Here is the note that accompanied the video:

Another video in the same vein as the first, but some a different slant. Comes to the same conclusions.
I would recommend it. I am throwing away my chips and Goldfish forever.  Bacon cheeseburger (with no bun) here I come!

Again, if it’s good enough for him, I’m certainly going to watch and strongly consider, which I just did. And now I share with you urging you do the same.

As for my update on the new eating regimen I started over Christmas break, it’s coming. I planned to do it this morning but spent the time watching this video instead. I think it was a good choice. But stay tuned. I’ve discovered some interesting things on my own even in the short time since I decided to radically alter my diet, and many of them have put me in the mindset to watch this video and the one from yesterday and wholeheartedly agree.

This video was sent to me this morning by mom, who had it sent to her by my aunt and uncle – who just happen to be two of the smartest and most informed people I know. It was sent with this message:

Invest 1 hour and learn a lot about diet and health. I guarantee you will be shocked and surprised. This is very important for your health. We have been misled for many years. What this guy is saying is true.

I immediately started watching it, became enthralled, and then decided that since a) it was about heart disease and b) a convenient link to download the iTunes was provided, that I should download and listen to the rest while getting some exercise. So I did.

Consume the information however you want to, but make sure you consume it. As I delved into my own personal research about health and diet, I continue to come across this information from highly respected sources. Today helped a great deal in solidifying my belief in it.

So here is Dr. David Diamond of the University of South Florida, discussing how bad science that is fraught with fraudulence and conflict of interest thanks, in part, to the “avaricious” interests of big business, has contributed in a major way to the obesity epidemic in America.

Note that the talk is a little over an hour, so here is the iTunes link if you want to download it and listen on a mobile device.

After 48 hours of unnecessary procrastination, I watched it…and was predictably inspired.

The Talk is given by Simon Sinek, who has an easily commanding presence and an engaging manner of speaking. He is also a great storyteller, which makes the 18 minutes fly by like the Wright Brothers. In 2009, Sinek released the book “Start With Why.” After you’re done watching this, you’ll know why that was the title, and you’ll also be a more informed leader and marketer.

And I can honestly say that I have never – never – felt better.

In this post, I will recap my first 10 days as a real food something-atarian (we’ll get to the name in a bit), including what spurred the change, how I’ve gone about implementing into my life, and the specific ways that I’ve been impacted positively by doing so.

Image source: A Word In Progress

So What Am I, Exactly?

Let’s get this out of the way first, because everyone I discuss this with asks. Are you a vegan now? Are you a vegetarian? A pescatarian? WHAT ARE YOU? (I’m a man!)

Frankly, I don’t really know. As of right now, these are the “parameters” of my new eating strategy:

• I don’t eat any beef, pork, chicken, or any other kind of meat.
• I do plan to eat fish from time to time, for the following reasons: as a way to navigate the tricky and mostly deleterious waters of eating out at restaurants; because I love sushi and won’t give it up; because it’s a good source of protein and healthy fats the body needs; and because fish, in general, seems to pose fewer health risks than meat (so long as you stay away from fish high in mercury).
• As for dairy, I have replaced cow’s milk, which I really only used in my morning coffee and in certain recipes, with rice milk. I use eggs only in cooking (for now). I continue to eat yogurt, but I have switched to the Greek Gods Non-Fat Yogurt that has zero preservatives or extra sugars, and then I mix it with fresh fruit and granola.
• I eat far more fresh veggies, nuts, and fruit as snacks.
• I only use fresh-baked loaves of bread from bakeries, or I bake my own. Non-fresh store bread is loaded with preservatives to keep it fresh and, if you’re not careful, a source of hydrogenated oils.
• I continue to drink beers and wines, like my beloved Sam Adams, that do not use preservatives or any type of corn syrups (like lite beers do). I have eliminated sugary, processed juices (because of this) as well as the lemonades and fruit drinks that come in powdered form and are naturally sweetened, like Crystal Light.

And that pretty much covers it. Mind you, I didn’t necessarily set out to make these rules, and they are not really rules, per se. This is just how my eating habits have developed during the 10 days of this experiment, with a huge assist from Michael Pollan’s terrific little tome called Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual.

When you add it all up, I believe technically I am a pescatarian – a vegetarian who will eat fish – or to be even more accurate a flexitarian, which is a vegetarian who will occasionally eat meat, since I imagine at some point I’ll have a small steak along the way, or a hot dog at a baseball game (it’s tradition!) or something like that.

But while the meat aspect of this new eating regimen is important, I think the most important part is the focus on whole foods, especially plants, and the elimination of as many processed foods and artificial ingredients as possible. That’s why, no matter what kind of -itarian I am, I’ll always put the “real food” label in front of it.

