Thread by @RonJeffries

I think people generally do the best they can at any given moment in time, given all the forces acting upon them. They give what they've got, and allocate it across all the demands they're facing.

And yet, we manage to improve. How does that happen?

1/10

We are constrained ... but [most of us] are not entirely constrained. We have a bit of freedom, a bit of leeway, a bit of choice.

We can choose to use a bit of that bit of time to change how we operate, maybe even just to change a habit.

2/10

An example would come in handy right about now. [cf @marick ]

@mhsutton starts his day with a bit of exercise, using less than 15 minutes of his leeway to improve his health (and his day).

That doesn't work for me. I've often thought that nothing would.

3/10

Until. My Apple Watch has these rings that you're supposed to complete, one of which requires 30 minutes of exercise.

I started by defining exercise as, roughly: "on my feet and my heart is beating", and using the watch to track essentially every moving moment I had.

4/10

It's easy to tap and start or stop the timer. Since the first of September, I've completed all three activity rings every day. Some days, it'll be late evening, and I still owe the damn thing ten minutes of exercise or something. It would be easy to let it slide.

5/10

But I sez to myself, I sez, "Today is not the day that I break the chain", and I get up and do 20 laps of the house or whatever it takes to get the minutes.

6/10

Mind you, I'm not running a marathon or scaling cliffs or anything very exciting. But I'm getting 30 minutes of exercise every day, and I ramp it up a bit more from boredom than from any sense of duty.

7/10

Mike and I both found tiny ways to improve our exercise habits, ways that, for us, don't require a big change or what feels to us like a giant burden.

What kind of other improvement could be done with a tiny first step?

8/10

We might write a book one paragraph per day (at first).
We might learn a language in 15 minutes a day (at first).
We might develop a TDD habit by starting with just one test.
We might ... [your idea here].

9/10

We're doing the best we can. And we can get a little improvement.

10/10