Use Motivation To Program Your Environment

The end of the year, for me, is a time of very high motivation. My intention is to run through the new year with whatever goals I was planning. I adjust and figure out what I can actually do.

I also put in permanent (or hard to change) environmental changes. I believe in Environment Hacking, where I put things in my environment that trigger my behavior or remove things that are triggering behavior I don’t want. For example, to get off of nearly all social media, I removed the apps and blocked the sites in my /etc/hosts file.

My motivation goes up and down throughout the year. I am personally highly motivated from January through my birthday in early April, which happens to coincide with the first thirteen weeks of the year. I use this time to plan for when my motivation will crater. I do things that will make it easy to keep on track. For me this means not having to plan, just execute.

Here are some examples of what I have done when my motivation is high:

  1. When I feel like cooking, I cook something healthy in bulk. I’ll have something good to eat later when I don’t feel like cooking. I buy tempeh in bulk and freeze it.
  2. I use widgets on my phone homepage to show me how I am doing with goals or help me do them (e.g. DuoLingo and Cronometer).
  3. I have a pull-up bar in my office to encourage me to dead hang more. There’s a dumbbell set next to my desk. I have a underdesk pedaler. I am generally trying to make my day less sedentary.
  4. I bought a print that I find inspiring and hung it above my monitor (more on this later).

The general idea is to put things in places where you can’t help to see them to make it easy to do the behavior later when your motivation drops.

2026 4DX: Fourth Discipline

This is the fourth and final post in series of how I am implementing The 4 Disciplines of Execution [affiliate] for 2026 towards one goal each in my business, fitness, and personal life. I discussed the first [1st DX], second [2nd DX], and third [3rd DX] disciplines in previous posts.

Personal Growth: [1st DX] Get to CEFR level TBD in Spanish. [2nd DX] Focussed and repeat listening to beginner Spanish podcasts. [3rd DX] Count of podcast listens per week (at least 5 is my preliminary goal)

Business: [1st DX] Make Amazon Ads for my book break even. [2nd DX] Find readers, ask for reviews. [3rd DX] Review count per month (goal is 3 per month)

Fitness: [1st DX] Improve 5 lifts by TBD. [2nd DX] Lift 3x/week. [3rd DX] Pounds added to lifts.

The final discipline is accountability. For my business goal, I already am a member of a writer’s accountability group. For my personal growth goal, I want to get good enough to attend the local Spanish learning meetup by the middle of the year.

And finally, for fitness, I decided to rejoin Crossfit. I need access to barbells and racks (and small increment plates). It’s across the street from my apartment, and there’s a chance it could become a third space.

To add another layer, I will post monthly on this blog as well with just an update and my assessment of whether this plan is working or not.

Write While True Episode 47: Write Useful Books

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It’s been a while. Episode 46 came out in late January of 2025 and I’m recording this now in mid-December, so it’s been about 10 or 11 months. When I last left off, we were in the middle of season 4, and I was telling you about all the things I was learning as I was writing my book, Swimming in Tech Debt.

Well, I’m happy to say that I finally finished Swimming in Tech Debt, and it came out in September of 2025, a couple of months ago. And then the print book came out about a month and a half or so later, and I’ve learned so much about the book publishing process that I want to share with you.

Transcript

Improving My Social Connection Index

I went to PINC, a single-track conference with over a dozen speakers covering the general theme of People, Ideas, Nature, and Community. This was their 11th year. The talks ranged from techniques to help teens manage social media, to cheese sculpting, to collecting data on homelessness, to disaster resilient housing (and more).

One talk stood out to me as being applicable to my life. Aaron Hurst talked about his plan to open up US Chambers of Connection around the country. I learned about his social connection index and the six points of connection. There were two points on that list that I need to work on: (1) a neighborhood contact (2) a third place.

When I first moved to Sarasota, my building had frequent events where I met many of my neighbors. But after COVID, they all moved out of the building. I have not focussed on meeting new neighbors, which I intend to change in 2026.

I would also say that I do not have a “Third Place” as defined by this index. I do belong to a couple of meetups and online communities. I am also a member of the local Toastmasters and Art Center. These types of communities are covered by other items in the six points of connection.

What I like about a Third Place is that it isn’t as tied to people or time, but more to the place itself (where you might find new people with a common interest). The idea is that you could pop in at any time for serendipitous connection. The classic examples are a church or senior center, but those aren’t right for me.

I have been considering rejoining Crossfit for access to barbells, but I might also meet other like-minded people. It’s possible that this helps me find accountability as well.

LLMs Are Good At (some) Languages

Yesterday, I wrote about how I am going to use Page-o-Mat to make some Supernote page templates. Page-o-Mat is a python program that lets you describe journals using a YAML based configuration and then generates a PDF. Since template pages are just a PDF, you can use Page-o-Mat for that too.

My first step was to see if I could get ChatGPT to help me. At first, I gave it a link to the docs, but it seemed to have trouble accessing it. So, I just grabbed the YAML for my 2025 journal and pasted it in the chat. Then, I asked what kind of template pages I should make. Its ideas were pretty good and it generated some for me, which worked great.

But, then I asked if it could just make the PDF directly—which it did. On inspection, I see the PDF was generated by https://www.reportlab.com, which says that their “flagship commercial tool for making beautiful PDFs quickly using Report Markup Language and a preprocessor. Create PDFs the same way you create dynamic web pages”. So, it’s essentially (like Page-o-Mat) a language for generating PDFs.

