"sam is typing..."

Process is personal, hard to see and hard to describe. Unless you spend a lot of time thinking of how to explain it, it'll only make sense to you. Everyone is constantly developing their own approach to everything else. Sometimes on purpose, normally not. This starts to explain why the internet is full of people attempting to explain their own processes. This is great, because often you can find little pieces that could work for you. On the other hand, new habits can come in lots of forms, and can be disruptive. This constant evolution means processes are often complex and usually closely related to a persons other processes in ways they don't even notice.

For me, fitting these found ideas in can be tricky, but it's worth it even for the minority of times it actually works. You only need to move forward a little at a time to make a huge difference. I do what I can to stop new stuff getting in the way of anything else (like how sandboxing software works). It's also worth recognising that rigid plans fail. It won't "just happen", and you shouldn't expect it to.

There's a bunch of ways to try and use new ideas. Like it often turns out, it depends exactly what that idea is. It could be anything, software or a habit or a mental model or a way of thinking. I do have a few go-to techniques though, and most times it's enough to spend a bit of time thinking of how to set up a beeminder that starts gently and gets tougher, with some intent to review it down the line. It can also be useful to jump in at the deep end sometimes. Recently I replaced nvAlt with The Archive all at once, so far to great effect.

I know this only scratches the surface of the subject, there's plenty more out there that others have said too. I like to see this blog as a little personal web of connections between stuff, though, so I'm going to ignore the rest and be satisfied that this particular scratch is deep enough for now.

Thanks for reading!