A person can be a vegetarian and still eat all kinds of crappy foods filled with preservatives and hydrogenated oils and other nonsense, thus muting any potential health benefit. That doesn’t happen when you eat real, whole, unprocessed foods – at least not based on what I’ve been reading, and what I can surmise from my short experience so far doing it myself.

So, what am I? I’ll classify myself, as I did in the title of this post, as a Real Food Flexitarian. And now you and I both know exactly what that means.

Why Did I Decide To Do This?

The reason why I’ve been able to hit the ground running with this drastic eating change, and not look back, is due to a rather fortunate and serendipitous confluence of events.

First, I knew I wanted to change something in the new year to a) get healthier, b) lose weight, and c) just generally feel better. I figured that altering my declining eating habits would have to be a central part of this. I alluded to this in the first post about The Discipline Project.

Next, I started doing some research on being a vegetarian, just to find out more about it. Since discipline is my buzzword for 2012, I figured that adopting some kind of eating system might be a good idea and a way to eliminate some of the bad eating (like, say, ordering a pizza at night or foolishly indulging in fast food).

Then, on Christmas Eve, my brother and I decided to watch the documentary Food Inc. on a whim.

Image source: Sustainability

To say it was eye-opening would be an understatement. While I am sure that it is a bit biased and tells mostly one side of a complicated story, it does tell it in a compelling way that makes salient points regardless. And you can’t fake video of cows going to slaughter, chickens housed without light on a floor comprised of their own feces, or what the meat production/packing/distribution process looks like. (Hint: it’s repulsive.)

Featured in Food Inc. is author Michael Pollan, who my good friend Aaron Bollinger told me about several years ago after reading Pollan’s well-known book The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. I woke up early on Christmas morning and had some time to kill before the present-opening extravaganza began, so I decided to download one of Pollan’s books onto my iPad to begin reading.

There were a number of choices, but I settled on In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. I cannot recommend this book enough.

I finished the book that day, so totally engrossed by what I was learning that I simply could not put it down. Immediately, for a number of reasons that Pollan lays out in the book, I realized that this whole foods approach to eating made total sense.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That, those seven words, is the main idea of the book. It is basically Pollan’s entire thesis on food, and the more I researched the topic, the more it made sense to me.

Read In Defense of Food, then read Food Rules, and you’ll understand my new philosophy on eating, which I essentially adopted from these two sources (also using What to Eat by Marion Nestle as a guide for navigating the supermarket, a place you do not have to avoid but that you certainly should become more informed and savvy about).

The next day, I was off and running. I convinced the family to jaunt down to the Dallas Farmer’s Market with me, where I bought all kinds of fresh produce: tomatoes, avocados, peppers, apples, potatoes, and on and on. Fortunately, I’ve gotten into cooking over the past year, so the challenge of buying fresh ingredients and forming them into meals was one I looked forward to with great excitement and have thoroughly enjoyed.

Ten days later (it seems like more) I haven’t eaten one unnatural meal or snack. I even made it out of BW3s last Sunday with all of my good feelings still alive, avoiding the wings and buffalitos by opting instead for veggie boats and a salad. No, the later two didn’t taste as good as the former two would have; but I felt 100X better when I walked out of the restaurant. I felt energized and content as opposed to tired, bloated, and stuffed. The trade-off was well worth it.

The question now is, will I continue eating this way?

I’ve made dietary changes before, experienced huge early returns, and vowed never to return to eating crappy foods again…only to return to eating crappy foods again down the line.

Why do I think things will be different this time?

Simply put, because I think this style of eating is sustainable, and because I’ve never experienced such a drastic shift in my overall feeling of well-being as I have over the past 10 days.

What Have The Benefits Been?

Now that I’ve alluded to how much better I feel, it’s time to get specific. What exactly feels better?

Health

Every day of eating real foods as opposed to processed foods is decreasing my risk for a number of different types of cancers and chronic diseases. Even if this was the only benefit, it would be worth it don’t you think?

Energy

This is the #1 benefit I’ve experienced. I have more energy throughout the day, and the energy is consistent – without any type of substance like coffee to keep it that way.

I always used to find myself having great energy and focus early in the day, but then it would tail off in the afternoon. Now that I’ve cut out eating a frozen Healthy Choice meal or ordering in for lunch, instead eating something like whole wheat pasta tossed with olive oil, tomatoes, and freshly grated parmesan cheese (my lunch the last two days), I have not once noticed a decline in energy, that classic “crash” everyone talks about and that I used to experience, in the afternoon.

And note: I have not yet re-incorporated working out into my daily routine. So the increase energy cannot have anything to do with exercise. (That’s coming next though.) And I haven’t been sleeping more either. The only change I’ve made is how and what I eat, in addition to drinking more water to make sure I’m properly hydrated. That’s it.

