Habits

The dashboard lights in a car indicate when something might be going wrong and gives us an opportunity to prevent a more severe breakdown.

In my middle and high school days, long before learning about the benefits of minimalism, I used to do this thing that my mother lovingly(?) referred to as a “quick clean”.

[Read more…] about How Minimalism Helps You Create A Personal Dashboard

Anthony’s Note: This is a guest post by Courtney Carver, from Be More With Less. I had a great video chat with her about her message, and her new book, Soulful Simplicity, which just came out at the end of December. Feel free to watch the video below and then enjoy her post on morning routines.

If your mornings have turned to mush and your snooze button, coffee, and everyone else comes first, it’s time to reclaim your mornings. Don’t you feel better when you start your day with intention and direction instead of chaos and distraction?Without a consistent morning routine you might …

[Read more…] about A Morning Routine Can Change Your Day (or your whole life)

Most people overestimate what they can do in a day and underestimate what they can do in a lifetime.

In the spring of 2013, a massive storm swept through Minneapolis that left thousands of trees ripped from the ground.

Roads across the city were blocked by decades-old giants that stood dozens of feet tall. I had never seen anything like it in the midwest.

That was one week before the sale closed on our first house.

A week later, on the day of the closing, we picked up the keys to our new home and excitedly drove over to check everything out. At that point, many of the fallen trees in our neighborhood had been chopped into neat piles on the lawn extension in front of the houses.

Having a two car garage at our new house (and only one car to put in it) had my head swirling around the possibilities of a wood shop in the other half of the garage. I love working with my hands and the idea of working with wood again felt exciting.

So about a block away from our house we pulled the car over and picked up this giant section of tree trunk. I figured it would be fun to make something out of it as it’s not exactly easy to get chunks of wood that big on a regular basis. Funny enough, you can see the closing documents on the front passenger seat in this photo.

It was half a miracle that I was even able to get it up into the car and another half miracle that I didn’t break my back in the process.

After placing the trunk on blocks in the corner of the garage, we went about our business and I took to the internet to do some research.

That trunk was part of a pretty big, living tree just a few days earlier so the wood was completely green. In order to start working with it, I’d need to wait for the wood to dry out completely and I wasn’t sure how long that was supposed to take.

After a bit more research, I found out that it would take nearly four years for the trunk to reach the point where I could actually start to do anything with it. I left it in the corner of the garage, slightly annoyed, with that amount of time seeming impossibly far away and wondering why I should even bother keeping it.

—

Well, that was four years ago. Today there’s a gigantic, dry, ready to carve piece of wood in my garage.

Three years ago, in November of 2014 I wrote my first blog post here on Break the Twitch.

Both of that post’s readers seemed to enjoy it, I think.

Today, thousands of people read articles on this site every week.

In January of 2017 I started writing a 17,000 word book.

It took me almost a year to do, despite many authors writing 60,000 word books in that time, my book is done.

—

Have you ever thought back to something you started doing, but burned out and decided to stop?

A hobby you picked up but your expectations were too high or you beat yourself up over not seeing much progress right away?

Do you ever wonder where you might be if only you had kept going?

I’ve wondered that enough times in my life that finally I decided I didn’t want to wonder anymore. And you can make the same decision for yourself as well.

All you have to do is slow down, and keep going.

1 / Be kind to yourself, breathe

Even if you’ve let something go for a few years, let yourself be okay with that. You’re here now and there’s really nothing that shaming yourself will help you accomplish from here.

Whether it’s the process of decluttering your home, writing a blog, getting in shape, or saving for a trip, it’s okay that you stopped and it’s perfectly fine to continue onward, even if things seem worse off than when you started.

2 / Define success differently

Success isn’t an amount of money you make, the number of likes a photo gets, or anything but how you feel about the things you do.

It’s perfectly natural to take breaks, have long pauses in life, as things tend to work in cycles. Perhaps success looks like pulling out the paint brushes after six months of them being hidden in a drawer, that’s for you to define.

3 / Let time help do the work for you

If something seems like it’s going to take a long time, don’t let that discourage you from taking action. If I had not bothered holding onto that giant tree trunk four years ago, I would not have a dried piece of wood in my garage today.

