Skip to main content

How To Push Your Habit Building Onto Technology

I use desktop alerts to keep myself organized through the day, in various ways. There are things i want to do repeatedly and I don't have a good track record with keeping good habits, so I have found some ways to make tools fill in the gaps for me. There are some specific examples i can give. I have been using the great site 750words.com for almost a year, and I love it. I write nearly every day, and I'm getting better at that habit all nthe time. usaully I only miss it when something interrupts me. I remember with something better than an email reminder or a note on my calendar each day, which both i can build a habit to ignore. I use an alert program, which is KAlert in my case, but any alert program should work the same. Every morning at 5AM, it spawns a google chrome window opening the 750words.com write page, and so I wake up and sit down to my computer every morning to find the page already open with a blank page and a blinking cursor, and I start writing. I don't have to remember, and I don't have an alert I can easily ignore. I just find myself sitting in front of exactly what I need to do, every morning.

It works nice, give it a try. I use a similar alert to prompt me for hourly journal entries for mood tracking, and work start/stop times, among other things. If I can represent it as a URL, I don't need to remember it, because my computer is an supplement of my brain.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CARDIAC: The Cardboard Computer

I am just so excited about this. CARDIAC. The Cardboard Computer. How cool is that? This piece of history is amazing and better than that: it is extremely accessible. This fantastic design was built in 1969 by David Hagelbarger at Bell Labs to explain what computers were to those who would otherwise have no exposure to them. Miraculously, the CARDIAC (CARDboard Interactive Aid to Computation) was able to actually function as a slow and rudimentary computer.  One of the most fascinating aspects of this gem is that at the time of its publication the scope it was able to demonstrate was actually useful in explaining what a computer was. Could you imagine trying to explain computers today with anything close to the CARDIAC? It had 100 memory locations and only ten instructions. The memory held signed 3-digit numbers (-999 through 999) and instructions could be encoded such that the first digit was the instruction and the second two digits were the address of memory to operat...
1 comment
Read more

Statement Functions

At a small suggestion in #python, I wrote up a simple module that allows the use of many python statements in places requiring statements. This post serves as the announcement and documentation. You can find the release here . The pattern is the statement's keyword appended with a single underscore, so the first, of course, is print_. The example writes 'some+text' to an IOString for a URL query string. This mostly follows what it seems the print function will be in py3k. print_("some", "text", outfile=query_iostring, sep="+", end="") An obvious second choice was to wrap if statements. They take a condition value, and expect a truth value or callback an an optional else value or callback. Values and callbacks are named if_true, cb_true, if_false, and cb_false. if_(raw_input("Continue?")=="Y", cb_true=play_game, cb_false=quit) Of course, often your else might be an error case, so raising an exception could be useful...
1 comment
Read more

Announcing Feet, a Python Runner

I've been working on a problem that's bugged me for about as long as I've used Python and I want to announce my stab at a solution, finally! I've been working on the problem of "How do i get this little thing I made to my friend so they can try it out?" Python is great. Python is especially a great language to get started in, when you don't know a lot about software development, and probably don't even know a lot about computers in general. Yes, Python has a lot of options for tackling some of these distribution problems for games and apps. Py2EXE was an early option, PyInstaller is very popular now, and PyOxide is an interesting recent entry. These can be great options, but they didn't fit the kind of use case and experience that made sense to me. I'd never really been about to put my finger on it, until earlier this year: Python needs LÖVE . LÖVE, also known as "Love 2D", is a game engine that makes it super easy to build ...
Post a Comment
Read more