Focus

I touched on this above, but it bears repeating. I have found my focus to be many magnitudes sharper throughout the day. It doesn’t yo-yo, as I had found it starting to do more and more over the last 18-24 months. I’m thinking much of this has to do with being hydrated and keeping my blood sugar more stable throughout the day by a) eating right and b) not over-eating.

Body

My body just, overall, feels better. I don’t get that bloated feeling after eating. My stiff, unflexible muscles (I know, I need to work on it) feel slightly less stiff and unflexible, with no exercise or stretching to account for it.

Heck, I even find myself sitting up straighter in my chair and having better posture. Is this due to the food? Probably not, though I think it’s a sign that the discipline being developed by my commitment to eating well is spilling over into other areas of my life that I’m just starting to notice.

Weight

As I said before, I haven’t incorporated working out in the daily mix yet. I also haven’t restricted myself too much from a portion perspective, though I have naturally found myself eating less than I used to because I get both full and satiated with less food. So I haven’t been explicitly trying to lose weight over these first 10 days while I get used to my new daily eating habits. Yet I’ve still dropped four pounds already as of this morning.

That’s pretty encouraging and leads me to believe that once I do target specific weight loss goals, I will have a much, much easier time reaching them than if I was exercising more and eating less but still ingesting tons of preservatives and edible food-like substances that are not really food.

Bowels

Just skip this section if discussions of the bowels and their movements are displeasing to you.

More than likely, however, it is the non-movement of the bowels that is truly displeasing, as irregularity can be one uncomfortable, chronic byproduct of a diet filled with junky non-food food that your body doesn’t know how to process efficiently.

Since I switched to eating all whole foods and no meat, I’ve had a satisfying, cleansing bowel movement every day, sometimes more than one. I cannot tell you when the last time that happened three days in a row was, let alone ten. Regardless, it’s a huge reason why I feel better, lighter, and less filled with nasty toxins.

And now you know more about me than you ever wanted to know.

Skin

My skin looks better, and I haven’t spent any additional time in the sun. This is one benefit I didn’t really expect, nor care about, but I’ll take it seeing as how I’ve been mocked on the Interwebs before for my ghastly complexion.

Mood

I tend to be a pretty happy, positive dude, but I had started to notice myself getting a bit more chippy, a bit less patient, and a bit more moody than in the past. Like the energy and focus that I started this list off with, my mood tended to be inconsistent. Not anymore — at least not from my perspective, but hopefully from others’ too!

That’s a pretty substantial list already, and I could probably go on. But you get the idea: I feel a lot better and in a lot of different ways, and these changes have to mostly be attributed to my shift in eating habits since nothing else has changed.

I was further emboldened to believe that these improvements were food-related during our interview with ‘Coach Carla’ Ferrer last night on the first episode of Healthy Habits. This is a woman who lost 130 pounds some 18 years ago and has been able to keep it off without going on specific “diets” other than focusing on eating whole foods.

What’s Next?

What’s next is more of the same.

And I plan to keep my motivation strong by continuously finding fun new recipes to cook, making trips to the Farmer’s Market a regular occurrence, and writing/blogging/talking about my experience to constantly remind myself of just how good I feel and how beneficial these changes have been and will continue to be.

I also plan to get back in the gym and start working out again. It’s funny: now that I feel so good, I can’t wait to get back in the gym. I’ve held off just to make sure I wasn’t doing too much, too fast, plus I was worried that my energy and/or strength level might drop because of the shift in eating habits. I’ve been so pleasantly surprised that the opposite has actually happened.

The key now is to maintain these new habits.

Six months, a year, five years down the road, I don’t want to be viewing this new way of eating as some kind of strategy that I’m trying to maintain. I just want it to be a part of my life, a part of who I am and how I live, so that it becomes second nature and unquestioned.

I’m only 10 days in right now, with a past littered with good intentions and good plans that fell by the wayside; so I still have to remain vigilant with my daily focus, which is part of why I wanted to take the time to write this post and remind myself of the myriad benefits I’ve gained in such a short period of time.

And yes, I know that some of the benefits I’m claiming to see can perhaps be explained as self-fulfilling prophecies. Perchance some of these benefits can even be attributed to a kind of placebo effect, mind over matter, as I look to justify the time and effort I’ve put into reshaping the way I eat. Maybe this is true. To which I say: who cares?

The benefits, both tangible and intangible, are improving my life on a daily basis, and they only started when I started to make these changes. I’m no scientist. I’m no nutritionist. I’ve read a couple of books, but I don’t know what all is going on inside of my body that eating better is facilitating. I just know I feel 100X better than I did 10 days ago, and that’s enough proof for me to believe that what I’m doing is right, that I should continue doing it, and that my personal experience is worth sharing.

So I will, quite happily, and with boundless motivation.

**********

And if you want to join me, the more the merrier. Comment here. Friend me on Facebook. Follow me (and Healthy Habits) on Twitter – @JerodMorris.

