Most common words in English

I'm working on improving my typing speed. The theory is:

If I can type in larger chunks then I can type faster.

So I should learn how to type the most common words, really, really fast.

Here are the 100 most common words.

How to type upside down.

˙ɯopuɐɹ 'ʎןןɐǝɹ 'ʎןןɐǝɹ sı sıɥʇ

˙uʍop ǝpısdn ǝdʎʇ oʇ ʎɐʍ ǝɥʇ s,ǝɹǝɥ

˙ǝuo sıɥʇ ɹo 'ǝʇıs sıɥʇ oʇ oƃ

˙uʍop ǝpısdn ʇxǝʇ ɹnoʎ uɹnʇ ʇɐɥʇ sǝƃɐd ǝʌɐɥ ʎǝɥʇ

˙ʇxǝʇ uʍop ǝpısdn ǝpoɔıun oʇ ʇxǝʇ ɹɐןnƃǝɹ ʇɹǝʌuoɔ ʎǝɥʇ

ɥƃnoɥʇ sɹǝʇʇǝן ןɐʇıdɐɔ ǝʌɐɥ ʇ,uop ʎǝɥʇ

¡uɯɐp

Practice Starting!

For years I've been writing that I have no trouble writing. The hard part for me is sitting down to write. Once I sit down, the words come. Like right now.

This morning I realized (finally) that the solution to this problem was simple: I needed to practice sitting down. So I did. After my morning pages, I got up, went to the kitchen. I took a breath, and then headed back to my writing room, sat down, and wrote.

Then I got up and did it all over again.

Each time I did it, I did it a little differently, and each time I learned something.

The major lesson "learned" is something that I've known for a while: that if you want to get good at something, then you have to practice. I'm not good at sitting down to write, so I need to practice it.

More generally, I'm not good at starting. Once I start I can generally (not always) keep going, but starting is the hard part. So, the remedy is clear. I need to practice starting.

I'm also not great at finishing, but that's for another day. Right now my "deliberate practice" is starting.

To do that, I need to try to "deliberately start" whatever I do. I can practice starting lots of times, each day.

Who knows, I might even get good at it!

Staying on Course

In a course on usability, my friend Jared Spool described what happens when you fly from New York to Boston. Most of the time, he said, the plane is off course. Still, you get there. What gets you there despite being off course most of the time is course correction. The pilot (or the autopilot) is constantly correcting errors. Head a little too far North and it points the plane a little further South. Perfection is impossible, so the correction will inevitably head the plane a little too far South. Fine. Correct it again. The wind blows harder than expected and you’re off course again. Correct it.  You might get blown so far off course that you need to touch down and refuel. Get back up in the air and adjust your course once again. That’s how planes get from coast to coast. They correct, correct, correct and eventually they get there.

Life’s like that, too. You try to reach a goal and find yourself headed in the wrong direction. Maybe you’re not a little off course; maybe you’re way off course. It doesn’t matter. What will get you there is course correction.

It’s hard to course-correct effectively if you’re busy berating yourself for being off course. Self-criticism or self-abuse won’t get you back on course; it wastes time and energy. And it sucks.

Being hard on yourself won’t keep you from going off course again. When you’re flying a plane, going off course is part of flying. When you’ve living a life, going off course is part of living. You need to accept it, and adjust.

Sometimes the winds of fortune or errors in life navigation will push you way off course. So refuel. Do any necessary maintenance. Then get back flying again. But before you do, you might take a look around. Your unscheduled stop may turn out to be a pleasant surprise.

Hard to Make, Easy to Break

Good habits are hard to make, easy to break. I should know. I’m back in recovery again after having built, and then broken some really good habits. If I examine them, maybe I will learn something and be able to keep things going the next time.

And this post is further proof of how hard it can be to repair a broken habit. I started writing it on 7/26. The stuff that’s highlighted like this was written on 8/11 when I finally got the goddamn thing off my desk. But in the course of it I think I learned something. I hope I did.

So with that in mind, let’s proceed first to the data then the examination.

