Get Everything Done

I'm a huge ran of ritual. This is actually one of the things perhaps causing me the most issue with my playing around with Mark's long list systems (NQ-FVP at the moment). A lot of rituals incorporate a sense of order, timing, and environment to them. You don't just "go to church whenever", but you have a specific time and place where you go, and it's the same as everyone else. Same for many classic rituals, like formal meals, tea time, theatre, and so forth. There is a flow and order to such things.

The issue I have with habit formation and routines in long lists right now is asking myself why it would be better for me to have potentially too much flexibility to do them whenever, when maybe the right thing is to ritualize them so that each thing I might want to habitualize not only is done every day or whatever, but is also done always in the same order, surrounded by the same other activities. Once you get this to a certain point, you have a scheduled routine for the whole day.

If you combine this with something like, say, Eat the Frog habits, then you're also doing your main project in a ritualized manner. Then you maybe batch a bunch of other non-routine thing that are almost always administration stuff. In that case, you've ritualized the processing of trivia to a specific time and place, and probably with a specific environment as well. At that point, what's the point of scanning through a list in some order? You've got the list, and you just go from top to bottom in the ordered ritual that you've created for your entire day.

Even interruptions might be able to have their due in such a system.

I see this as maybe slightly different than time blocking, since the point to me isn't how much time is spent, but the ritualized order in which things are done. Assuming that you get progressively more and more control over your habits, environment, and so forth, is that order really going to change so much from day to day that you have to recreate it from scratch every day?

Alan:

As for how ritual can be used as a mechanism to improve habits, I think there are a few things to leverage here. First, I'd say that you want to make things *very* concrete, actionable, and specific. You do the thing in just such and such a way, every time. As an example of a non-religious (kind of) ritual, look at the various tea ceremonies throughout the world, but especially the Japanese one or the Chinese "Gong Fu Cha".

Then, think order and isolation. The ritualistic element means that you are either doing the ritual, or you are not, and you're not doing anything else while the ritual is ongoing. You isolate yourself, your mind, and your space to that specific thing and only that thing. You establish a physical environment, mental environment, and specific order (routine/schedule) to the thing. The important thing is that is doesn't "happen when you feel like it" but rather, you do it because it's time to do it.

I think the overarching principle here is taking away as many elements of choice as possible. Then, ideally, as with real rituals that have stood the test of time, you don't just insert the ritual anywhere, but you surround the core of the ritual with preparatory and closing rituals that enter into the main ritual and out of it. Then you practice it, over and over again, precisely the same way each time. And even if you struggle to do it at all, you don't accept anything other than doing the thing for at least some amount of time. The analogy here is that you may not always be fully invested in whatever practice you're doing, but you don't just leave. You stay and do the thing for the amount you have set out to do it, even if you mostly do it poorly.

I'd say that would be my approach to it. I might also try to recruit other people to do the ritual with me, depending on what the ritual was, or someone with whom you can have accountability.