Change is never easy, even change that we know will be positive, but one thing I’ve come to realize is that believing in what you’re changing and having people to share the experience with sure can make success more likely.

He’s right of course. It’s silly and self-defeating to expect different results when you don’t do anything differently.

After completing the introduction to The Discipline Project – my endeavor for 2012 – last night, it occurred to me that I needed to do something immediately to build positive momentum as soon as possible. I’ve had many other great ideas in the past, even blogged about them publicly, but then allowed them to quickly fade and be forgotten about.

Not this time.

Yesterday

My plan all along had been to officially begin The Discipline Project on January 1st. Why not, right? It could officially serve as my New Year’s Resolution and it would give me two weeks of freedom to be as undisciplined as I wanted to be. Except that following this lame, lazy strategy would be the same thing I’ve always done. I would simply be procrastinating away the challenge of replacing bad habits with good ones, which is never an easy thing to do, while giving the excitement I have for this project time to dissipate.

I decided right then and there, moments after hitting Publish on last night’s post, that I wasn’t going to do that anymore.

So instead of frittering my night away watching football or busting out the Wii for a bit or aimlessly browsing the web, I decided to take some action. I didn’t really have a plan, so I just started doing things. I cleaned some dishes that had piled up. I did some laundry. I prepped two MSF articles for publishing in the morning. I took my dog for a longer-than-usual nighttime walk. I did some research on goal-setting. I emailed a good friend of mine to wish her a happy birthday.

I acted.

There wasn’t a tremendous amount of organization as I basically just jumped from one thing to another, but I did stuff, all in the name of discipline. I had time to get some of these menial tasks out of the way, which should free up my time later this week to work out or write or spend time with family, all things that most certainly will be in my goals and on my to-do list (once I get to that part). If discipline is holding myself accountable to my own goals, then at least my actions last night contributed toward goal achievement by maximizing time that otherwise would have been wasted.

It may seem insignificant, but to me it was important. Instead of putting it off, I acted right away. For me to add more discipline to my everyday life, this is what I need to do more consistently. One night in and of itself means nothing. It’s not like I haven’t had ultra-productive nights before. But it was a good start, a different start, and it helped me build momentum for today.

And sure enough, today has been positive and disciplined as well.

Today

I got up and did some proofreading, posting, and promotion this morning for MSF. I arrived right on time to pick Derick up at the auto body shop where he was dropped his car off, and thus needed a ride to the office. I knocked a number of tasks off my to-do list in the morning (a to-do list that is still in my head, but will soon be written down — gotta get there), then I went home to walk Rebel, got a quick workout in, and I still got back to the office right at 1:00 to continue plowing through everything on my plate today.

Nothing spectacular. Nothing earth-shattering. Just a disciplined day with far less wasted time and energy than normal.

It’s something to build on, and it’s a stepping stone to a productive afternoon, a fun evening with the family, and then yet another produce day tomorrow.

Best of all, it feels different. Nothing in this post may sound all that remarkable to you, and really nothing about last night or today really is remarkable. Except that it is, to me, because I know that in the past I’d have made far less disciplined decisions.

It’s only one day, but it’s a great start. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some positive, disciplined momentum to continue.

The fact is that I’ve struggled ever since I launched this blog to really understand what I want to do with it. There have been a few posts here and there, and I know what the overriding theme of the blog is — what primility means — but I just haven’t been able to coalesce all of my many thoughts on the subject and ideas for blog post series into anything coherent and consistent.

Until now.

Acknowledging a problem is the first step towards overcoming it…right?

Several months back, during the summer, I started a book called The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin. Despite generally feeling happy from day to day, I figured it couldn’t hurt to see if there were ways I could add even more happiness to my life. Despite me, a single dude from the Midwest, not sharing much in the way of daily perspective with Rubin, a married mother of kids living on the east coast, I found much of what she discussed useful.

For the first several chapters, that is.

You see, like many things I start with great intentions, I never finished The Happiness Project. It sits half-read on the table next to my couch. The most recent action it got was several hours ago when I used it as a paper plate substitute for some pretzel bites I was munching on while watching football. Happiness indeed!

It occurred to me today, as it has many times over the past several weeks, that this is a habit I need to eliminate. Not pretzel popping; oh no. Sourdough pretzel bites make a lovely snack and a terrific beer companion. And certainly not watching football. Those who know me know that habit is not dying anytime soon.

No, the habit I need to eliminate is starting something, feeling good and excited about it, then inexplicably stopping it before completion.

As Kenen Thompson might ask, (Ooooh-eee!) what’s up with that?

Demanding more.

Seriously, I don’t get it sometimes. Whether it be a book, a workout program, a plan for eating better, a new blog, or a number of other projects or activities, I often find myself not following through like I wished I would.

Granted, it’s not all bad; not by a long shot.

