I’m a little late (by 3 Days) but for August and the rest of the year I am beginning a practice of 30 Day Experiments. For this month, I am experimenting with setting a daily writing habit in writing a short story. I am also looking into documenting and structuring my support tech systems. And thirdly, as a bonus I am also setting myself the task to really nut down on my branding.
The 30 Day Experiments Practice
The 30 Day Experiment practice is purchasable as an ecourse (or a wiki page) called a Field Guide, and a Notion.so template. All of it is delivered via Notion, so you don’t need to go outside of this to learn about habit setting. The system comes from @evielync. Ev Chapman is the creator of several free notion templates and systems, but the 30-Day Experiments Guide and Notion Tracker is one of her few paid for systems. Only costing $9, you get a whole ecourse page explaining the system, plus the tracking template with a couple of databases. You can set your experiment up, then on a daily basis document note towards your progress.
To use this system you will need to have a Notion account. If you don’t already, then signup for a free Notion account, sign in to Notion, then purchase the 30 Day Experiments collection and duplicate it.
The 30 Day Experiments provides a less stressful and holistic way of attempting to set up new habits. I like the concept of this – to look on setting out habits as an experiment – some will succeed over the 30 days, some may not. But as the Field Guide says, forget will-power, this system crowds out bad habits by helping us set enjoyable experiments in good habits. Choosing your first experiment starts with identifying a singular focus area – for those of us who may set out a year with one focus word or area, this fits. The general areas already found within the templates are career, health and family, but you can add your own.
The 30 Day Experiments process is also a good way of bucketing down or blocking out a task period within your year. As a person who works on much longer projects (novels and design projects can take much much longer) it’s nice to have something enjoyable and personal to work on within a shorter but concise time frame.
I have, however, already broken this system by choosing three experiments, but in priority order: The first – writing a short story – is already in progress by two weeks, and it’s about taking that out to build a consistent daily writing habit for it over August. The second – to look at my own life systems and tech is what you see here, in this post about using notion.so and finding this particular experiment system. The third is part of a slow burn to develop this website and brand. As Sydney is currently on a very tough and long-winded Covid lockdown (or stay-at-home) I have more than ample sitting-at-home time to put some hours towards all of these.
When you first go into the tracker template in Notion, there is already a couple of experiments in there. I overwrote one, but kept the other called Move 30 (a health focus area) just about as-is. I take the dogs for a walk around the park every day, and it’s vitally important to both my mental and physical health during this lockdown. Good for the dogs too.
To use this notion template to the fullest you do need some Notion knowledge. I also found adding a further property of image to each experiment card helped to enthuse me as a visual thinker.
- Checkout the pricing and signup to Notion here.
- The 30 Day Experiments Field Guide and Tracker – sales page
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