As you may know I’m setting myself new habits every month, my habit for February was to achieve one hundred press ups and I’m pleased to say that I’ve been able to stick with it and I am now on week 4, I had to repeat week 3 to pass it.

The habit I am setting for myself this month is to improve my posture and to start this I need to improve my stomach muscles and so the two hundred sit-ups training program seems like a useful way for me to achieve this.

I started on Sunday by doing the initial test and only managed 25 ‘good-form sit-ups’, however despite my initial poor result I qualified for the hardest path through the 1st week. Its the day after and I feel pretty good, it was hard work for me to complete the 5th set but I am looking forwards to an increased support from my middle (and maybe a slight reduction in tummy size).

Lots of people have recommended Pilates to me, as I have pulled muscles in my back before I suspect that I have relatively weak core stability so will try to get onto a class when I can.

I’ve previously posted about The Power of Less and how small habits add up over time so big challenges can be made easier to tackle. In that post I set out the 12 key habits Leo Babauta suggested as a way of getting started, but didn’t actually say what my habits would be only that I would be swapping in things that made sense to me.

Well this month’s habit is going to be one hundred push ups; it will be easy to quantify this one, I either do or I don’t manage, I can track my progress as the month goes on and now I’ve put it out on my blog and told you I have to do it.

How are your New Years resolutions going?

I’m not a big fan of New Years resolutions, I think they end up being something you do for January and then forget about. But I have lots of things I want to do, too many to have just 1 resolution for the year so I was quite interested when I read The Power of Less: Changing Behaviour with Leo Babauta on fourhourworkweek.com. The post features several excerpts from The Power of Less and in Chapter 5 Leo suggests that to develop long-lasting habits we should focus on just one habit at a time so you can focus all your energy on that and to do so for at least a month to give that new habit time to settle in.

At first each target should be quite easy to achieve that way you will find that you are reaching your goal which in-turn creates the habit of succeeding. It should also be something measurable; for example to eat 5 pieces of fruit and veg a day, or to exercise for 20 minutes a day. Then by being consistent and doing it at the same time each day as well as checking daily you increase your chances of making this habit change stick.

There are even “12 key habits to start with”

1. Set your 3 MITs (Most Important Tasks) each morning.
2. Single-task. When you work on a task, don’t switch to other tasks.
3. Process your inbox to empty.
4. Check email just twice a day.
5. Exercise 5-10 minutes a day.
6. Work while disconnected, with no distractions.
7. Follow a morning routine.
8. Eat more fruits and veggies every day.
9. Keep your desk decluttered.
10. Say no to commitments and requests that aren’t on your Short List (See Chapter 16, on the Simple Life).
11. Declutter your house for 15 minutes a day.
12. Stick to a 5-sentence limit for emails.

This sounds like something I can get behind and so have decided to follow this advice, though I will swap in some of our other habits that make more sense to me. I encourage you to read Tim’s post and or the book and let me know how you get on and what habits you adopt.

Today was a day I wasn't looking forwards to. It's not often that I wake up and think to myself "oh no, I've gotta do that thing today", after all I'm a firm believer in the idea that You are what you Think and so I try to see things in a positive light.

However today I had meetings scheduled from 9am until home time at 4:30pm, with the bulk of the day taken up training a member of staff in our new CMS and a basic primer in HTML, and I'll be honest I was expecting a bit of a fight about how html wasn't part of their job description. However I have to say that my fears were misplaced, totally misplaced it turned out. The CMS went down well with this initial training session and we were quickly getting comments like "This used to be so difficult in our old system, I can't believe how easy this is in the new one". I've come away from the day on quite a high, although only partially complete the project my team is working on is being very well recieved, it is making other staff members jobs easier which is making them happier and that makes me happy. We're doing a good job, I shouldn't have woken up with that thought - I should have rephrased it and seen it in the light of an opportunity to find out what we can do to make our product better.

True all development needs testing by the end users, and testing often to make sure that when the project is finally delivered it does the job it is needed to do and not necessarily the job people thought it should to do. I guess it was a case of just wanting people to approve of what we'd spent some time working on and see the good in it; I'm proud of the code I write and the products I contribute to so naturally I want others to feel the same way.

I read the quote below on Tim Ferriss' blog tonight; though the quote may be over 40 years old it still has an enormous power to speak to you I think. In today's society few people do stand up for what they believe in for fear of ridicule or for fear of standing out from the crowd and being a target. But we should stand up for what is right, this lesson should inspire us to try harder to achieve and not to settle for anonymous mediocrity

“I say to you, this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren’t fit to live.

You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be, and one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid.

You refuse to do it because you want to live longer. You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab or shoot or bomb your house. So you refuse to take a stand.

Well, you may go on and live until you are ninety, but you are just as dead at 38 as you would be at ninety.

And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.

You died when you refused to stand up for right.

You died when you refused to stand up for truth.

You died when you refused to stand up for justice.”

-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
From the sermon “But, If Not” delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church on November 5, 1967.