Chris Loper has been writing about self-improvement and helping busy adults with habit formation since 2017. He also writes an education blog for parents and students for Northwest Educational Services. Along with Greg Smith, Chris is the cocreator of Parenting for Academic Success, a series of transformative classes that create empowered parents, confident students, and harmonious families. His most recent endeavor combines his academic and habit-formation expertise to help students thrive in college. Visit SmartCollegeHabits.com to learn more. In 2021, Chris published a humorous memoir titled Wood Floats and Other Brilliant Observations, a book that blends crazy stories with practical life lessons. He lives in Issaquah, WA where he is the owner of South Cove Tutoring.
About a month ago, I published an article about the power of effort-tracking, which explained how to use an effort-tracking spreadsheet to increase your productivity and exercise more. The thing is, my personal productivity has been excellent, and my exercise is on autopilot, so I hadn’t been using an effort tracker for over a year. But at the time I published that article, I was struggling with burnout. I had… Read More »Recovery-Tracking
Today, I’m offering a quick corollary to my previous post, Don’t Believe Everything You Think. The message here is simple: You are not your thoughts. Our inner experience is largely composed of thoughts. We create and listen to a running narrative of our life. We think about the past. We think about the future. We react. We judge. We wonder. We ponder. We remember. We plan. We predict. It’s easy… Read More »You Are Not Your Thoughts
Remember the feedback loop that controls your life? We’ve talked a lot about how to master the actions component of that feedback loop, and for good reason: Actions are always under our control, and actions speak louder than thoughts. But thoughts are also important, and we do have some control over them. So it’s time to start exploring the topic of developing better thoughts. What do I mean by that?… Read More »Don’t Believe Everything You Think
Behavioral change is hard. Luckily, there are strategies that make it easier. One of the best is keeping track of your effort.1 This means finding some way to record how frequently you work toward your goals. Indeed, research has shown that tracking how often you work toward your goals leads to greater progress. Effort-tracking is effective for four reasons: 1. Process Focus Effort-tracking helps you keep your eyes on the… Read More »Effort-Tracking