Last week I made a shocking discovery.

Fruit is great in hot weather.

I know, revolutionary insight but if you looked at my habits, this idea was a real shock.

I don’t have anything against fruit and eat it when offered, but I just don’t choose fruit or go for it. Instead I’m more likely to snack on a piece of chocolate or sandwich. But during this heatwave I realised that fruit was clearly the more refreshing choice.

And that made me think about my habits.

I know it’s not great, but …

There are a lot of my habits which don’t match my intentions or goals.

The fruit one is one small example.

It’s such a small thing that could be corrected with a minor lifestyle change (buy more fruit in the shop, keep sweets at home, choose fruit at snack time) and yet I wasn’t doing it. Why?

Well I wasn’t really thinking about that habit.

So I decided to make a list of the bad habits I have (in obsidian of course). Here’s a sample:

• not flossing every day
• drinking more coffee than I’d like
• snacking on chocolate during the day

And once I made that list, the alternatives were pretty obvious:

• Floss when after brushing your teeth
• drink water
• Eat fruits instead of chocolate

Not every bad habit is so simple or unentrenched, but some are.

And guess what, just making the list has helped me change these habits.

I’m still not perfect, but they’ve far lesser.

More tricky habits

There are a couple of bad habits in my list that are more sticky.

Not least of which is “being impatient with people”.

While it’s not something that just magically changes, I’m glad it’s on this list. Unless I acknowledge this is an issue, I won’t be willing to change it. And now it’s there, I can plan for change.

Not magic, but maybe worth a go

A lot of good coaching and therapy starts with awareness.

Sometimes, that’s enough.

And sometimes we need to do more. But either way, maybe making a bad habit list will help you with some of your bad habits that you know about, but do nothing over, or even ones you are less aware of.

If you give it a go, let me know what you think.

My kids are almost 2 and 5.

Both of them are going through a period of temper tantrums.

It’s annoying and frustrating. Especially when the elder one turns around and sets off the younger one, usually with a punch or a poke after being asked not to.

On my better days I stay calm and manage to get through the conflict.

But most days aren’t my better days.

Instead I can lose my cool and try to physically or vocally stop the conflict: It always increases it.

Doing the same negative behaviour

The irony is I’m often doing the exact thing I’m annoyed at my children for.

• They act out because they are tired — I act out of tiredness
• They shout at each other — I shout at them
• They aren’t patient — I lose my patience.

I fail the same measure I evaluate them by.

On being the adult in the room

I realised this all about three months back.

My child was acting like a child (as should be expected) but I, the adult, was also acting like a child.

How did I expect my children to learn the values I wanted if I didn’t embody them myself as an adult?

So I made a change and used this mantra:

I am the adult in the room.

Any time I face these kinds of situations, I say those words to myself and force myself to respond like an adult.

I wish I could say this has been a magical panacea — it hasn’t — but it has helped. A lot.

I don’t know if this will help you, but as a parent, I know I could use all the help I can get.

It’s the end of my Friday workday so I’m doing my simple weekly reflection. It’s called plus, minus, next and I heard about it from Anne-Laure Le Cunff of Ness Labs.

I like using the symbols

• / - / ➡

• Plus is for the good things from the week
• Minus is for the bad things from the week
• And next is for the things I want to do differently next week.

So simple, but that’s its power. By being so low effort, I can almost always do it; it’s just 5 mins at the end of the day. Now I have a record of what I’ve struggled with and what was easy and good.

You can do it on paper or digitally and I have templates for both Obsidian and DayOne.

One last thing to note, this isn’t a full weekly review in the GTD sense. Instead, I split that onto Sunday evening when I plan for the week ahead.

There’s a movie going around that’s getting some major press. It presents an anti-trafficking group as the saviours of children caught in the child sex trade.

The only problem?

It’s a fantasy.

Sure, there’s elements of a real story — organisation, people, even rescue missions — but the truly effective work of anti-trafficking is less glamourous. Instead of sting operations, it’s more about policy changes and resources for local groups to provide effective assistance.

Heroes need not apply

By seeking to be heroes some groups are harming efforts more than helping.

Conducting a sting on a human trafficking group might help arrest some low level members, but if there isn’t a support system in place, the kids freed won’t go back to their families. And even if they do, they need help to recover from their trauma and protection from the people who sold them in the first place.

You see while there are gangs who snatch children, most people end up in trafficking situations due to a person they, or their family knows.

So why aren’t we doing more for anti-trafficking support?

Anti-trafficking is tough.

