Don’t break the chain
I like reading fiction and non fiction books but with increasing commute time and every day errands, finding time to read books was non existent. It was very very tough to read even one book in a year. I was talking to a friend about this and he said, you need a Seinfeld calendar. I thought it was a cool calendar app with some intelligence to help you get some things done.
When I read about it, I found it to be a simple powerful concept. All I have to do was have a calendar to mark that I am doing a recurring activity everyday irrespective of how busy I was. The idea was not to break the chain of tick marks on the calendar every day. This was how Jerry Seinfeld managed to create a good comedy show, he wrote at least one joke a day. I tried this with a reading a novel, planned to read only 10 pages a day which roughly took me about 10–15 mins a day. I kept marking this on the calendar, when I saw a nice chain of tick marks in the calendar I felt I should never break this.
I ended up reading more books in a year than I used to hunt for unbroken time for reading. I followed the same for the blogs, I used the wordpress archive widget as my Seinfeld calendar, I made sure I write at least once every month to make a calendar entry, this way I ended with 6 years of continuous blogging. It did not matter if I had people reading or not, it was about starting something and sustaining. Try for anything you want to start new, don’t break the chain and see the improvements you get over time without spending too much mind space.
