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The 90 Day Focus Challenge

Fox

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Hey @Fox, I've been following a lot of your posts and actually discovered 75 Hard from your other post.
That being said, have you been able to complete the program yet?

I'm only on day 23 and not a week goes by where I don't have at least one day where I struggle with the challenge. Whether that means walking 45 minutes at 10 PM at night or trying to finish the last liter of water by bedtime.

A lot of people combine the 75 Hard challenge with Andy's PowerList Idea and I've actually started that too, but I noticed a weird phenomenon. If I start working on the items on the list and something changed that made one of the items not possible to be accomplished anymore (a meeting or a call that I could no longer make), then I end up LESS motivated to complete the list because I have already LOST that day.

I think the same phenomenon happens when you have to do 75 Hard over and over again. Andy alluded to it in one of his recent podcasts that trying, but not completing the program can actually put you in a worse position than when you started. I believe the intent is to work on that voice in your head. To fight through those hard days where it's so easy to say, "f*ck it, why am I doing this", so that at the end of the 75 days you know that you can accomplish something that you've set your mind to through all the hard days.

I don't know about you, but I've had some super hard days with the 75 Hard Challenge and I'm re-considering not even doing the PowerList because I don't think I can consistently accomplish both right now. I'm just not good enough and I haven't built those habits yet. Those L's on the PowerList... well it certainly doesn't help the confidence I'm trying to build through 75 Hard.

My recommendation is to finish 75 Hard. All of it. Then worry about the next challenge.

I get what you are saying but I feel differently about it.

Both the 75 hard challenge and this challenge I want to continue doing long term. I am not looking to do one, just drop it, and then start or something else. They are all where I want to be at every day.

For me, I want to have a $m/year mindset so I am pushing myself quite hard to make some core changes about who I am and how I behave. These are where I want my baseline to be.

So (for me) to do one challenge, and then work on another challenge but drop the first, and then work on something else and drop the second challenge, is not a great approach. I might rack up some challenge "wins" but nothing has stuck long term.

One last point - if you just keep retrying and don't even think about quitting long term it gets a lot easier mentally. I don't even consider quitting as an option anymore.

And I still have made a ton of progress even though I have "failed" the most on this forum with the challenge.

Failure is only failure if you quit - if you pick yourself back up its experience.
 
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JustinY

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Clearly it's working for you and at the end of the day that's all that really matters.

I've struggled with giving up on business ideas after not getting results quick enough or when I am uncertain on what the right next steps are.
For me I view this challenge as a way to increase my discipline and mental resilience and to transfer that energy towards starting my own business once I am done with this challenge.
Not to say that I'm done, but at least I've proven to myself I can accomplish something I've put my mind to.

Good luck with the new challenge man. I'll probably work on that once I get a handle on 75 Hard.
 
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André Casal

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I'm in. It's time for bed now so tomorrow I'll post my plans and the progress I'll be making so you guys can hold me accountable. Also have surgery coming soon, do I don't know how I'm going to hold up, but we'll see.

I'm divided between editting this post and no one reading it and creating a new post for each workday and spamming the thread. What do you guys think?
 

1step

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Hows this going for everyone so far?

So far so good for me.

I use trello to organize my daily tasks and have just made a point to make sure and put the top 2 tasks for the next day on my board before leaving work for the day.

Today I had more on my to-do list than I anticipated and it took me much longer than expected. This meant I had to put off some things that I normally would've taken care of sooner. The most important being managing a few issues that came up from employees. This didn't cause any issues today but it might later. I am not sure what the solution is here but I am used to being available to them very quickly or an within an hour at the latest. Maybe I will alert them before I go into a long work session to address any issues before hand and let them know I will be unavailable for awhile.
 

André Casal

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Ok, first day's results are in.

Stage 1, Day 1 (2019-09-11) - 90 min of pure execution, excluding planning and researching/reading/learning, done. I've uploaded 21 videos to my YouTube channel.

