Shruggling to make habits

One of my continual “shruggles” or struggles that you just can’t understand so you just shrug at them, is planning and organization. Specifically sticking to a schedule and consistent habits challenge me. I’ve applied many methods to this in the past with varying degrees of success, but nothing has ever stuck for long. Since I need to be consistent in my posting, social media presence and creating new materials, now more than ever I need to optimize the time I have.

At the time I’m writing this, it’s been seven weeks (at the time I started this article, thirteen weeks at posting!) since I left my position at Hyland Software and embarked on this journey to living a present life and so far (when I started writing this), I have not gone live on my website, posted a single blog, video or song. What has been holding me back? It would be easy for me to blame different health challenges, but I think there has been an underlying mental blockage that I’m still working around. What is it I truly want to do all day? What to do when?

As I’ve been working on different materials, songs, articles, etc. I have been challenged with focusing on one item at a time, feeling discouraged with using different software, AI platforms, or the equipment I have. I’m overall lacking motivation to just get in front of the computer or even sing. After all, as we saw in episode 1, ChatGPT had told me, “Ultimately, the success of your creative endeavors will depend on your dedication, hard work, and talent.”

If I want to write and sing all day, why don’t I do it? I hear new song ideas and stories in my mind and silence them regularly when I could jump to a desk and write, type, or sing them out. I’m writing this because I don’t think I’m alone. On social media I see a lot of my creative friends “shruggling” with the same issues; Have time but no motivation, are motivated but have no time. Have money but no time, have time but no money. There are many parts of the equation. But to have time and money but no motivation? This one doesn’t compute! No true deadlines ahead of me, no real stress, and I live in paradise, where I have nature to nurture me. What is going on!??

By now surely, I had broken the suction of all my Passion Vacuums, as I recently posted.

Battling the Pain-body

Listening to Eckhart Tolle, I’ve started to theorize that I’m going through a transition period where the pain-body is attempting to hold onto what it can, as I become more present. The concept of the pain-body is one that many spiritual teachers use as an extension of the ego and mind or, entity in itself, which we have at birth and live with throughout this existence. The pain-body feeds on suffering either inherited or created throughout the lifetime and uses that to build and feed the ego. This is all part of the overall existence we’re currently experiencing on the way to the next one, working our way to presence and individually as we all experience things differently to bring back to the collective all. I don’t want to lose anyone here on this topic because it’s vast and everyone needs to travel on their own, but I suspect I was born with a heavy pain-body, and did nothing but feed it, along with my ego, until very recently. The hold on my thoughts and feelings is very strong since I’ve had seven weeks to reflect and stew in my pain a bit. During this time little things would irritate me that would not have otherwise, and existing physical pain seems amplified. I don’t have the stress from the job anymore and I’ve already walked away from the marriage and other relationship stresses back in Ohio, so now the pain-body needed to find something else, anything else.

Having a lifelong physical condition, that can be very painful at times, creates a mentality of suffering that can be hard to separate from. Observing what is happening physically, without becoming emotional or assigning the label of pain, continues to challenge me. Writing this and sharing it with the world, is part of the way I’m working to keep myself observing and present. Staying aware when I am not being present due to physical variables and bringing myself back into the moment. Given that this presence is the key to creating a healthy lifestyle, I should be able to apply this to motivation and creating healthy lifestyle habits.

AI All of My Habits?

There are critical things I need to accomplish in daily life, like eating healthy, taking care of the body with exercise and the mind with meditation and learning. A few times in the past, I was able to maintain a daily workout, but I almost always had to pay for it! Signing up for classes and eventually a Personal Trainer were the most effective methods of motivation, but why?

Can I use AI to finally create healthy habits which will maintain my creativity, motivation, and presence so that I can be successful?

It turns out, when it comes to productivity, AI can be a deep rabbit hole! You don’t know what you don’t know. And AI doesn’t know what it doesn’t know! So sometimes, neither of you know that you’re on the wrong path.

You don’t know what you don’t know and neither does AI!

Starting with creating my schedule I used an idea I got from Matt Wolfe on YouTube, he provides the weekly TLDR in the world of AI and is always bringing up interesting AI tools. One of his videos is “The ONE ChatGPT prompt to rule them all!” and spoiler, the prompt starter is:

What are the absolute coolest, most mind-blowing, out of the box, ChatGPT prompts that will really show off the power of ChatGPT? Give me 10.

Matt Wolfe @mreflow

I adjusted based on Matt’s video to look specifically for organization and achieving goals:

What are the absolute coolest, most mind-blowing, out of the box, ChatGPT prompts that will really show off the power of ChatGPT for organization and achieving goals? Give me 10.

