Practices
Every practice in the library, in one list. Narrow it by how long you have, who it is written for, and where you are right now.
Narrowed down
62 practicesHow long you have
Who it is written for
Where you are right now
On your own, or with someone · On my own
Theme · Systems for daily life
Whatever system you build has to survive a bad day. When feeling comes in a wave, the calendar and the checklist are the first things to go, so decide now what that hour looks like.
Write down the smallest possible version of the day: the two things that still happen, everything else forgiven until tomorrow. Have somewhere for…
Book time on your own the way you would book anything else. Not as a reward for having finished everything, and not only once you are already frayed.
Overwhelm often comes from the sheer volume of contact rather than from the work: lectures, housemates, group chats, the phone going all evening.…
When something has become impossible, start far below it. Sitting in the parked car with the engine off is a real first step, and it is the one that gets somewhere.
Choose a version so small it feels slightly ridiculous, repeat it until it is dull, then add one notch. Sit in the car. Then start the engine. Then…
If it is out of sight it is gone, so build the system around what you can see. Clothes on an open shelf and books in the drawer is a perfectly good arrangement when that is what works.
Tidy usually means hidden, which is why so much storage quietly fails. Try the opposite: hooks instead of hangers, open boxes, a clear jar, one bowl…
If everything you do is both urgent and important, you are living in the emergency corner. It is exhausting, and the exhaustion is real even though the week looks thin from outside.
Crisis living is a place rather than a personality, which is the good news, because places can be left. Look for one emergency that keeps coming back…
Some days fill up entirely with things that were urgent for somebody else. Practise saying not now to other people, and to the version of you that opens one more tab.
For one afternoon, write down every time you get pulled away and who did the pulling: a colleague, a notification, or you. Most people are surprised…
Find out how long you actually last before your mind wanders somewhere nicer, then make that your block. If the honest answer is eleven minutes, work in elevens.
Most people set twenty five minutes because a website said so, fail at it daily, and conclude they are hopeless. Time yourself honestly across a few…
If you take medication, work out when it actually comes on and when it fades, then put the demanding work inside that window. Spending your best hours on email is a waste of something limited.
Track it for a week. What time did it start, when did the edge come off, when were you flagging. Then build the day around the answer: the thinking…
Put small obstacles between the urge and the doing. One browser used only for work, tempting apps buried three folders down, notifications off for anything that is not an actual person you love.
None of this stops a determined person and it is not meant to. It adds four seconds, and four seconds is often enough for the urge to lose its grip.…
Ask what is working and what is not, rather than whether you did well or badly. The first question you can answer honestly. The second one you will lie to yourself about.
At the end of a week, three questions. What went better than I expected. What got in the way. What is the one thing I want to change. Notice where…
Start at the moment you have to be there and work backwards, writing each step and how long it takes, until you reach the hour you have to get up.
Interview at ten. Twenty five minutes on the train, ten minutes walking, fifteen minutes early to be safe, twenty five to dress and eat, and the…
A calendar holds things that happen at a time. A list holds things that must get done but not at any particular hour. Put both in one place and you break both.
When everything goes in the calendar, the real appointments get lost among forty invented blocks. When everything goes on the list, the dentist at…
A task with no time attached has nothing to bring it back to you. Give it an hour, Friday two until three, and the diary carries it instead of your memory.
Do this on a Sunday with the list in front of you. Not everything needs a slot, only the things that have been sliding from week to week. Be honest…
When someone asks for an hour of your time, your head searches for a clash, finds nothing, and says yes. A calendar with everything already in it turns that guess into something you can look at.
The trick is to put in the whole of your life, not only the appointments other people gave you. Travel, meals, the school run, the hour you actually…
Pick one aim big enough to hold the year, and let it be the thing you measure choices against. Not a list of values. One.
It might be finishing the course, or being the parent who is actually there in the evenings. When something new arrives you hold it against that one…
Read down a long to-do list and you will find things belonging to a person you were three years ago. Some of them were never good ideas. They got written down anyway.
Seeing the list that way makes deleting bearable. You are not abandoning your ambitions, you are letting go of ideas that arrived on a hopeful…
A healthy list loses items as well as gaining them. Some leave because they are done and some because they did not survive the week. Both are normal.
If the only way something can leave your list is by being completed, the list can only grow, and every glance at it will feel worse than the last…
If deleting makes you anxious, do not delete. Keep two lists: a short one for this week, and a long one where things are safe but out of the way.
The anxiety is usually about losing the idea rather than about the task itself, and a separate holding list answers that. Nothing is gone, it is…
A pile is mostly decisions you have not made. You did not know what to do with the thing, so you put it down there to sort out later, and later has not arrived.
Read that way, tidying stops being about tidiness. The job is not moving things around, it is making forty small decisions you have been putting off.…
A task needs smoothing at both ends. If it looks big and horrible you will not begin it, and if the middle is full of snags you will not see it through.
These are two different problems and people usually only work on one. Making the start smaller helps you begin: open the document, write one line.…
Looking for a whole subject rather than a single practice? Start from the nine areas.