ProductivityLife | 7 Min Read
#10 - Going Atomic
Habits are a fundamental part of everything we do so it's no surprise that if we want to achieve our goals, we need to install the right ones.
Hey Friends 👋
I hope you're doing well and have had a great week?
Something I noticed this week is how often I get lost looking at the larger picture of where I want to go and what I want to do. And, how I don't spend enough time looking at the day-to-day details of what I need to be doing to make those things happen.
This thought I realised was largely provoked by reading Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear, I'm only at the start of the book but it's been thought-provoking.
After reading just the first couple of chapters, I'm wondering what small things can I do every day to lead me towards the goals I have and most importantly how can I reinforce the right habits to get me there which is something I'm hoping the book will help me achieve the more I read it.
Something that I believe often gets lost on us is the power of small changes and achievements which is why challenges like 100DaysOfCode have become so widely successful and powerful. A 100 days doesn't sound like a lot of time but it is impressive seeing what you can achieve in that time when you make small amounts of progress every day.
So, going forward instead of thinking of the macro-picture, I'm going to try to think on a more atomic level and see what small things I can do every day to make progress towards my goals.
Of course, one thing that is of concern thinking like this is it's easy to take on more goals than you should and ultimately overwhelm your day to day life with little habits and tasks you need to do. My concern here is we can only do so much and if we are truly thinking of long term habit-building we would be naive to not factor in our well-being and rest time to allow us to destress and relax.
If we are constantly working and pushing I believe in the long term this can be detrimental. Instead, before breaking down our goals to the atomic level of what we need to do every day, we need to think what are the most important goals for us to chase, then once we have our priorities we can plan and implement the habits we need to get there.
By taking this approach, we can factor in things like rest time to ensure we are not being overwhelmed by the habits we have established in pursuit of goals.
I look forward to reading more of the book, I feel like the one or two chapters I've read so far have been jammed packed with great information and advice to implement.
Have you read the book before? I'd love to have a conversation with you about it. (Please, no spoilers though 😉)
Thank you for reading this edition of Sunday Summaries and I look forward to chatting to you again next week if not sooner.
Coner x
🏃♂️ What I've Been Doing
This week, it has once again been a lot of work on the PhyType website and loads of progress has been made. So far, the redesigned about and changelog pages have been published and are in production for people to see and use. The blog page has also been redesigned and is almost ready to go live, I just need to sort the blog post template design before we can send that to production as well.
I just need to then get writing blog posts to leverage SEO to get more people visiting the website and hopefully converting into clients for the business.
Outside of working on PhyType, I've been getting back into Twitter, creating content for it and interacting with more people which has been great to do after a while off. But, it does come back to my point from before about balance. If you're not careful Twitter can easily take over your life and become a full-time job which is something I'm keen to avoid.
Finally, this week I've also written a new blog post for LogRocket's blog which will hopefully go live in the next few weeks and I'll be sure to tweet it out once it does go live so make sure to follow me over there if you're interested in reading it.
💬 Quote Of The Week
"The cowards never started and the weak died along the way. That leaves us, ladies and gentlemen."
📺 What I've Enjoyed
This week as noted earlier, I've been reading Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear which I'm looking forward to getting my teeth into more and finishing off. I'm also still reading a few other books which are:
- The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun by Gretchen Rubin
- Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker
One thing that I've started to do more and more is reading samples from Kindle and if I don't get into the sample then I move on and find another book.
Too much in the past, I've forced myself to read a book purely because others have said it's been a good book but life is too short to read every book so we might as well pick the ones we are the most interested in.
📝 Reviewing Last Weeks Targets / Goals
Let's take a look back at last weeks targets and goals and see how it went and what we can learn from it.
- ✅ Complete the redesign of the changelog page on phytype.com
- ⏳ Add the blog page to phytype.com
- ✅ Add the about us page to phytype.com
- ❌ Start creating content on Twitter again (thinking one per day)
- ❌ Keyword research for the first blog post on phytype.com
So, overall not a bad week, achieved 2 of the 5 goals and am currently halfway through one of them as well.
Of course, something that did take up extra time but wasn't a goal was the LogRocket article I mentioned earlier. This wasn't originally a goal because I was waiting on approval to write the post which could've taken a few days to a week but as it came through quicker than expected I prioritised that over other tasks it has a quicker return on investment and is time-sensitive.
Also, with the content creation on Twitter, this is something I've done ahead of time for next week, so next week there is a tweet lined up for every single day. Doing it in this way is a lot easier to do than trying to tweet a new piece of content every day because inevitably life gets in the way which is what I noticed from the last week.
Finally, I just didn't get time to do the keyword research so I'm going to take that on this coming week.
🎯 Next Weeks Targets / Goals
Here are my goals for next (13/12 - 19/12):
- Finish implementing the blog page and blog post designs to phytype.com
- Keyword research and plan first blog post for phytype.com
- Feasibility research for a new SaaS idea I want to make
- Begin initial designs for the redesign of conermurphy.com
- Align branding across socials to match the new Twitter banner.
I look forward to working on these and sharing my progress with you during the week on Twitter and then reviewing them in a week to see what we can learn from these tasks. Build, Measure, Learn - that's the name of the game. 💪
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