I also asked Bard (first I accidentally didn’t change ChatGPT to Bard and then I felt bad), but I didn’t get very good responses. Even trying BingChat produced rather lame results, but ChatGPT provided at least a few solid ideas. Since both were disappointing, I mostly abandon them, but I would try back from time to time to see how they responded.

There were other great ideas that I’ll get to below or in future episodes, but I started with the first one that ChatGPT provided:

“Create a detailed daily schedule for me that maximizes productivity and incorporates time for relaxation and personal growth.”

“Certainly! Here’s a detailed daily schedule that maximizes productivity, incorporates time for relaxation and personal growth, and includes one hour for walking your dog and two hours for singing and making music:

6:00 AM – Wake up

6:15 AM – Morning hygiene routine (shower, brush teeth, etc.)

6:30 AM – Mindfulness or meditation practice for 15 minutes

6:45 AM – Breakfast and review daily goals

7:15 AM – Physical exercise (30 minutes)

7:45 AM – Start of focused work block 1 (2 hours)

9:45 AM – Short break (15 minutes)

10:00 AM – Continue focused work block 2 (2 hours)

12:00 PM – Lunch break and leisure time (1 hour)

1:00 PM – Skill-building activity or personal growth pursuit (1 hour)

2:00 PM – Creative project or hobby (1 hour)

3:00 PM – Dog walking (1 hour)

4:00 PM – Flex time (catch up on emails, calls, or miscellaneous tasks)

5:00 PM – Start of focused work block 3 (2 hours)

7:00 PM – Dinner break and relaxation (1.5 hours)

8:30 PM – Singing and making music (2 hours)

10:30 PM – Wind-down routine (reading, journaling, etc.)

11:00 PM – Bedtime

Here are some additional tips to make the most out of your schedule:

1. Prioritize your most important tasks during the focused work blocks.

2. During breaks, engage in activities that help you relax and recharge, such as stretching, going for a short walk, or listening to music.

3. Use your lunch break and leisure time to enjoy a hobby, read a book, or engage in activities that bring you joy.

4. Experiment with different skill-building activities or personal growth pursuits during the designated hour to explore new interests and broaden your knowledge.

5. During the creative project or hobby hour, you can dedicate time to practicing an instrument, writing songs, or any other creative pursuit you enjoy.

6. Make sure to give your dog ample exercise and attention during the designated hour for walking.

7. Keep a balance between work and relaxation to avoid burnout.

8. Adjust the timing of the schedule to fit your personal preferences and lifestyle.

Remember, while a structured schedule can be helpful, it’s also essential to be flexible and adapt as needed to ensure your well-being and enjoyment throughout the day.”

ChatGPT4

Genius idea or waste of time, AI won’t know.

Immediately I thought, I want this on my calendar and hello rabbit hole! First, I asked ChatGPT to create .ics calendar files for the schedule, but it provided a plain text code for only one event .ics. Now, it should have hit me here maybe that .ics files are single events, sometimes recurring but each item would be a single .ics file and for a daily schedule that would mean many .ics files to make up a calendar. But that wouldn’t hit me for another two hours, while I relentlessly pursued .ics files.

It seemed that for creating the schedule items ChatGPT was great at creating a .csv file and then it could write a python script to convert the .csv to .ics files. Since I don’t know python, but I can sort of figure out what the code meaning is from general code knowledge, it took me over 15 iterations with ChatGPT to get the script to work as anticipated! We went back and forth fixing one error and then creating a new one, only to have ChatGPT bring back the first error when fixing a new one. Repeatedly I had to remind ChatGPT of the corrections we had already made to the script. It was very apologetic along the way:

“Apologies for the ongoing issues. It seems there was a misunderstanding in the previous responses.”.

ChatGPT4

What ChatGPT couldn’t tell me was that I was completely wasting my time. Google calendar only imports one .ics file at a time, but it turns out, it can import .csv files directly with the correct header information and create many calendar items at a time. It also couldn’t tell me there was already an icsConverter on GitHub, probably a few if I kept looking.

That’s really what I’ve learned over these three months. You really do not know what you do not know and figuring that out can be time consuming. Taking the time to evaluate the path you’re on and make sure its valid before you either set out or as you go along the way are critical to understanding where you are and where you’re going. I find I spend a lot of time in my head thinking about these topics, but not so much concrete planning and reflection. Well, that’s going to change! The time spent on the python script was not a loss, since learning python is one of my goals and this was a good start.

Sleep on it when you AI it.

