The power of daily rituals (2021)

Every morning for the past 14 months or so I've sat down at my desk with a cup of coffee and spent ~20 minutes writing out a page of thoughts in my Hobonichi Techo journal with my trusty Pilot Metropolitan fountain pen. I try to write plainly and honestly about whatever pops into my head, and before I know it, I'm done.

It hasn't been super life changing, but I do enjoy doing it. Sometimes during the course of the day I'll think back about an aspiration I had that morning, and actually do something I might not have done otherwise.

About a year into this practice my hand started hurting a bit, so I've slowly trained myself to write using the muscles in my arm and shoulder rather than moving the muscles in my hand. My handwriting quality took a nose-dive in the short term, but my hand stopped hurting and I have moments now where my cursive looks nearly as good as it used to.

I used to play Counterstrike competitively, and it's become commonly known that pre-match routines can help a lot with consistency. Often something as simple as warming up for 30 minutes in an offline server with bots.

Some of the benefits are physical, you're literally warming up the muscles in your hand and arm, but it also has psychological benefits. If for instance you're nervous about the upcoming match, going through the warmup puts your mind in a context of "alright, we've done this a thousand times before, nothing new, just got to go through the motions". It also removes noise from your mind as your attention is going into the warmup instead of overthinking the task ahead.

I think there's a predictive phenomenon in the brain which primes us for activities when the precursors are present. For instance, working at home versus at the office - my experience has been that the simple act of physically going to the office puts me in a better emotional state to get to work than staying at home, almost like during that process it's killed the tasks associated with home and booted up the ones associated with work.

Show and tell daily helpful rituals? Here's mine:

I shower before bed and put out my clothes for the next day before bed. When I wake up, I roll out of bed into a predetermined outfit and not have to waste precious pre-coffee clock cycles picking one out.

1. make coffee

2. sun isn't out yet, so read a book for a while

3. make second coffee as it starts to get lighter outside

4. walk in the garden with second cup of coffee

5. fire up my computer and start checking messages

My work ritual every morning:

1. Power on laptop (it is powered off every day at 5 PM).

2. Log into VPN.

3. Log into Okta.

4. Log into AWS accounts, one per container (about 7 or 8).

5. Log into Docker Desktop.

6. Log into AWS CLI to get daily credentials.

The whole thing takes about 3-4 minutes. A former colleague referred to this as my "mise en place", or my daily arranging of my working environment. Like the article suggests, I find this offers me a "centering" before I open my email, calendar and missed chat messages and get started for the day.

n=1 but they help me hit flow states. almost like they provide 'context' before x, helping me to 'prepare' (or be ready?), filter out the noise, focus. similar in group setting - shared context.

i suppose could be 'placebo' but would it matter if the result is what i want, and i can't easily attain it other ways?

i do feel it is somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy - i am essentially practicing something so getting better at it. not enough reason though to 'practice' an alternative, at least for me personally.

This article sounds like it's written from the perspective of alien artificial intelligences discovering humanity

friction makes rituals stick. if opening instagram takes 2 seconds instead of zero, that pause is where the ritual lives. you notice the choice instead of autopilot. works for building good habits too - the slowdown creates space for intention

I always feel a little jealous of religious people when they do these things.

I guess us secularised, atomised people should just make our own.

Broke up into 2 groups, the first asked to perform some ritual vs the control.

The control were actually placed in what my high school described as detention. Sit still and relax for 30 minutes.

Did they measure how much rituals chill you out or how much stewing in your own juices for 30 mins makes you uncomfortable?

walk my dog for 45 minutes then make breakfast for my kid