Output of: post the-small-habits-i-keep-on-rails
The small habits I keep on rails
Willpower is a bad scheduler. If a habit has to be decided every morning, I skip it about a third of the time. If it shows up as a Todoist task at 6:10 with a due time, I do it, because the friction of dismissing the notification is higher than the friction of doing the thing. That is the whole trick. The habits below are not special. The rails around them are.
What I do every day
- 20 push ups + 20 squats + 15 leg raises + 40 mountain climbers + 30s hollow hold, at 6:10.
- Take a multivitamin at 10:00.
- Read one post on daily.dev.
- 30 to 60 minutes of workout / running / cycling.
- A monkey-type round.
Todoist handles the scheduling. Recurring tasks for the habit stack; one-off tasks for anything that is not on rails yet.
What I would cut first
Ranked by return on the minute it costs me. If the week got crowded and I had to start pulling things out, this is the order.
- Keep. The 30 to 60 minute workout block. Biggest mood and energy lift of the day, and the only one that pays back into everything else.
- Keep. The 6:10 bodyweight stack. Tiny time cost, primes the day, and the streak matters more than the volume.
- Keep. Multivitamin. Cheap, zero friction, no reason to touch it.
- First to cut. daily.dev. It is the most passive item on the list, and the easiest to rationalise as "input" when I am really just scrolling.
- Second to cut. monkey-type. Fun, but if my keyboard speed were the bottleneck in my life I would already know.
When the rails break
Travel, illness, late nights, a deadline that eats the evening. The stack dies and pretending it did not makes it worse. The minimum viable version I fall back to:
- One walk, any length.
- Multivitamin.
- Skip everything else without negotiating with myself about it.
The goal on a bad day is not to run the program. It is to not break the identity. One tiny thing keeps the "I do this" label intact. Zero things starts a story about quitting.
The commitment
One new habit, starting with this post: one post per week, on Fridays. This blog is day one. The rules are the same as the rest of the stack. Todoist handles the scheduling. If I miss a Friday, the cadence header on /blog will tell on me. That is the point.
What success looks like
Three months from now, late July, the honest metric is not whether I hit every day. It is two things. Is the Friday post still going up. Is the workout block still showing a streak longer than two weeks. If both are true, the rails are working. If one breaks, the rails are wrong for the season, not the habits.