Figuring out my ChatGPT folly took sleeping on it overnight and when I woke up and realized my error, it only took about 15 minutes to get the .csv files I wanted to import into Google calendar. The above original answer on the daily schedule was only a shell and I still needed some specific planning around the blog, YouTube channel and songwriting to achieve my goals. I gave ChatGPT these additional prompts to create more detailed schedule items.

Before I could do any of that, I had to have an idea of what goals, blocks of time, regular daily tasks, etc. That knowledge came from my previous experiences with the perils of planning which I’m going to dive into in a blog all by itself, and probably an associated video. Let me know in the comments if you want to see it! Knowing my specific goals and time frames I provided ChatGPT a few more prompts:

Write a step-by-step plan for creating a successful YouTube channel that creates one 20-minute and one 5-minute video per week. An associated 2000–3000-word blog post also needs to be completed prior to the planning of the video. The videos consist of screen capture, video recording, animation, images, and music. The videos are produced in ChipChamp and the blogs are posted to a WordPress site.

ChatGPT Provided twelve useful steps and I responded:

“Create a weekly schedule for achieving the goals of the YouTube channel, only the hours of 1pm-4pm and 8pm-10pm can be used. Start the weekly schedule on June 26th.”

Once it generated the schedule and it made sense I replied.

“Convert the above schedule to a csv file with the following headers. Subject,Start Date,Start Time,End Date,End Time,All Day Event,Description,Location,Private,Reoccur”

As it happens, Google Calendar doesn’t recognize the Reoccur entry, so there is a step of manually creating the repeating for each item. I created separate Google calendars for Blogging & YouTube, Music, Daily Tasks and Chores to clearly see what overall topic I’m supposed to be focused on at any given time just by color. Importing each .csv into the calendar went quickly, and adjustments were easy in the visual calendar display.

Now I have my schedule, which I will keep you updated on how well I can follow starting on Monday June 26^th. I’ll provide daily updates on Instagram and YouTube, maybe others.

This method of turning csv files into task, time, project, or program management can be used across any tools that support csv import, which is a LOT! Asana, Atlassian, Microsoft Project, GitHub Issues, and thousands of other platforms for various tasks will support importing csv. I’ll be using this method in a few different ways in upcoming posts too!

Meal Planning melt down!

The next life hack I wanted to tackle was meal planning, which turned into another rabbit hole and enough to generate an entire article on itself. I’ll just say, if you have specific dietary requirements like being Vegan or following an AutoImmune Protocol (AIP) diet, or heaven forbid, both, then you have some work to do to get what you want out of ChatGPT. What you can do to get better results is create food lists and ask for recipes based on only using the foods listed. Half the time ChatGPT still provided recipes that added ingredients I didn’t list, so you have to be careful. ChatGPT, like so many humans, does not seem to understand what it means to be Vegan. For someone with simple dietary requirements you may find the meal planning sufficient, but I couldn’t get any usable results trying to plan for more than a few recipes at a time. I did enjoy this far more than scouring through recipe websites which are notoriously covered in garbage ads and pop-ups. I will continue to work on prompting for recipes to help me with a restrictive Vegan AIP diet I’ll be following starting in July. There are also several dedicated AI meal planning apps like ChefGPT which I might try. I’ll keep you updated on that along the way too, so don’t forget to subscribe to the YouTube channel!

RockyAI, my AI Accountabilibuddy!

Finally, as I mentioned above, paying someone to keep me accountable, like a Personal Trainer, was one way I succeed in the past. AI life coaches are becoming a popular application for generative AI, so there were several to choose from in the App Store. I decided to try Rocky AI, which claims: “Achieve Your Life-Goals with Your Growth Mindset AI Coach”. I’ve only worked with the site and not the app so far, but I find it lacking in structure and hard to follow. There are helpful prompts but they all seem to lead to similar documents and videos. I do find the content to be targeted and engaging, even some helpful ideas provided that may assist me when I’m struggling with procrastination or staying on track. In my updates I’ll let you know how my new relationship with RockyAI goes.

Too soon?

It may just be too soon to AI All of Me, but I’ll start here and keep working towards an efficient, effective life and share what I learn along the way. The biggest take-away so far is that AI tools are still maturing, they may not have the skills to produce what we need out of the box right now. Being more mindful about the desired outcome, researching what already exists in that space and taking time to reflect along each step, will be critical to achieving results with AI.

AI All The Way!

Now I’m going to take AI All The Way! I’m going to spend the next week deep diving into learning how to get all I can out of AI. I’ll spend time on LearnPrompting.org, Google Digital Garage, Brilliant, Udemy, we’ll see where the AI takes me!

Check out the YouTube video for this Episode: https://youtu.be/ss3wmqtz9eU

Follow the YouTube Channel for more videos! https://www.youtube.com/@themodemlisa