I wrote about my micro-habits system back in Sept last year. My previous micro-habits system were centred around the keystone habits that I’m building as part of my million dollar goal project:  

• sleep
• meditation
• health and fitness
• downtime for deloading, reviews & reflection
• deliberate practices for deep work

I then translated these keystone habits into a daily weekday schedule:

11.30pm: Bedtime

08.00am: Wake routines - wash up, yoga, meditate, bathroom

09.00am: Workout - alternate between running or the 7min workout. On days when I do the 7min workout I save time and can leave earlier.

10.30am: Recovery, shower, prepare to get out

11.30am: Commute to one of the cafes I frequent for work. Listen to podcasts while on the move.

12noon: Lunch (breaking fast for intermittent fasting)

1.00pm: Work - task review (top 3 tasks to complete), reading for first hour, then deep work. Use mindfulness bell with 20/20/20 rule for eye breaks, and standing desk to have some movement.

6.00pm: Commute back home. Continue on podcasts while on the move.

7.00pm: Dinner, family time

8.00pm: Food consumption stops for intermittent fasting to start. Household chores.

9.00pm: Writing on 200wad

10.30pm: Shut down laptop and phone to reduce bluelight sources before sleep. Shower (the decisive habit-forming moment for sleeping on time).

11.00pm: Wind-down, chat with wife, some light reading, or short night meditation

11.30pm: Sleep

But sooo much had changed since then, that this habit system had effectively been upended. Like, everything. 

First, caring for a newborn means you shift your schedules around him. Next came COVID, lockdown and stay home measures, meaning the places and spaces where these habits get acted on are now restricted to just my home. Deep uninterrupted sleep is basically a non sequitur when you have a newborn needing to feed every two hours. Morning routines are trimmed down to the bare minimum – yoga and meditation are starting to feel like distant memories. I had done sitting meditation daily for more than ten years, and never had such a long dry period since I started. With caring duties interspersed throughout the day, deep work at home is an occasional luxury, and whatever remaining pockets of time I get, I focus on getting tasks done. That means I no longer get to have my regular one-hour reading before starting work. My prolific reading streak had suffered because of that. Inspiration had all but dried up. Fitness and running had similarly disappeared. Ironically, zero commuting time means I don’t get to listen to podcasts as much. Forget about downtime and deloading too.

My micro-habit system had been the stable bedrock from which I based my productivity and ambitions on. With almost everything upended, everything I do now feels shaky and immaterial. But that’s why I’m writing this post now. Recognizing you have a problem is the first step to solving it.

What can I do with the cards given right now? How do I make the best of the constraints, or better yet, use these constraints to achieve what I want, despite?

-———————-

After some reflection and reading back on my past posts, I think the keystone habits should still stay the same. These are the main foundational pillars of the house I’m building, and the only thing that has changed is the decoration and everything in between these pillars, not the pillars themselves. The reasoning behind them is still sound, just that the how had to be done completely differently now. Like say, sleep. Getting restful sleep is still important, but how I can achieve it with a newborn on nocturnal feeding is the difference. Perhaps I have to let go of being able to have deep uninterrupted sleep in one nice block of time from 11pm to 8am. So it’s the framing that needs a change. 

The main rule of thumb here is to release the need to anchor the tasks related to each keystone habit to a specific time slot within the day or week, but give it more breathing room to be accomplished flexibly within the window of a day (or week if it’s not a daily task). Therefore:

• deep uninterrupted sleep through the night
  => adequate rest throughout the day, with noon siestas, power naps at dusk.
• morning yoga and meditation
  => meditation at least once sometime in the day
• dedicated health and fitness sessions in 2-3h blocks
  => anywhere fitness - exercises whenever wherever it can be done, done through the day
• downtime for deloading & reflection
  => spreading out the deloading and reflection time over days instead of dedicated blocks of alone time
• deliberate practices for deep work
  => prioritising tasks between deep work vs shallow work, and picking the right task off the list for the current moment instead of scheduling it upfront. Coding requires deliberate practice, and I want to feature it strongly here.

So a rough daily schedule would have flexible bands of time to accomplish some specific tasks, in whatever sequence. It could look like this:

11.30pm: Bedtime

8am-1pm: Wake routines - wash up, change baby, prepare breakfast for wife. Morning reading. Some exercises from the 7min workout. Shower baby. Prioritising work tasks. Shallow work.

1-3pm: Head out buy lunch (breaking fast for intermittent fasting). Take the stairs for exercise. Eat lunch back home. Entertain baby while wife eats lunch. Siesta nap with wife and baby. Coffee. Meditate?

3-7pm: Use mindfulness bell with 20/20/20 rule for eye breaks. Cycle between work and baby care in 1h sprints. Try to secure 2h window for some deep work if possible. Code something. Continue with exercises from 7min workout. Dusk power nap.

7-9pm: Dinner, family time. Clean baby, care while wife eats dinner. Food consumption stops at 8pm for intermittent fasting to start. Household chores.

9.00pm: Intermittent writing on 200wad and caring for baby. Deloading, reflection.

10.30pm: Shut down laptop and phone to reduce bluelight sources before sleep. Shower (the decisive habit-forming moment for sleeping on time).

11.00pm: Wind-down, chat with wife, lulling baby to sleep, short night meditation while baby sleeps.

11.30pm: Sleep (if baby is asleep).

Will this work? Based on accounts from other parents, the general principle of letting go of rigid schedules and spreading things out in bands of time seems sound. Will experiment and report back.