NVC and MBB

Surprisingly, Nonviolent Communication and Mind-Body Bridging have turned out to be one of the more important feeling and most exciting findings of the project. I bumped into these at the latest hour and haven't had that much time to actually test them out, but there's tons of potential in there.

The best bit is, they are not just productivity hacks, but actually tools or even outlooks for a better and more ethical life. I'll carry on working with NCV and MBB.

Beeminder or HabitRPG

At the beginning of Hacked Man I totally fell in love with Beeminder. Later, I found HabitRPG and sort of liked that too a much. Lately I've had trouble keeping the habit of using both, but I still think both are extremely powerful tools. Using both doesn't seem to be clever, though. Both get a bit neglected, as they feel very similar.

Either should work, but I think I'll choose Beeminder. I've got more mileage out of it and it packs more punch to punish you than HabitRPG. I'll update Beeminder for year 2015 and use everything I've learned during the year to let Beeminder inspire or punish me into reaching my goals.

Meditation

Meditation has been brilliant, but it's somehow been ambushed a bit by MBB. Extra-mindfulness has somehow eaten a bit of the punch of a proper meditation session. Still, this is a habit that I'm just going to keep up. It doesn't really take time, but is obviously healthy and helpful.

My next hurdle is to try to learn to meditate at home. During the six months of Hacked Man I think I meditated about two times at home. So that's something I'll have to work on.

Runner-ups

• Timely: A nice service, especially useful, if you are searching for that extra nudge to get something started. Just plan it in and you'll start soon.
• Motivation hack: seems to work. The hard part is to remember to use it.
• Memory Pegs: These also work! The same problem with the previous hack: just have to remember that I can remember things flawlessly, if I want.
• Sleep Journal: endless amounts of fun. Just need to use some extra effort to keep up the habit. I still quit the moment I stop concentrating on keeping it.

In general, the project has been fun and worth the effort. I've also managed to gain some very practical skills and tools, that I'm loving and getting a lot of mileage out of. I didn't turn my life into unending gloryride of productivity or manage to stop playing video games completely or sleeping or anything, and happily so.

It's funny how that sort of things always pop to mind when thinking about self-help, even though my goal wasn't to turn into an inhumanly powerful accomplishment machine at any point. I can't deny, that lifehacking yourself into an Übermensch is still obviously something that's very appealing to me. Overcoming stuff is the best. Especially if it's yourself that you are overcoming.

Even with the extra energy and new tools, Hacked Man has also taken resources. All changes do and especially when I've had quite a lot to do anyways, having an extra project has seemed a bit excessive. Still, it's a price I've happily paid for now. The return on investment has been good so far and it's not like I've actually had skip nights of sleep or miss my family for weekends to keep up with Hacked Man.

The best part about the whole project is, that it's let me take a much more reflective and active approach on goal setting. Now it feels it's more about thinking up exciting stuff I want to do, than thinking about how to accomplish it. Some days of holiday and I shiver with...

...

...anticipation to start another big project or to think up a new goal!

But first, a bunch of posts about how everything went: the best, the worst, the okayish!

I've been thinking about the dynamic between "real" habits and "simulated" Beeminder/HabitRPG habits. You can obviously lose real habits too, but I wonder how simulated the habits formed by Beeminder actually are?

My example is the dream journal. I kept a dream journal practically every single night for a couple of months. Then my Beeminder goal for it ended and I pretty much instantly stopped keeping the dream journal. This is very much how my every attempt at dream journaling has gone before, except this time I lasted way longer ang got way more dreams written down.

I'm not sure if this makes keeping a dream journal a good or a bad example of a simulated habit. I created a new beeminder goal for the journal and started remembering and writing down dreams again the same night. So the skills and the habit (waking up in the middle of the night after a dream to write it down) are still there, but would they have surfaced, if I would have just decided to start doing it again, without involving Beeminder?

Having too many Beeminder-goals seems to clutter your life. Using it for tying your shoelaces is annoying, as it's hard to keep updating about something miniscule, even though not updating will cost you actual money. Still, I have a feeling that I'm just trying to explain fading out Beeminder now, that I've actually start bombing goals more often.

So naturally my teenageish reaction has to be doing the exact opposite. I have to think through all my goals, but I won't really try to cut down on the number of goals or ensure that every goal will be super-special or anything. I'll create a nice tapestry of goals to keep me active in the short and long term. And if this ends up costing me a bundle, so be it. At some point I'm bound to learn to check Beeminder daily even while I'm on holiday and notice I haven't updated in two days and all my daily goals are falling off the ledge.

Happy Christmas! Hopefully this won't end up being just an expensive Christmas present for the Beeminder-people, heh.