One of the actions that has made the largest impact on my life is my old-school notebook.
I learned this trick in my twenties from a mentor — shout out Nickodemus. Every day I would get a lined notebook and write down what needed to be done, large and small. Then I would stack rank them by what was most important. If something didn’t get done that day, it moved to the next day. Each page was dated and broken into what needed to be completed by me and by my business partner. That way I could always stay focused, and nothing fell between the cracks.
Over the years I added and changed things to better suit my work and my personal life. Now my Moleskine is never far away.
What’s on the page
At the top is always the date.
Then my non-negotiables, titled Dailys. These are the tasks I really try to do every single day, even if it’s just for a few minutes. Learning a new language. Fitness. Writing this book, in fact, came from this.
Top left is Goals — what needs to be done, personally and professionally. I write them in whatever order they pop into my head, but that’s because I’ve done this so long I don’t need to stack rank anymore. I’m also not afraid to do uncomfortable tasks. So I just sort of know which ones to tackle in which order. That took time and experience.
Below that is Insights, where I write down my current insightful thoughts and anything I’m trying to stay focused on. I find — and the data backs this up — that whatever we set our intention to tends to happen. And the way I set intention is by writing it down by hand, each day, in a notebook.
What I added inside
When I was in prison I added a couple of things.
I added my workouts and my food, so I could track my results. That made a huge difference in my training and kept me far more focused on progress. It’s a great way to remove motivation from the equation — motivation fades with time — and focus instead on building the habits that get me where I want to go.
The After Action Report
At Lompoc I also started tracking my mental health, which is incredibly powerful.
Every day I filled out a section called the AAR — After Action Report. I scored the day out of ten and wrote two or three sentences about how it went. What was good, what was bad, what I could improve. Did I mess up my diet? Did I skip tracking my workout? Was I ill? Did I skip my reading and watch TV instead?
And the good things — I tracked those too. Every time I wrote a letter on behalf of someone else, helped them with reading or writing or filling out a medical form, I noted it.
There were plenty of days I hated myself. Days filled with anger, self-pity and destructive thoughts. Those are the ugly, dark thoughts you don’t share with anyone. We all have them, some worse than others. But I would have days where those thoughts crept in and made camp. I needed to track not so much what I was thinking about, but how I felt about it — and score it.
What the data showed me
Then I could see what I did that affected my score. What did I eat? Did I hit that workout? Did I do my language flash cards?
Here’s the big one: did I help people?
What I started to notice was that on the days I helped people and got my fitness in, my mental health was stronger. The more of those boxes I could hit, the better I felt, mentally and physically.
When the day goes to hell
There’s a but coming.
Even in prison, where every day is the same, things come up and your plans go to hell. Not beating myself up about it — and just rolling into the next day — made a big difference in my mental health, and frankly in my desire to keep at it at all.
After a few months I had pages of trend data on how my fitness, learning, helping and mental state were holding up. I could correlate it against the output I wanted. Each day got easier, ever so slowly.
Because the data guided my decisions, even on the days I didn’t want to make them.
Next chapter: I’m Not Nice. I’m Kind. →
If the dark thoughts in this one sound familiar and they are not passing, please talk to someone. In the US you can call or text 988 for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, any time, for free.