Look Inside My Crazed Daily Mind

In the last two weeks, we’ve been on a bit of a journey together.

First, I told you about how I went from being an “ideas person” who never got anything done – to actually accomplishing things consistently. It was all about building habits, and recognizing that habits follow this framework:

Trigger
Action
Reward

Second, I broke down how Destiny 2 uses habit loops effectively to keep the game interesting, and you interested. Through a combination of clear goals, smooth ramp-up, visual and audio cues, plus excellent rewards – playing Destiny 2 is a crazy enjoyable experience if you get yourself into the loop.

Today, I want to bring it all together and walk you through how I’ve used the knowledge of how habit loops work and how they’re used in Destiny 2 in order to create my own indestructible method.

With the knowledge you’ll gain through this article, you should be able to take the concepts I’ve created and utilize them to build your own method. If you’ve read all three articles, you’ll be fully equipped to go from stalling on your own ideas, to consistently getting them done.

So, let’s get to it.

The Calendar

For my entire life, I’ve loathed calendars. I’m not good at them – in fact I’m downright bad at them. For me, calendars only work for connecting with other people. For keeping me organized, on task, and on time? They’re completely useless.

But, because calendars are all over our lives (from “daily planners” as a kid to Google Calendar now), I always tried to use one.

I also always failed.

I’ve also tried:

Todoist
Google Tasks
Apple Reminders
Evernote
OneNote
Asana
Outlook tasks
GTD
Wunderlist
Trello
Every type of “todo list” under the sun
Prioritized lists

They all failed for me. Every. Single. One.

I’d start frazzled, realizing I “needed a system” to keep myself aligned and my life together. So, I’d pick up the latest new idea or app, throw my life into it, and then 1-2 weeks later I’d have somehow quit, forgotten, or messed up my system such that it wasn’t salvageable.

Eventually I got pretty desperate and felt I was mostly broken. I just couldn’t get my act together, no matter what I tried.

Until, I ran across this video:

Now, I have no idea if I have ADHD or not – but this video (and the other 2 related Bullet Journal videos by “How to ADHD“) blew my mind.

At first, I thought the Bullet Journal would be my thing. It started that way – but it’s not, not 100%. For me, the Bullet Journal concept is a great jumping off point, but it’s difficult to find something I identify with in it when the community surrounding it is mostly highly organized, artistic, and almost nothing like me and my needs.

It’s great, I’m sure, just not me! Even the structure of the Bullet Journal – with the icons and indexes and migrating – the rules kept getting in the way for me.

Which is why part of that video from How to ADHD rocked my brain.

She points out, about mid-way through the video (and in other videos) that at the end of the day, the Bullet Journal is exactly what you make of it.

I took that to heart, really deeply.

For me, that means literally every page is a blank slate. If I wake up on a Tuesday and want to throw out the entire system I’m about to share with you, I’m free to do so. Any day, every day, can be organized and put together however I want it.

Therefore, my journal evolves naturally. I can experiment and try new ideas any time. I can keep what I like and ditch what I don’t, any time – and there’s no remorse or “feeling like I’m doing it wrong” because there is absolutely no correct method.

That opened up a whole new world for me, and actually got me organized. What I’m about to share with you is how I operate and organize this journal today – it’s not exactly how I did it six months ago. I probably won’t do it exactly the same next year.

So, I’m going to tell you what I use and how I do it – but I enthusiastically encourage you to steal all the ideas that resonate with you and ditch the ones that don’t.

Seriously, and do it with no remorse.

I keep my own personal Bullet Journal with me every day. I use a Lechtrum 1917 dotted notebook, and one black and one green artist’s pen. None of those details matter – but I figured you might be curious. I don’t use the specific “Bullet Journal” version of the notebook – I don’t care.

And, based on the habit loops in Destiny 2, this is the method I follow to keep my life in order…

The Method

Remember we’re looking for 3 specific things

Trigger
Action
Reward

I run my life out of this book as many days as I can humanly remember to do it. When things get too chaotic, inevitably its because I haven’t used the book for a day or two.

So, my initial trigger to run my life is usually just keeping the book on me. If the book isn’t near me, something feels off. Kind of like how you have the tick to check your smartphone every 10ish minutes – I’ve kept my notebook with me long enough to train myself to check it when I finish a task or when I don’t know what I should be doing next.

Every day, at the end of my work day and just before bed, I define the next day’s actions on a single page. In the Destiny 2 metaphor – these are my daily bounties.

