In my quest to become an Übermen­sch, I fig­ured out long ago that life is best viewed as a marathon not a sprint.  Part of this phi­los­o­phy and process involves “chunk­ing” tasks into man­age­able pieces. For exam­ple, it would be impos­si­ble to mem­o­rize a med­ical school education’s worth of car­di­ol­ogy in one evening.  How­ever, it would be pos­si­ble to review a chap­ter per day in a car­di­ol­ogy text book until you had a bet­ter under­stand­ing of the field.  This philo­soph­i­cal idea is greatly helped by a new web­site I dis­cov­ered called “Don’t Break The Chain.”

This site is thanks to LifeHacker.com and is extremely sim­ple.  One sim­ply col­ors in a cal­en­dar with the idea that they don’t want a day to not be col­ored in.  You can view your cal­en­dar by month, four months, or by year and it is visu­ally strik­ing to see a chain of “col­ored in days.”

In my case I wanted to cre­ate a moti­va­tional tool for study­ing, exer­cis­ing, writ­ing, and cre­ativ­ity.  I there­fore have 4 chains that I can color code in.  The goal is to start small.  Pick a task you want to make a habit and start your chain with it.  See if you can fill in a week.  If you can, keep going to fill in a month.  Keep going and add chains as you need them.

The web­site cred­its Jerry Sein­feld for the inspi­ra­tion.  He appar­ently uses this phi­los­o­phy to write jokes and doesn’t want to see a white day on his cal­en­dar.  If you use the idea, and find suc­cess, please let me know.