It involves many parts to make sure we can catch the perpetrators, help the abused recover, and ensure they aren’t trafficked again. That typically means

• intelligence and surveillance to identify networks
• educating communities to spot the signs of traffickers and trafficked people
• policy which allows trafficked people safe haven
• support structures for their long-term recovery.

That costs a lot more than taking down a few local crooks and patting yourself on the back saying job well done. It also doesn’t help that safe haven policies are anathema for right of centre parties (and some left of centre ones too).

And finally, it’s a global challenge.

To prevent trafficking of people from developing to developed countries we need the right structures in place in both countries and coordination between each. With budgets stretched and a lack of political appetites for cooperation, that makes it extremely challenging.

It’s far easier for a group to claim they are the heroes doing what governments won’t, all the while merely putting people back into the same situations that lead to them being trafficked in the first place.

How to actually take a stand against human trafficking.

There are many long standing human trafficking groups such as Stop the Traffik who are making meaningful, long-term changes to help end human slavery.

Look for groups such as these rather than wannabe soldiers.

I used to be a massive defender of the Oxford comma, now I think most examples where it adds clarity are usually the result of poor writing.

For example, “He met with his parents, the Pope and Barak Obama.” Is this a list of three people or are the Pope and Obama his parents?

All that needs to be done is to put his parents at the end. “He met with the Pope, Barak Obama and his parents.”

There are perhaps a few situations where it can add more clarity (a list of groups) but it’s hardly the saviour of English grammar some writers make it to be.

For the last few years I’ve felt like tech companies and tech journalists are all trying to tell me I shouldn’t be happy with the “amazing revolutions” that came out only a year ago (but of course these new ones will all fix my problems). It’s things like the iPad which was finally a pro device when the iPad pro came out, or maybe when it got the m1 chip, or perhaps stage manager? No, sorry. It was when final cut pro and logic came out last month.

There’s nothing wrong with improvement (and sometimes “improvements” are steps backwards.) but maybe we could drop the technology gaslighting where we’re told that we’re not happy with the things we loved and they are clearly terrible now.

I’ve noticed (and I feel the temptation too) to think of task management/PKM/bullet journaling/jorunaling/whatever as a binary thing — either you have some incredible complicated system which you use everyday the way the gurus on YouTube use theirs, or your “not doing it right”.

Rubbish.

Task management is about managing your task. If a post-it works for you, that’s great! You have a system that works.

PKM is about storing and retrieving ideas - if a pocket notebook works for you, great! You have a system that works.

Journaling is about getting thoughts out of your head and on paper. If you do that every now and then and find it useful, great! You have a system that works.

Maybe you would benefit from adopting some practices or ideas (or more consistency) but you shouldn’t do that out of some sense of envy or guilt. You can always try things out and stick with what works for you.

Give yourself grace to experiment.

Writing what you’re grateful for is a common journaling activity and for good reason.

Practicing gratitude is one of the most effective ways to increase your happiness. If you aren’t doing it, I highly recommend you start.

But it’s easy to stop there. To feel better about ourselves and what we have but not respond out of that. There can be knock on effects such as a more positive and warm outlook to those around us, but what if there was a journaling prompt that encouraged us to be more generous too?

Here’s one I’m trying today.

What am I grateful for today? How can I help others share this gratitude?

It might seem like a small addition, but I’m hoping it will lead me to take action.

• If I feel grateful for someone helping me, how can I be helpful?
• If I’m grateful for learning something, can I share what I learned?
• If I feel grateful for some part of nature, can I share it by taking someone else to the spot?

Sometime it might be trite, but just perhaps a small act of generosity will make someone else grateful too.

I’ve been less patience recently.

It’s been a growing issue since my daughter learned the word “why” and now her brother is “stealing attention” from her, at least from her perspective.

Blaming my situation is the easy and half-true option.

While I certain have some extra pressures, these are an opportunity for me to demonstrate greater patience. Plus I can always choose my response to even the worse situation. And that’s where my journaling experiment comes in.

A journaling prompt for patience

“What are some situations that typically trigger impatience in you? How can you prepare and respond more calmly in these situations?”

I stumbled upon this journal prompt yesterday and started to write out my answers.

As soon as I did, I saw some common trends in my triggers. But more importantly I noticed that the solutions had even more in common.

Accepting the situation as it is

Mentally preparing for the situations

Taking actions to prevent those situations from arising.

I still need to see how I actually live these ideas out and I’m journaling every day to track what happens, but I’m hopeful. I’ll let you know how it goes.