I launched Midwest Sports Fans in the summer of 2008 and it’s stronger than ever, with a goal of 12 million pageviews for 2012. The company I am a part-owner of, Orangecast, recently launched Synthesis, one of the best managed WordPress hosting offerings available anywhere. And so far so good on the most recent project, The Assembly Call, an IU basketball postgame I host with a couple of IU hoops fanatics – we’ve had a show all ten games this year, and the previously moribund Hoosiers are 10-0. Success indeed!

None of these achievements, nor others I didn’t mention, occur without some serious stick-to-it-iveness.

But I’m still left gnawing feeling that I’m capable of more. Much more. And as 2012 approaches, I want to indulge this feeling and do something about it, because I think it is the essence of primility.

I am glad that I can take pride in the successes I have achieved, but I feel humbled when I look back at missed or overlooked or forlorn opportunities.

I have the pride to know that I’m capable of achieving anything when I put my mind properly to it, but humility sets in when I think about how many times I’ve put my mind to something but shortly thereafter forgotten about it and then not held myself accountable.

I pridefully see in myself the potential to do so much more than what I’ve already done, but I humbly know that I need to attack 2012 differently to get a different result than I got in 2011.

That’s where The Discipline Project comes in.

The Discipline Project

I’ve been knocking around ideas in my head for something like this ever since December of 2010, when I got the idea to write “30 Rules for 30″ – basically 30 tenets to guide my daily actions in my 30th year. I even wrote out the 30 rules, but I never got around to posting them, as I promised I’d do; and I certainly never got around to following them.

It’s a shame too, because when the idea first hit me I was really excited about it. There was no follow through though, so here I sit roughly a year later still seeking, wanting, craving some way to more consistently hold myself accountable to my goals.

Quick but relevant aside:

A couple years back I watched highlights of a Tom Izzo press conference when Michigan State was in the Final Four. Someone asked him what he thought heisrole was as a coach. He said, quite simply, that his role as a coach was to “hold players accountable to their dreams.” I thought this was a brilliantly succinct way to sum up what a coach should be. The best coaches bring the best out of their players, which should in theory guide said players in the direction of their goals.

I love that quote. I also refuse to believe that we necessarily need coaches to do this for us on a daily basis.

Of course we need coaches in our lives. It is of the utmost important that we always be humble enough to learn from those who know more and have more experience than we do. But on a day to day basis, I do not think we should have to have another person who holds us accountable to our goals. We should be able to hold ourselves accountable to our goals.

To me, that’s the essence of discipline; certainly it’s the essence of personal discipline.

And that is my goal for 2012: I want to learn how to hold myself accountable to my goals. The Discipline Project is how I am going to do that, and I will be taking you on the journey with me here at Primility.com.

What next?

The next steps:

• Define my goals for 2012 – because how can I hold myself accountable to them if I don’t know what they are?
• Chart long- and short-term courses for achieving my goals – because how can I expect to reach the achievement of my goals, my ultimate desired destination, if I don’t have a roadmap to follow?
• Monitor constantly and publicly – because both will ensure accountability.

As I go on this journey, I’m happy to have anyone jump onboard who wants to. I don’t need to just hold myself accountable for my goals; we can hold eachother accountable for our goals.

And don’t worry, I won’t take it personally if you wait a week or a month or longer to make sure I’m serious about this and actually follow through on it, given my checkered history with bold proclamations here at this site and other places. I’ve earned that doubt.

In the interest of full disclosure, that same doubt has been whispering in my ear through every keystroke of this post. Why wouldn’t it? I’ve done some good things in my time, things I’m proud of; but I’ve left a lot of other worthwhile successes on the table because I haven’t been willing to hold myself accountable and demand the daily discipline of myself that it takes to consistently achieve goals.

Writing this post is step one in what I hope, no expect, will be a long and worthwhile journey towards rekindling the fire of discipline and achievement that once burned within me. It’s still there. I can feel the embers. The coals remain warm. Now I’ve just got to get the fire started and then feed it regularly so it never goes back out.

So that’s the idea. That’s The Discipline Project.

I’m excited. Let’s do this.

For an enhanced multimedia experience, click on this mp3 to open and play it in a new browser as you read.

Dearly beloved,

We are gathered here to celebrate the passing of Procrastinating Jerod Morris, as we also mourn the many lost opportunities caused directory by his incessant and pervasive habit of putting things off.

Procrastinating Jerod Morris passed on to another plane yesterday, July 13th of the year Two Thousand and Eleven, some 29 years and 364 days after his birth. 

Image source: GordonAndTheWhale.com

On his death bed, Procrastinating Jerod Morris had these final words to say:

I lived a good life, a happy life, and certainly a life devoid of great shame or excessive regret; but unfortunately yes, there was some regret. These few regrets came from things I always wanted to do, that I always meant to do, that I knew should do, but that somehow I always found a way to push off until later.

