Everyday Systems Podcast: Recent Episodes
Reinhard Engels
Make language learning a habit, not a goal. No app, no book, no $$$, just 10 minutes a day of talking to yourself.
No S not quite doing the trick? Intelligent dietary defaults are a safe way to layer a little more on top — without piling on extra rules and risking the habits you've already built. They make convenience your friend instead of your enemy. A revisit of one of my oldest systems, with eight battle-tested examples.
My 7th annual review covers just the highlights from 33 total systems: How color-coded spreadsheets changed my behavior more than goal-setting, fine-tuning Glass Ceiling with precision drink accounting, the Spider Hunter sleep expansion pack, and gamifying my rage at Duolingo.
For the 100th episode, a clip show of course—in which I revisit Mantrafication and share an actual full clip of my current mantra. Part tour of all the systems compressed and contained in that mantra, part useful tool you could use yourself.
Specific rules and a general approach for managing your relationship with technology -- battle hardened by over 20 years of practice.
How to stop permasnacking on news. Use techniques inspired by the No S Diet and read it like a meal.
Urban Ranger, from scratch, as if I’d never spoken or written about it before. Draft chapter for the upcoming Everyday Systems Compendium, and hopefully interesting and useful in its own right.
The No S Diet, from scratch, as if I’d never spoken or written about it before. Draft chapter for the upcoming Everyday Systems Compendium, and hopefully interesting and useful in its own right.
Build habits by leaning on the clock and calendar rather than fighting against them. Beyond N and S days. Cutesy task phrases. Powerfully silly times. Calendar-First Tasking.
I think I mix about 14 metaphors in this episode: We’ve got a goose-stepping white bear baseball player with devil horns doing jiu jitsu on the death star. A ridiculous Chimera, if you put it all together. But maybe just the guardian-gargoyle image you need to keep the antimantras at bay.
Anxious? Here's a fun technique for getting over it. It's halfway between gamified mindfulness and exposure therapy.
Aristotle: "You are what you repeatedly do." Well, what do you repeatedly do? In this episode, an exercise for finding out.
Food logging: apparently it works. But it's torture to do long term. I discuss a way you can practice a limited, strategic, surgical form of food logging with the No S Diet (or any other diet) that gives you the benefits of food logging – which are real, potentially at least – without the protracted and probably futile misery.
After 20 years of swinging my sledgehammer injury-free, I discovered that that even Shovelglove can cause or at least be impacted by injury. How Shovelglove principles like "schedulalistically insignificant time "and "maintenance is more important that progress" have been key to my recovery.
After 20 years of swinging my sledgehammer injury-free, I discovered that that even Shovelglove can cause or at least be impacted by injury. How Shovelglove principles like "schedulalistically insignificant time "and "maintenance is more important that progress" have been key to my recovery.
Be a Mensch, not a rockstar. It's surprisingly hard, even though you probably don't have any alternative.
Meta Systems are systems for managing other systems: to track and boster them. Personal Punchcards, The Life Log, Mantrafication, and Loose Lips Sink Ships.
Soul systems are systems for detaching yourself from the frenzy of everyday life to reflect, for learning, for recovering, for devoting more of your limited time to what’s important, for figuring out what’s important to begin with. Systems discussed include: Audiodidact. The Study Habit. Demogorgon vs. Asmodeus, Timebox Lord, G-Ray Vision, VC Cat, Posifactive and Weekend Luddite.
2021 was miserable in most respects, but it’s been another fantastic opportunity to test the true mettle of Everyday Systems. Part 1 reviews Body and Spirits systems: The No S Diet, Shovelglove, Urban Ranger, Lawful Good Biker, Glass Ceiling, Low Smoking.
A helpful image from WWII propaganda to keep you from sabotaging your self-improvement efforts with premature talk.
All the self-help books ever written distilled into one word, with a note of enlightened self-mockery that makes the whole thing bearable:
How pandemic proof are the Everyday Systems? A quick review of 14 systems and how they are holding up.
How to ingore both of the evil voices in your head and attain comic detachment from your psychomachia.
Reflect on what is giving you trouble with your self improvement system. Write a contract with yourself on a 4*6 index card. Record yourself speaking it. Listen to this recorded mantra every day.
No S for the soul?
14-Year Jubilee updates on 8 "spiritual" systems: Weekend Luddite, Audiodidact, Chain of Self-command, Low Smoking, G-Ray Vision, Monthly Resolution, Lawful Good Biker and The Study Habit
It's been 14 years now since everyday systems first went online in 2002. And I think that significant anniversary deserves some kind of acknowledgement. So I think what I'm going to do to observe this is give a kind of "state of the systems" check-in episode, a brief tour of how all the everyday systems are still working for me, -- whether they're still working for me -- how I notice they're working for other people, and any additional insights I might have about them
Are my low podcast production values good enough to produce an audiobook? You be the judge! For this episode, an experimental reading of Chapter 1 of the No S Diet book. Let me know if a few tweaks here and there might do the trick, or if I had better rethink this whole project.
Habit is powerful. But is it always the answer? Is there room for one-time, decisive actions in the realm of self-improvement? I think there is -- but perhaps not quite where you expect it.