I’ve set a stopwatch on my phone next to me and only when I did work that didn’t involve planning, research, learning or reading (i.e. work that actually moves the business forward), did I allow the stopwatch to move forward. These 90 min of execution took me about 3 to 4 hours to accomplish. I’ve realized with this exercise that I’m very used to planning and research and very little used to actual execution, which made me very tired. Moving forward I’ll try and shift to a more execution oriented process and spend more time doing what really matters. Just for this lesson this first day was already extremely worth it!

Stage 1, Day 2 (2019-09-12) - 90 min of pure execution, excluding planning, researching, reading, learning. I've recorded (but did not upload yet) 18 videos for my YouTube channel.

Normally I wouldn't work until 1AM, but I'm starting to appreciate the results of pure execution, so I did. Oh also I had knee surgery today, but that's not gonna stop me.

Stage 1, Day 3 (2019-09-13) - 4h42m of pure execution, excluding planning, researching, reading and learning. I've uploaded 42 new videos to my YouTube channel and recorded 24 new ones.

These 4h42m of pure execution took me the whole day. I paused the timer whenever I had to research or wait for the videos to upload. I don't think I can speed up research, but I'm switching from 100Mbps to 500Mbps next week to shorten upload times.

Stage 1, Day 4 (2019-09-14) - I pushed it too much yesterday. Today I'm faced with the decision to do 90 min of pure execution, restart the challenge or use the day to rest.

Decided to rest because I was so exhausted.

Stage 1, Day 5 (2019-09-15) - 90min of pure execution. Recorded 20 videos and uploaded 7 to my YouTube Channel.

Stage 1, Day 6 (2019-09-16) - Woke up at 9h50. Restarted the challenge.

I stood up late playing games yesterday and woke up too late today. I've setup a daily alarm to make sure I wake up before 9 AM every day.
 
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TylerJW

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I'm in too. Kicking things off tomorrow (Saturday).

Going to write this out rather than print it so I'm fresh on the guidelines. Love the format
 

Charnell

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The first day is tomorrow as well. I have my legal pad already laid out with tomorrows tasks. Created a spreadsheet to keep track of wake-up times, health (lift maxes & Renpho scale readings), phone time, etc. Turns out I rarely go above 2 hours of phone time a day, except Wednesday when my emergency alert was on all night cause a few tornadoes ripped up the town.

Here's the rundown of my task log if anyone needs an idea. Tasks, notes, and schedule are pretty self-explanatory, I made a major tasks portion that I will continue writing each day and adding onto as they get knocked out under tasks.

legal pad tasks.png
 

Charnell

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Wow.

Going in with a plan is killer. I knew that before, but having a need to "prove it" makes things easier to just get done.

Out of bed at 8, started working at 8:20. No music, no phone, no email. 907 words written in 29 minutes fingers to keyboard, editing, publishing, promotions, created a survey I'll be sending out Monday to firms already using my service in order to build-out company profiles (UGC). 2/4 tasks knocked out in a little more than an hour and a half.

It's not even 10:30.
 
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Bertram

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EDIT]
Fox,
The challenges are fun and get me up and running. Thanks for offering them here.
I have a proposal for you to consider.
If you focus a challenge on not quitting, then the focus is on whether or not you'll fail.
If you focus instead on how far you can go in the challenge, and accept some probability that you will fail, then you'll focus on the gain, and that value of 23 days or 40 or 55, will signify achievement, which is what it is.
But under the present assumptions of this challenge and 75HARD, day after day we've accumulated wins, but as soon as we stumble we are forced to trick ourselves into feeling that this accomplishment is now meaningless.
That makes the failure the more powerful event.
Not only is that silly, but it's also very unhealthy and it goes completely against the emprirical reality of winning.
That makes the single day of failure a more powerful experience than multiple days of winning.
Which makes no sense.
For example, you learn to ride a bicycle by building skills of balance and power, repeating again and again as needed.
You don't learn to balance and pedal by falling on the concrete sidewalk and ripping open your kneecap.
The failure and pain and bleeding knee are not inherently valuable.
Same with learning skills like discipline and endurance. These are the gains in experience that result is skill acquisition. If anything, pain and torn kneecaps should not be pivotal.
Both 90 Day and 75 HARD challenges elevate the day of failure to a higher significance than a day of success.
And here's the kicker, the whole challenge becomes a matter of events, resisting failure, postponing failure, and failing itself as events.

