Seinfeld Calendar
Sunday, November 2nd, 2008
Not long ago I read an interesting article at lifehacker which described a method Jerry Seinfeld uses to stay motivated.
Basically the idea is this: To become good at something you need to do it over and over again. Practice makes perfect. To help motivate yourself to practice a skill every single day, mount a single page calendar displaying a full year on a wall. Every day you accomplish whatever goal you set yourself, circle that day on the calendar with a big red pen. After a week or two a nice chain starts to form. Your only job is to not break that chain. You must love that chain, and be super careful not to break it. As the chain lengthens, so does the desire not to break the chain.
I really like this idea and have been wanting to try it out for a while. There are some tools out there that will help you do this, like this one that will integrate nicely with your iGoogle home page. However, when it comes to organization I work better with non-digital tools. Being so late in the year I don’t want to buy a poster so I quickly made up an a4 calendar which you can download here.
If I feel the system is worthwhile I might make up another nicer calendar for 2009!