What Happened

In May I decided I was going to write. I was going to do it regularly and diligently. I started writing, and as I  wrote I found good tools and configured them so my writing was easier and smoother. And I made a resolution: if I opened a web page with something useful, I would not close the page unless I’d written about it. I worked diligently on my other writing projects. And the results showed it.

	TWR	RSILT	WPFW	BWAS*	Other	Total
May	5	10	2	0	0	17
June	8	35	6	0	0	49
July	13	2	4	3	0	22
Total	26	47	12	3	0	88

This does not include daily pages, which are a well established habit for me, and it does not include my first ever stage play, started in June and finished in July.

And this does not count August which has been pretty much been a washout up to now.

To read the stats: my blogfest in May started near the end of the month, so those first 17 posts have to be extrapolated to the whole month. June was a rockin’ month. I was in a pretty steady state, with continuing improvements. And in July the roof caved in. Why? And what can I learn?

What happened in July?

The obvious and wrong answer was my computer problems. I feel like I have been fighting it all month. But that’s not true. It crashed the weekend I went down to Boston: that was July 10th. It’s only been two weeks that I’ve been fighting it. It just seems like forever.

Then I thought it might be Evernote. Once I started using Evernote I just clipped interesting web pages instead of blogging about them. Turns out this is half the story. I blogged about Evernote on July 6th. My Evernote notebooks show that I started clipping on July 3rd – and I started clipping articles about Social Media. Ahh!

So another answer: At the start of July Mira and I decided to work on a blog. That sent me into another round of process improvements—including Evernote. I let Evernote be a proxy for blogging what I learned about. Then the computer crashed. And things got worse from there.

And the last answer: I just lost momentum, and did not know how to gain it back. And here’s the proof. I started this particular post on 7/26 (or before—that’s the date of the last draft before I picked it up on 8/11)

Now what do I do?

Well, this is a first step [I wrote in my original draft]. I’m writing stuff in the blog. But it’s not enough. I’ve gotten out of some really good habits, and into some bad ones. Just getting myself to write this post was a real struggle. I kept wandering off, surfing web pages and NOT WRITING!

So the answer to this seems to be: put the discipline back into your life.

Really?

That was my remedy on 7/26. “Put discipline back in your life.” And where did it get me? Nowhere. Why? Because “Put discipline back in your life” is a slogan. It’s not a behavior.

And worse, I’ve got bad Beliefs. “I’ve lost control.” “I don’t know what to do.” “I can’t handle it.” All that old shit.

Well, I can handle it. And here’s how I’m going to do it.

My Daily Pages is a fully established, very reliable habit. When I started doing the Pages it was partly with the idea of making it a keystone or foundation (depending on your metaphor) for other good habits.

I got myself into the writing habit and when I lost it I did not have a reflexive way to recover. So I was unstable

What will stabilize me? My answer is good, tight management. I need to managed, or coached until the habit is set, and to intercede if I slip.

Right now I need management at a very granular level. A day is too long a time. The right level of granularity is: a Pomodoro  at a time.

So here’s the current plan.

I will build on Pages. I will start each day with Pages, rather than doing them “some time during the day.” I will follow the Pages with Daily Planning. I will figure out some things that I am going to do—or at least attempt that day. Then start to work on the plan a Pomodoro at a time. Each time, write some notes. Coach yourself on a continuing basis.

Ellis cautions that to make changes it’s necessary to approach the problem both cognitively and behaviorally, and to reward the right result and penalize the wrong one. So: if no pages, I will take a cold shower. I hate cold showers. I have a strong incentive to avoid them. I will avoid them.

Will it work? Time will tell. Pages work. Building on Pages just might work.

I’ve got a new blog (Oh no! Not another!!!) Yes. It’s a personal one. To give myself that feedback and create a sense of history. It’s a personal blog. I may or may not make it public later on. We’ll see.

Today, under this new regime, I’ve done my pages, made my plan and made two posts in the personal blog.  I’ve completed two Pomodoros of varying sizes.

This one will make three of each.

We’ll see what happens.