I know, silly is a harsh word.
But it's true, this approach is not how achievement naturally happens. In fact this challenge slows down behavioral changes like gaining discipline and changing habits.

The fact is, those who overcome failure and go on to great achievement focus on self-love and self-forgiveness, and not self-esteem or self-criticism. You must be your own best friend. Not some cross-armed, frowning coach who only appears at the moment you collapse in exaustion. That's just how it goes.
Self-compassion is more important to achieving success than punishment. Or self-esteem. (Research link below.)
Imagine you were learning a new sport, say hydro surfing. Would you focus on skill building and reward of success, even when you ? Or would you try to improve yourself by stopping completely after each fall by dragging in the sail and board, unharnessing, drying gear and putting everything back in your car, and changing back into dry clothes and shoes, and getting in the vehicle? So how could it possibly make sense to think you improve a skill like discipline or endurance by having to start overand letting the whole program hinge on a single experience of setback?
Asking for a friend.
And again, thanks @Fox.

 
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Bertram

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I had no problem with the 90-Day this past week even though I was massively ill and had to sleep for thirty hours straight.
Once again, thanks @Fox for posting the action-taking challenge threads.
I can push through very unpleasant situations and tasks two ways. First, I state "I am not a person who..." or "I don't ..." or "I do ..." and simply state the behavior I want to do or not do. Forget the reasons behind it, the value, goals, feeeeeelings. It feels better to make the statement and change the subject. Making the statement sincerelt brings about instantaneous physiological changes. Your beathing and posture change.
Second way through: it's a job. It's just my job. My job is to write a contract within three hours. My job is speed hiking for seventy minutes (nice job!). My job is 18/6 fasting. My job is writing twenty pages (yasss).
If you know that you'd do just about any dirty job to get by, then yes that the task list is very easy to get through as long as you don't reflect on the meaning or personal value.
Just a job, monn.

Thanks again @Fox.
 
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Bryaninbangkok

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I already do all that except the 3 hour deep work thing, which I will work on now, (maybe 1 article per day towards my book) I love seeing people help each other like this, not many people in my real life are this dedicated.
 

RazorCut

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I’m late to the party but let see if I can ace this. Struggling to get up at 5 at the moment and stay on track so this commitment strategy will help.

Thanks for the thread @Fox :thumbsup:
 

Hai

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@Fox Hey man, in one of your Youtube videos you schedule free time for the weekends. Do you follow that schedule? I´ve been on the grind for some years now without ever scheduling off time for whole days like that, and social life has suffered accordingly. Is that something to recommend or do you think the daily deep work routine is something worth/better to do?(with off time for whatever from 5pm or 8pm onwards)

P.S.: Just seeing you travel a lot while still get tons of work done shows that it´s possible to optimize.
 

Fox

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@Fox Hey man, in one of your Youtube videos you schedule free time for the weekends. Do you follow that schedule? I´ve been on the grind for some years now without ever scheduling off time for whole days like that, and social life has suffered accordingly. Is that something to recommend or do you think the daily deep work routine is something worth/better to do?(with off time for whatever from 5pm or 8pm onwards)

P.S.: Just seeing you travel a lot while still get tons of work done shows that it´s possible to optimize.

Ya I try to take a full two days a week off with very little "device time".

I for sure recommend it - you need that time and apart from a few hustle style weeks you don't want to be working like that long term. You need time to relax, recover and reflect.

I didn't update this thread but since I posted this I have had way more downtime and way less time on devices/social media.
 

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