Renegade Yogi

Standards System

A while ago I talked about how I needed a standards system to structure my day. I promised to blog about it as I used it, but I never did. So I’m going to recap it here.

The first week went pretty well. Here’s my sheet at the end of the week:

As you can see, I missed three investment calls. But I did record everything every day. It felt a little overbearing to have all of that stuff to do. But I did it and benefited from it. Notice that at the bottom left, I wrote some things to add for next week.

Here’s the chart from week 2:

It all broke down here. Not only did I start missing more items (more X’s), I didn’t even do it or check anything Friday or after getting up on Thursday. Then the chart stood hanging on the wall for a month as a reminder of my failure, until I decided to take it down last week. Notice that the last day of that chart was January 29. Today is March 8.

I think it was just too much stuff. My day felt like there was too much crammed into it, even though most of the things could be done in a couple of hours. Perhaps it was just the “schedule a meeting” task, which is mostly outside of my control. It seems to have poisoned the rest of the system.

Last week I wanted to do an at-home yoga retreat (which was a success, by the way). I decided it would be a good way to revive my standards process. Here’s the chart from last week:

I did everything except blog on Friday (which I did the next morning). I also followed the system, which is more important to me right now. I want the system to get ingrained so that I can get into regular habits.

What’s interesting is that I did develop a couple of habits from the first two weeks of doing it. For several weeks after I stopped using the system, I would still wake up at 8 and go to bed at 12. I don’t really do that anymore. And I don’t know if it’s really what I want. I didn’t feel more productive because I was awake earlier. But it is definitely a useful thing to correct extreme sleeping patterns (or lack thereof).

It’s Monday, now, so I should come up with another one. I think I’ll put a theme on it, like Jake does. (Jake Lodwick is the one who inspired me to do this). His system is now up to 7 pages. Too much for me, but he’s been evolving it for a while. Who knows what mine would look like in a few months. By the way, you should check out his app for generating those pages called We Have Standards.