Now, as I head towards this bright white enlightened light, I no longer have any future time to put things off onto.

You see, 30 years of age was always the deadline, the horizon; and I never spent much time looking past that. Thirty years old always seemed so far out there, and it always seemed like I had so much time; so, so what if I don’t do something now? I’ve got all the time in the world to get it done before 30.

Or so the jackwagon inside of me thought.

But now my time has come. The requiem for the procrastinator has begun, to be followed soon by the renaissance of a more proactive man.

As 29 years and 364 days turns into 30 years and no days, the horizon on Procrastinating Jerod Morris has finally reached the foreground, it has invaded the present. The checks have come due. The piper is demanding his money. Yet I have no plan for the present nor the future, and I cannot repay my debts.

So I must move on, and allow Jerod Morris to do the same without me.

In unloving memory, we lay Procrastinating Jerod Morris to rest today.

In memoriam, Procrastinating Jerod Morris’ next of kin, Proactive Jerod Morris, has asked that in lieu of flowers or donations, everyone dishonor the memory of the fallen by choosing at least one thing that they could put off until tomorrow and instead do it today. Cross it off the to-do list early.

It’s not what Procrastinating Jerod Morris would have done, but perhaps after taking inventory of the unfulfilled potential of his days, it is what he would now want.

###

(You can turn off the creepy music now…)

Remember that it is never to late to change, and it is never too late to turn a bad habit into a good one. Humble yourself with the realization that you want to change, or need to change, and then take pride in making it a reality. That’s what I am trying to do with my nasty little habit of procrastinating.

I have finally realized that I’ll never get all I want out of life if I keep putting off the nuts and bolts activities that may not always be fun, but that are nevertheless necessary. Sometimes short-term sacrifices have to be made for long-term gains; the mind of the procrastinator does not always see that.

For anyone else looking to have their own requiem for the procrastinator inside them, feel free to share your story below. Or just share something you did today (or rightnow) that shows your commitment to a procrastination-free life. Sometimes the simple act of sharing an activity or experience, and then being lauded for it, can help reinforce the desire to do that activity again.

I’m sure I won’t be perfect in not procrastinating. A certain challenge awaits. It will not surprise me when the vampire of Procrastinating Jerod rears his ugly, lifeless, no-good head in my direction and tries to distract me; but I’m doing my best to prepare for it with specific strategies (which I’ll share soon) to ensure I’m not just doing the same things all over again.

Because doing the same things over and over and expecting a different result is nothing more than insanity.

And in a lot of ways, allowing yourself to excessively procrastinate is the same thing.

I’m ready to take some real steps to change that about myself. Who’s with me?

**********

* – Song credit: Lux Aeterna by Clint Mansell off the Requiem For A Dream soundtrack.

Here are a few articles and blog posts that have gotten me thinking recently:

(Note that I often tweet these articles as soon as I find them with the @Primility Twitter account.)

The first two articles were actually tweeted out this morning my Michael Lombardi. You might not expect such universally applicable content to be tweeted by a guy who spends most of his days talking about the NFL, but apparently that is an erroneous assumption.

The Start-Up of You by Thomas Friedman

Whatever you may be thinking when you apply for a job today, you can be sure the employer is asking this: Can this person add value every hour, every day — more than a worker in India, a robot or a computer? Can he or she help my company adapt by not only doing the job today but also reinventing the job for tomorrow? And can he or she adapt with all the change, so my company can adapt and export more into the fastest-growing global markets? In today’s hyperconnected world, more and more companies cannot and will not hire people who don’t fulfill those criteria.

I can state with absolute certainty that at our company we absolutely make decisions like this. The importance of being lean and nimble, especially in the tech industry, cannot be understated. Thus, anyone who is not pushing the envelope and providing value beyond tactical work is dead weight. And dead weight will sink you. So don’t be dead weight.

Ten Principles to Live By in Fiercely Complex Times by Tony Schwartz

7. Accept yourself exactly as you are but never stop trying to learn and grow. One without the other just doesn’t cut it. The first, by itself, leads to complacency, the second to self-flagellation. The paradoxical trick is to embrace these opposites, using self-acceptance as an antidote to fear and as a cushion in the face of setbacks.

There is an element of primility in that particular principle: embracing the opposites. Find a way to make two opposing forces work together. It’s powerful. As are the rest his principles.

10 Ways to Beat Online Obscurity by Demian Farnworth for Copyblogger

5. Promote other people to promote yourself

No doubt about it: we are fixated on ourselves.

You have to fight that and purposely find people doing wonderful things and share their work with the world.

Write blogs the showcase their work. Spread their work on Twitter. And if it doesn’t come naturally to you, then schedule this into your day.