In which the subtle but crucial difference between S-days and Cheat Days is expounded upon.
Long term planning with index cards is back! You can now capture your entire life strategy, operations, and tactics in three index cards.
The "what the hell" effect sounds funny but it can seriously screw you up. How can everyday systems practitioners defend against it?
Hate your S-days because they make you feel out of control? Here's a mod to help you enjoy them again.
Change your biker-alignment to Lawful Good. Be flamboyantly, comically observant of traffic rules.
Shovelglove without the sledgehammer. Or at least, without making the
sledgehammer a requirement.
How to roll your own everyday system from scratch. Introducing the idea of Systematic Moderation.
Want to modify an Everyday System? It's possible -- but risky, as this episode emphasizes. Subtitled: "In Praise of Vanilla."
Feel like over the top S-days are undoing all your hard work during the week? Here's how to diagnose and correct this problem.
How well do I practice what I preach? What level of compliance is necessary for big picture success? What's the hardest everyday system? I attempt to answer these questions in my first annual self performance review.
Just as your daily task list should fit on a single 3x5 index card (see Chain of Self Command and Personal Punch Cards), your life strategy should fit on an single 8x11 sheet of paper.
You may think you know the answer to this already -- or at least, the answer I am going to give you. But you're probably wrong. Because it's not a sledgehammer. Or even a sledgehammer with a sweater wrapper around it. It's a timer.
I've been asked to talk about the top five health and fitness books I've read. Unfortunately I don't think I've read that many health and fitness books in my entire life, and they certainly weren't all worth recommending. So I'm going to have to narrow it down to four. And I'll be cheating a little because one of them hasn't even been published yet.
90% of our increased calorie consumption since 1977 has come from snacking. So snacking is not only the biggest problem in terms of dietary excess, it is almost the entire problem.
Talk to yourself -- and record it. Why? Autotherapy. Catch all those great ideas that would have gotten away otherwise. Nag yourself into doing impossible tasks. Keep an even-keel diary that reflects a broader range of experience. Give serious books the serious attention they require.
No time to read? Hate mindless but necessary chores? Solve both problems at once by listening to audiobooks while you do housework.
Consolidate well-understood routine tasks into compound tasks. Break up poorly understood novel tasks into more atomic components.
Convenience is stronger than you are. Accept this fact. But with a little planning, the convenient thing doesn't have to be too awful. Case in point: "optimize your oatmeal."
Moderation isn't mushy. Learn from extremists by drawing hard lines -- just draw them in different places. Get the clarity of cold turkey abstinence without the sweeping deprivation.
No time to exercise? Get philosophical. Use enlightened self-mockery, a neo-Kantian personal categorical imperative, and an existential leap of action to get you moving.
How to use index cards for todo lists at the three scales of the chain of command: daily, monthly, yearly.
Organize your self improvement efforts on three temporal scales: year=general, month=officer, day=footsoldier.
A month is a much better granularity than the more typical yearly resolution we make on new years, because you can estimate better on that smaller scale, and recover and reset faster. And it's long enough (over 21 days!) for some habituation to occur, even with a slip up or two.
Limit your celebratory eating to the holidays themselves. Adjust your expectations so that your goal is mere maintenance. If you screw up, don't wait till new years to get back on the wagon.
One thing that every self help guru can agree on is that you have to have an arbitrary number in your system. It is a little weird that the most rational concepts we have available to us -- numbers -- are so irrationally inspiring. But it clearly is the case.
Strictness builds habit faster. Dumb down what to be strict about with "fence around the law." Avoid punishment and reparations.
Use the full habit traffic light for 21 days to build your habit, then switch to more efficient negative tracking.
Need to keep track of something? Keep track of behavior, not results, with the Habit Traffic Light. Mark each calendar day with green for success, red for failure, yellow for exempt (S-days). It's cheap and keeps you focused on what you can control.
Want results? Frame your goals in terms of behavior. Results goals are just wishful thinking. Automate conscious behaviors into unconscious habits.
Smooth out dangerous and humiliating binge drinking into moderate and pleasurable moderate drinking with a 2 drink a day "glass ceiling."
For every labor saving device there seem to be at least two time consuming devices to soak up all that freed time again. As T.S. Eliot put it, we are "distracted by distraction from distraction." Weekend Luddite is a system that addresses (at least in part) this problem of distraction management.
Reimagine yourself so that walking becomes the most important, the most exciting thing you could possibly be doing.
14 minutes is one minute less than the smallest unit of schedulistically significant time. No calendar has a finer granularity than 15 minutes. No one ever has a meeting that starts at 9:05 or 9:14. You have no excuse not to do this. Time-wise, it doesn't even register.
Take a sledgehammer and wrap an old sweater around it. This is your "shovelglove." Every week day morning, set a timer for 14 minutes. Use the shovelglove to perform shoveling, butter churning, wood chopping and other motions until the timer goes off. Stop. Rest on weekends and holidays
Last week I gave a high level overview of the no s diet to give you a sense of how something this simple could possibly work. This week I'm going to zoom in a little to a smaller scale and go over each of the rules in a bit of detail.