It’s interesting that ChatGPT makes PDF with a language tool even though PDFs themselves are a language. Knowing the internals of PDF, it makes sense. You need to remember the exact byte locations of each object you create to write out the PDF trailer at the end. It’s extremely easy to mess up and there isn’t a good tool for debugging it. Humans would be horrible at making it by hand, and so are LLMs (but we both can make PDFs with tools).

Page-o-Mat Can Make Smartnote Page Templates

In 2024, I used my tool, Page-o-Mat, to make a PDF journal for my Smartnote. It worked fine, but there was no way to insert pages or add more internal (or external) linking to a PDF on Smartnote.

I think a better way to use the Smartnote is to use the native .note format, though, not a PDF. This format supports template pages, and luckily, you can put the Smartnote template pages in a PDF, so it’s possible to do that with Page-o-Mat. This lets me use all of the features of the Smartnote, but still have pages that have spaces to fill in.

I have to think through what I want in my template pages, but I’ll share the configs and PDFs when I make them. If you already have ideas, go check out Page-o-Mat on GitHub.

How Digital Journaling is Better Than Paper

Yesterday, I wrote about How Digital Journaling Is Worse Than Paper, and today I want to write about how it was better.

I use the Supernote Manta. It’s better than paper for me in these ways:

  1. It’s a lot easier to carry (slim and light). This will be especially true as I build up annual journals in it.
  2. It also has my Kindle, so I don’t need to carry that in addition.
  3. I never run out of ink.
  4. I can make my pen have various thicknesses and shades.
  5. You can undo and edit.

#5 is the reason I can’t give up digital journaling. This was not part of my criteria when I was deciding on this a year ago, but I could not live without it now.

Also, I don’t use this feature, but it has OCR, which makes the journals searchable. I do like that I could use it later.

How Digital Journaling Is Worse Than Paper

In 2025, I used my Manta Supernote, and I didn’t journal in it daily. I always have lulls in my year with less daily journaling, but the lull was bigger this time. I don’t know if it was having an electronic journal or if there was something about the year.

But, I’m willing to try it again. Here are my observations on what was worse about a digital journal:

  1. I have a page for each day and more pages for planning and retros, so the journal is over 400 pages. It’s hard to navigate that (compared to a physical book).
  2. I used a PDF, not the native Supernote format, which makes it impossible to change the structure of the journal. Supernote supports page management and internal linking for its native format.
  3. The Supernote is nice looking, but not as nice looking as my paper journals.
  4. I journal in Black and Red, which isn’t possible on a Supernote.

So, this time

  1. I am going to use the internal Supernote format for the journal. I think you can make custom template pages, which I will look into.
  2. I will need to use internal linking liberally to make the journal easier to navigate.
  3. I will use highlighting more to take the place of the red pen, which is mostly to draw attention to something.
  4. I need to find triggers and sources of motivation to get me to journal more regularly.

Why even do this? Tomorrow, I’ll write about How Digital Journaling is Better Than Paper.

Mimicking Work-like Accountability

I’ve been writing about how I’m implementing 4DX from The 4 Disciplines of Execution [affiliate], but I’m stuck on the 4th discipline, which is to have accountability meetings.

In 2024, when I set out to write Swimming in Tech Debt, I started out thinking that I could have accountability by just talking about it publicly, but quickly realized that that wouldn’t work. To fix that I joined the Useful Authors community and participated in several writing accountability group meetings per week. I still go to them for marketing accountability. This kind of accountability (a group with similar goals) works well for me.

This kind of accountability is what 4DX expects because it’s targeting teams of people that work together. I have mimicked it with my author group and in similar groups like Toastmasters.

Another kind of accountability is to have a coach (which I have done with Crossfit and running). That’s fine when you don’t have your own plan and just want a coach to provide one. This is kind of like working for a boss or customer who decides what we’re doing and I just need to execute. When I am clueless, this works well for me.

My problem is that my fitness plan for 2026 is very specific, and I don’t want a coach (yet). But a group of like-minded lifters will be hard to find. I don’t have a good solution.

2026 4DX: Third Discipline

This is the third post in series of how I am implementing The 4 Disciplines of Execution [affiliate] for 2026 towards one goal each in my business, fitness, and personal life. I discussed the first [1st DX] and second [2nd DX] disciplines in previous posts.

  • Business: [1st DX] Make Amazon Ads for my book break even. [2nd DX] Find readers, ask for reviews.
  • Fitness: [1st DX] Improve 5 lifts by TBD. [2nd DX] Lift 3x/week.
  • Personal Growth: [1st DX] Get to CEFR level TBD in Spanish. [2nd DX] Focussed and repeat listening to beginner Spanish podcasts.

In the third discipline, we design scoreboards to tell us if we are winning. The idea here to make it impossible to not know where the leading indicators are. The ideal is like a sports scoreboard—easy to glance and focussed on the one thing we are trying to do (score points).

My leading indicators for my business goal are the count of known readers and a count of known reviewers. Behind that I will have the list of names, but the scoreboard should just show the count. I will also make a goal that I can track against.

I already have the scoreboard for my fitness goal, which is just a spreadsheet tracking my lifts. I only need to track my last rep count and weight.

For the Spanish goal, I need to pick some number of repetitions that I think it will take to be able to listen to a podcast with full comprehension. I will have to just try over the next couple of weeks. Once I have that, I just need to track that number each week.

The fourth discipline is to build in some accountability. This is easier for the book’s intended use, which is for teams. The 4th DX is just to have a dedicated meeting where they make sure that the leading indicators are moving and that they seem to be resulting in the WIG. I will need some time to think about this, so I’ll probably take a detour in future posts and get back to it in a week.