For those of you who are not copywriters, you may wonder what kind of value you can get from a site like Copyblogger. I’ll tell you: a lot. Not only could everyone benefit from learning about the art of how to structure words or craft a sales pitch or any of the other myriad topics discussed at Copyblogger, but often the lessons can applied to other areas of life.

Take the one above. Maybe you don’t blog or tweet. Fine. You can still seek out ways to promote others in your life. What better way to “pay it forward” or grow your karma than by lifting up or lauding someone else?

How to Compete with Generation Z by Penelope Trunk (the Brazen Careerist)

But what I’m saying is that you can follow your passion within constraints. I don’t think lifelong learning is about turning on a dime, switching on a whim. I think it’s following old paths and layering them with new, internally generated questions. But you need to be on some sort of path to have a stable place to form a question.

This post focuses on the importance of learning; specifically, Ms. Trunk focuses on the importance of adults making it a point to continue learning (and relearning and unlearning) perpetually.

7 Steps to Becoming Unstuck and More Productive by Michael Hyatt

Productivity is like any skill. The more you practice it, the better you get. Don’t get discouraged if you don’t initially make as much progress as you want. Stick with the process and expect to improve. You will!

Mr. Hyatt provides seven simple, easy-to-digest and implement strategies for becoming more productive, including recommending a couple of tools that web procrastinators may find very useful.

I love my life as it is. I have a great life. I’m fortunate in so many ways, and incredibly happy in general. But my life can be better and I can happier, and I know it. It’s not going to happen, though, not if I’m not proactive about it.

And isn’t seeking a better life and more happiness ultimately why we get up every day? Or, at least, shouldn’t it be?

Of course. Okay, now to the point.

This morning, I decided to do a little thing that I think could provide a large benefit. I’d like to share it with you.

Image source: Kristen Murphy/AP via W-Cellphones.com

The Problem of Hyperconnectivity

When I woke up this morning, I decided to do some reading from my Google Reader, which I am slowly but surely packing full of my favorite writers, specifically people who will inform and inspire me.

As an old boss once told me, our minds are like computers, and the output is dictated by the input. I’m trying my best to be more proactive about what I’m putting in so that better and more productive thoughts can come out.

Today I read a great blog post by Jonathan Fields titled “Creative Kryptonite and the Death of Productivity“. The basic point of the article is that in today’s hyperconnected world, it is far too easy to become distracted; and these distractions end up limiting our ability to be creative and even close to our productive best. It’s a theme I’ve seen covered numerous other places, and Fields does it as well as any of the others.

A quick excerpt:

“Hyperconnectivity has become one of the purest forms of intermittent reinforcement ever to exist. Which is a bit horrifying, because in addition to pulling us away from activities and relationships we claim to hold dear and degrading “real” productivity, it all but eliminates the opportunities for disconnection that are crucial in the creation of great art, business and life.“

Fields defines intermittent reinforcement as “a behavioral pattern where repeated reinforcement of a behavior over times programs your brain to crave more and more opportunities to express that behavior.” As he says, it mirrors addiction.

When I read this, ding-ding-ding bells started going off in my head immediately.

Raise your hand if you…

• Check your cell phone, especially to return texts, when stopped at red lights (or, God forbid, while driving)
• Stop to immediately check every call and text message you get no matter what you’re doing at the time (working, reading, writing, etc.)
• Simultaneously love and loathe the hyperconnectivity your phone gives you…yet you do nothing to manage it in your favor.

My hand is raised for all of these. Yours maybe (probably) is too, and I could go on and on coming up with examples. I think the point has been made though.

We live in an age of hyperconnectivity, and it can drown us if all we do is tread water because then we’re just at the mercy of the current. Today, I decided to actually start swimming, in one very particular way, essentially creating a current of my own.

Here’s what I did: I took control of my phone.

Overcoming Hyperconnectivity

Previously, I had one ring tone for everyone and one text tone for everyone. So when the phone rang, it could have been anyone from a random 800 number to my mom or dad. I wouldn’t know until I looked, so I had to look no matter what I was doing (because, let’s face it, if it’s mom or dad they deserve to have the call picked up in anything but the most exigent of circumstances).

The same is true for texts. Any time the text tone rang out, it could have been an important text from someone at work or my brother, or just something random that did not demand immediate attention. How was I to know?

After what I did this morning, now I’ll have a much better idea.

Managing Calls

First, I spent a little time creating three new ring tones. I wanted them to be fun songs that I enjoyed, but not anything too good because I don’t want to get sick of a song I really like.

And I already knew what each ringtone would be for:

1. People whose calls I always take (family, close friends)
2. Business-related contacts (business partner, co-workers, important clients)
3. Everyone else

Now, if I’m sitting reading a book and I hear ringtone #3, I know that it’s not a call I need to jump up for. I’ll certainly check it later and return it, if necessary, but I don’t need to stop what I’m doing because the likelihood of it being urgent is very, very low.