These tasks need to be small enough that I can take care of them easily – usually in a few minutes – most importantly it doesn’t require much brain power. If the task remotely stresses me out or I think about procrastinating it, that’s my trigger to break the task up into smaller bits. I procrastinate usually because I either fear an outcome or don’t have enough mental energy to follow through.

If it’s the latter, procrastination is 100% solved by breaking up the task into ridiculously easy chunks. Remember, I have tasks when I write books and articles like “open laptop”. No task can be too small or ridiculous enough when fighting procrastination.

That looks something like this:

Every week, I outline the major events of my week on a single page. I list out the days of the week, give space to write some events, and essentially put any seriously major events from my work calendar and my wife and I’s combined calendar.

Usually I’ll outline some high-level goals that I want to hit during the week, and I’ll break these down into each of their individual sub-tasks as I create each day of the week.

In the Destiny 2 metaphor, these weekly pages are my personal quests. They’re bigger things to hit than daily bounties and therefore require more effort and management, but they’re not crazy or feel unattainable.

Beyond that, I bust out into bigger individual projects. I maintain a list of projects I want to accomplish with a priority order to it. I don’t allow myself to start one project without finishing another, unless there’s something I can truly accomplish simultaneously (like, I can write a book and read one too – but I shouldn’t write a book and create a course at the same time).

Each of these projects is initially broken down into smaller tasks in their own separate area, and usually these individual tasks are migrated and made even smaller where I cover my daily stuff – I live out of the daily pages.

In the Destiny 2 metaphor – these things are my exotic quests. These projects are my personal lifesblood, keep me personally motivated and pushing my own limits and boundaries all the time. None of them are easy, they often need deadlines that trickle down into my weekly plans and incremental tasks that trickle down into my daily plans.

Just like Destiny 2 – you have a lot of work to do on exotic quests and they’re usually larger versions of all the tasks that go on in regular quests and bounties.

My Project List

The Real Magic

This may seem like the method of a crazy organized psychotic person – and you could be right or wrong, I have no idea.

But, when I get it all out and onto paper (out of my head), I’m literally more relaxed, cognizant, aware, and attentive. If I don’t do this, I turn into a living ball of crap and get mentally overwhelmed. It is what it is.

You may be wondering at this point how this accurately follows

Trigger
Action
Reward

And, it’s real simple.

The trigger is time. I do this every day, I keep my notebook with me at almost all times. When it’s the end of the day, I fill out the next day and when I complete a task, I look at my notebook for the next one.
The action is literally anything in that book. My one rule is, if it’s not in the book, I shouldn’t be doing it (either that, or it should be in the book). The exception is leisure time, which I don’t outline.
The reward was surprising to me, but it’s simple – when the tasks are completed, I cross them off and track completion. When this is done over multiple days, the book looks cool. It looks like I’m productive, it’s a pretty green and black color, and it’s very satisfying. I didn’t expect that, but it’s proof that your rewards don’t need to be complicated!

The final magic that I stole straight from Destiny 2 is this: I track completion in everything.

I cross off tasks in green as I do them. I cross off projects the same way. If I ditch a task or a project, it gets crossed off in black.

But, most importantly, everything gets a progress bar.

For whatever reason, I’ve found the most “addictive” thing in Destiny 2 to be that damn progress bar which tracks your activities. More often than not, I say to myself

“Oh man, the progress bar is at 92% – surely I can play 10 more minutes and fill it up to 100%!”

45 minutes later, I was right, and perhaps I did some additional things too.

So, I recognized this and applied it to my notebook. I don’t get everything done every day (I don’t force myself to) but that damn progress bar encourages those last few steps like you wouldn’t believe. If that progress bar only has 2-3 tasks left, I want to fill that bar green badly.

Summing it Up

This article is a bit of a mammoth – but I hope you find it eye opening for you. Here’s the few things you definitely need to remember:

Ideas turn into action when you build systematic habits
Habits are built on the framework of trigger, action, reward
Games like Destiny 2 use this concept to keep you engaged and interested, so does things like social media (open the app, make a post, get a like or view)
You can use this loop and information to your own personal advantage
I do it by building my own journal, starting with ludicrously small tasks going all the way up to my biggest dream projects
My personal journal has zero rules – I usually do the same thing repeatedly, but anything goes
Most importantly, you can definitely succeed at this, and you should do it in your own way

It took me years to figure this out and build it into something I use all the time. I still want to blow the whole process up semi-regularly, but with a no-rules journal, I’m free to do that. I use what works, I ditch what doesn’t.

Now, it’s your turn to take this information and build something that works for you. I’m excited to see what you come up with! If you stick to it, share it with me! I’d love to hear about it.