the mundane (because these non-interesting things got to be done)

I write this today so that I can review where I am with these in a few month’s time. And that will tell me whether I am making progress with my goals or not.

Except that I still believe that creating cant be habituated but one needs to turn the taps on to let the creativity flow. And the flow might look like it is habitual.