If, on the other hand, one of the carefully selected people who have ringtone 1 or 2 is calling, I will probably stop to check and answer the call (although, on a weekend, perhaps I’ll be a little slower to the work calls).

Bam!

Instantly, I’ve created a situation in which I’ve minimized distractions from calls.

Managing Texts

But calls were only a small part of my problem. Text messages were a bigger part of my problem, one I’ve been trying to manage better for some time now. I always check my texts, but this really is a silly policy, for one very simple reason: text messages are rarely urgent. And in the event that they are urgent, it’s a reasonable to expect that a call would follow soon after a text was not responded to.

So what the hell is the point of jumping to check the phone every time the text tone rings? Especially when you’re in the middle of doing something?

Answer: there isn’t one. It’s hyperconnectivity at its worst and most distracting.

And here is what I realized this morning about iPhone text and contact settings that I did not realize before: you can turn your text tone off as a global setting, but then give individual people a tone.

Again, bam!

So I did just that. Now text messages will not create a tone, except for a few select people I gave a text tone to (most of the people who have ringtone 1 and the people I work with, who sometimes send important texts when they cannot talk due to meetings or conference calls). For everyone else, the vast majority of whom are not going to ever be sending a text requiring an urgent response, I’ll see their text message when I check my phone. Scratch that. I’ll see their text message when I choose to check my phone, which now will be in between tasks rather than during them.

So how does this all tie in with primility?

Primility as a Means for Overcoming Hyperconnectivity

Whenever we are taking pride in making a change, it’s important to humble ourselves with the thought that there is no way to get a different result by doing what we’ve always done. This simple concept makes perfect sense, yet I often overlook it. I wonder why change does not come easier while completely overlooking the fact that I’m expecting change without actually doing something differently to cause change.

Humbly reading Jonathan Fields’ blog post today made me realize that I was falling victim to exactly what he was describing. But instead of lamenting that and simply blaming our hyperconnected world, or feeling powerless, or simply hoping I could overcome this issue, I decided to have some pride and do something with my newly found knowledge and perspective.

And that is why now I will control my phone, rather than the other way around. All by practicing a little bit of primility.

**********

How can you, in your own life, use primility to overcome the hyperconnectivity of the modern age?

So consider this post something of a small sneak preview of these two endeavors, because I already know what the subject of one of my goals and one of my rules will be: email.

Oh, email.

One area of my life that I greatly want to improve is time management. I suspect that all of us, in one way or another, could stand to improve our ability to manage time in this era of constant distraction; and, quite likely, one of the most omnipresent distractions in your life (it certainly is in mine) is email.

As Chris Anderson and Jane Wulf of TED explain at EmailCharter.org, the problem of email is becoming more and more pervasive, centered around one general issue:

The average time taken to respond to an email is greater, in aggregate, than the time it took to create.

That might sound counter-intuitive, but read their explanation. It’s not.

What does email have to do with primilty? A lot, I say.

If I am planning to take pride in improving my time management skills moving forward, and I am, then it stands to reason that I should humbly seek out suggestions and advice on how to improve this one area that is consistently a bane and time drain of every day in my life. I know that many of you are nodding with me right now.

So here is the plan: first, I implore all of you to read the Email Charter. It’s simple and spot-on, and the more people that adopt these email strategies the better for all of us.

Consider #8:

8. Give these Gifts: EOM NNTR
If your email message can be expressed in half a dozen words, just put it in the subject line, followed by EOM (= End of Message). This saves the recipient having to actually open the message. Ending a note with “No need to respond” or NNTR, is a wonderful act of generosity. Many acronyms confuse as much as help, but these two are golden and deserve wide adoption.

Second, it’s time to act.

I am going to start doing #8 immediately, and the Email Charter is filled with these reader-focused actions and objectives that will add up, little by little, to improving everyone’s email lives.

In fact, that’s what I love most about the Email Charter: it’s reader-focused; it’s selfless; it’s humble.

And here is where I tie it back to primility, because again pride and humility combine to form an effective roadmap for change.

If we are going to collectively take pride in making email a more pleasant and less time-consuming experience for everyone, then we need to be humble enough to a) learn the actual root of the problem, and b) willing to admit that we/I need to change and lead by example rather than simply demanding that others change to fit our desires.

Once we accept this, then we can humble ourselves before the Email Charter to learn it and the pridefully commit to putting it into action.

See? Primility. The concept that always fits.

So here is my pledge, which will affect anyone with whom I email: I am going to spend some time getting comfortable with these 10 tenets for email improvement and begin putting them into action. I’m sure it won’t be easy, and it certainly won’t be perfect, but little by little I am going to try my darndest to become a more reader-friendly emailer, and I hope that is I become more proficient that it will rub off consciously or subconsciously on the people I email.

If you agree that email can be improved, I hope you’ll join me. If we can affect change, it’ll just be primility at work again.