Practices

The same breathing serves different jobs at different times. Early on it may be there to help you sleep and stay contained. Later it may be there to help you feel more, not less.

This is worth knowing so you do not judge yourself for finding a practice useful now that was useless six months ago, or the other way round. In the…

Let the in breath come however it comes, then breathe out through pursed lips as though through a straw for a count of eight, finishing with two more counts through the nose. Three ordinary breaths, then go again.

Three rounds is the usual dose. Notice what is deliberately left uncounted: the inhale. Counting the in breath when someone is already panicking…

The three ordinary breaths between rounds are not a gap in the practice. They are where you find out what the practice did.

Come back to normal breathing and check the body, the thoughts, the mood, the energy. Do not analyse it, just register it. Going round after round…

To find the soft ocean sounding breath, breathe out through your mouth as if fogging up a mirror. Then keep that same slight narrowing at the throat with your mouth closed, and let the sound get quieter and quieter.

Starting with the mirror gives you something to do instead of an anatomy lesson about a part of the throat you cannot see. Once the mouth closes, the…

The soft sound and the feel of this breath in your throat give your attention somewhere to sit. When the mind is loud, something you can hear holds better than something silent.

It is called the victorious breath, and the victory meant is over the noise in your own head rather than over anybody else. The vibration in the…

Close your right nostril with your thumb and breathe in through the left. Swap fingers at the top, breathe out through the right, in through the right, then out through the left. That is one round.

The fiddliness is not a flaw in the design. Keeping track of which nostril and which stage takes up just enough of your mind that there is little…

Most time strategies are doing one of three jobs: showing you time passing, interrupting you when a moment arrives, or laying the days out ahead of you. When something is not working, ask which of the three is missing rather than hunting for a new app.

Have a look at what you already use. A clock in view and a timer running are the first job. An alarm that cuts through whatever you are absorbed in…

If you lose track of how long you have been at something, a clock you can see is the fix. If you get pulled under and surface far too late, what you need is an interruption, not a clock.

Alarms and schedules are doing different jobs again. An alarm is there because noticing the time yourself is the bit that fails when you are…

Do not plan to resist the phone. Put it in another room before you sit down, close the tabs, silence the chat app. Resisting works sometimes, and it costs you something every single time.

The five minutes before you start are worth more than any amount of determination once you are underway. Decide what is coming into the room with you…

Your ability to hold off a distraction is at its worst near the end of a work block, not at the start. Set the room up for the tired version of you, because that is the one who will be sitting in it.

In practice the hard removals happen in advance, while you still feel capable. Phone away before you begin, water and food already to hand, the next…

The towel left on the floor is the model. Tomorrow it is cold and unpleasant to use, and that is the whole of it. Short wait, happens every time, nothing terrible.

When you are building a consequence yourself, aim for those qualities rather than for severity. Something that lands within a day or two. Something…

Smoking sends its bill decades later. Homework skipped at fourteen lands at university applications. January's receipt matters in April of the following year. The few seconds of relief are always right here.

Lining these up next to each other makes something clear that willpower talk hides. You are not being asked to want the far thing slightly more. You…

Bring the cost forward into today. No screen until the hour of work is done, rather than a poor grade three months from now.

Same idea for adults: you do not leave the desk until the hour is in, the film waits until the form is filed. It works because it stops asking you to…

Write it up before you leave. One salesman, knowing full well he will not remember the visit an hour later, does his notes in the car with the engine still off.

The strength of it is that the trigger is fixed and physical. Sitting down in the car is the cue, and the notes happen before the key turns. No…

You get three goes at thinking about something: before it starts, somewhere in the middle, and once it is over. Most of us only ever use the last one, which is the least useful of them.

Before is a pause to look at the options. In the middle is a quick check on how it is actually going and whether anything needs changing. Afterwards…

The first version of the list will be alright. It becomes good over a couple of years, one forgotten item at a time.

So when you arrive somewhere without the thing you needed, add a line rather than carrying the annoyance around with you. That turns a bad morning…

A long project gives you no feedback until it is too late to use any. Put checkpoints in yourself: with the people involved, or just with you and a Monday morning.

Pick the dates while you are writing the plan, not later when you happen to remember. Each one turns a single verdict at the end into several small…

At a check-in, only look. Where am I, what has slipped, what have I still not heard back on. Skim the inbox without opening anything.

The moment you answer one message the review is over, and you will not notice it ending. Keep a sheet beside you and write down what you spot instead…

Once a day, look at the whole day before it starts eating you. What is on, what is urgent, what is this day actually best used for. Morning or evening, whichever you will really do.

It takes about five minutes and it is the difference between a day you chose and a day chosen for you by whoever emailed first. Some people prefer…

Before you hand it over, read the original request again. Not your memory of it. The actual words.

Almost nobody enjoys this, which is why almost nobody does it. But work that is good except for the two things nobody remembered is the commonest…