If there’s something you’d rather be doing, that’s fine, but don’t let the fact that something might take a long time discourage you from doing it to begin with. The time will pass whether we like it or not and the time will come before we know it—it’s worth getting started now and seeing what happens.

Most of the time, we think in terms of days, months, and years.

No matter where you are in life, if you’re reading this, you more than likely have many years to let small frequent actions reward you with incredible results. There are very few circumstances where you should not start or pick something back up, just because of the time it may take.

A few years from now, what will you look back on and be glad that you kept doing?

Anthony’s Note: This is a guest post by Angela, from Setting My Intention, where she focuses on intentional change and developing healthy habits in the midst of daily life. Follow along with her on Facebook and Twitter.

Everyone loves a good story—especially when it involves a massive transformation.

I’m a sucker for those movie sequences where the main character transforms in front of our eyes and changes from down and out to downright prosperous.

[Read more…] about How to Transform Your Life Without A Fairy Godmother

We’re using smartphones and other mobile devices more than ever before, and there is no shortage of evidence. The vast majority, 81% of us, now own a smartphone. Take a look at any place where people have to wait: stoplights, bus stops, checkout lines, and restaurants. There’s no sign that this trend is reversing—despite the fact that high levels of screen time have been shown to have substantial negative effects.

• The mere presence of your smartphone is reducing your cognitive capacity.
• Over-dependence on smartphones leads to user stress and is correlated to psychological traits including loss of control, social interaction anxiety, and materialism.
• There’s a strong link between the amount of time teens spend looking at screens and how sad they feel.

Along with that, who knows what issues we’ll see surface over the next decade as the technology we use is forced to become even more addictive in order to compete in today’s attention marketplace.

Here are some pretty alarming statistics about mobile devices that show you where things are now, and where we’re headed.

1 / The average person receives 63.5 notifications per day (Telefonica, 2014).

2 / 52% check their phones a few times per hour or more, whether there’s a notification or not (Gallup, 2015).

3 / Meanwhile, 91% of millennials say they have a healthy relationship with tech, but still check their phones 150 times per day (Qualtrics, 2017).

4 / It’s not just millennials, though. 52% of boomers use their phones during meal times, the highest percentage of any age group (Nielsen, 2015) and mobile use spans across all generations (Smart Insights, 2019).

5 / The average smartphone user in the U.S. spends around 4 hours per day on mobile devices (eMarketer, 2019).

6 / During which, the average user touches, swipes, and taps their phone 2,617 times per day (King University Online, 2017).

7 / The average age when kids get their first cell phone is now just 10.3 years old (Influence Central, 2016).

8 / 74% of mobile users ages 18 – 34 report an urge to immediately pull out their phone or open an app when bored (ComScore, 2017).

9 / The creators of the Facebook “Like” button substantially limit their own social media usage, and the guy that literally wrote the book about designing addictive smartphone apps has his home internet shut off on an automatic timer every evening (Guardian, 2017).

The question I can’t help but ask is: where will we draw the line for the role technology plays in our lives?

With each new innovation, will we allow ourselves to be pulled into every new offering some incremental solution to a problem we may or may not actually have?

Are we okay with voice-controlled convenience (not having to get up to turn off a light), in exchange for a device that listens to our every word and exploits those private conversations to algorithmically determine how to sell us more shit?

Is it okay for our coffee machine to automatically order more single-serving coffee cups when it senses the reserves are low, regardless of what the price is at that moment?

How much of our privacy, attention, and control are we willing to give up in exchange for convenience?

I’m certainly not saying that all technology is bad and should be banished from our lives. But it sure is hard to look at the above statistics and say we don’t need to ask ourselves some of these questions.

While it’s easy to feel like so much of this is out of our control, that if we want to “keep up” with modern life we need to accept every new technology as it comes, we can make a conscious choice—and that’s what I want to help you with.

It’s time to take a step back from our mobile devices…

…and seriously consider the answers to the questions above. But you can’t do that while you’re in the thick of it.

You have to step out of the digital noise. Pause and assess what role your mobile devices should be playing in your life.

You need a digital detox.

Consider this your invitation to join me for a seven-day digital detox, where we’ll focus on one small but impactful action each day.

Each step will only take a few minutes of your time. Going through the series will help bring more clarity around how you want to interact with your devices going forward.

To participate, sign up below and I’ll send you a welcome email with the next steps. See you there?