One fix a day: the power of momentum

Derek Featherstone / Published: January 30, 2020

There’s this thing that I do. I get an idea, and then I tend to obsess over it a bit. Here’s some recent evidence:

I have tracked every minute of every day since October 1, 2018 (see Life tracking). It’s a thing.
I just recently stopped my daily routine of exercise after a streak of 537 days of exercise in which I did at least 50 pushups each day. I had also done 530 days in a row of crunches and 527 days of squats (body weight only).
In 2019, I didn’t eat chocolate for the entire year.
In February of 2019, I wrote a 1000 words a day towards a book (that I’m planning on resurrecting soon so that I can get it done.)

So, yeah, there’s a history of things like this. Routines seem to be a thing for me.

Momentum

For me, the streak is about momentum: once I’ve got it, I need to keep it. Waver for a moment and miss a day? I might as well just not bother any more… why on earth would I start over? (Yes, I do know that’s ridiculously flawed thinking!)

It should come as no surprise that I’m doing a thing every day so far in 2020.

Home repairs

It started just before Christmas 2019, when I started doing some things around the house as we prepared for guests to arrive. It felt great to get some of these things finished or fixed around the house:

I repainted (most) of the interior doors in the main floor and upstairs.
I installed some baseboard/trim around the inside of the door to the basement (it had been off since we had the floors done 3 years ago!)
I sorted out our kitchen cabinets - they had been painted 3 yrs ago professionally, but they didn’t sand or prime, so the paint was coming off in high traffic areas. I figured out how to patch and repaint them so that they didn’t look so beaten up.

It felt good. Actually, it felt GREAT to get those things done. I decided I wanted to keep doing things as it felt good to accomplish things. From that effort was born…

One fix a day.

For the year 2020, I’ve been fixing one thing a day and posting photos of those things over on my instagram. You can see them all with the hashtag #OneFixADay. Here’s a few:

The idea is that while I’m not taking on huge things around the house every day, I’m doing a smallish thing, and that’s ok because it’s more than fixing zero things that day, right?

What about when I’m not home?

I travel quite a bit speaking at conferences and other training type events, as well as for sales and marketing related things. So how can I do one fix a day when I’m out of town? Simple: I do digital things.

And that, my friends, is what brings us to this web site in the first place.

Without #OneFixADay this site doesn’t likely exist the way it does, and I am not likely writing this post, because at least 5 or 6 of my fixes have been to get this web site up and running again.

And you?

So, what about you? How about looking through those #OneFixADay photos and start your own thing? It could be something around the house that was annoying, or broken, or just needed to be redone. It could be digital as well, if you’re in to that.

What can you do that’ll make a small difference over time, if you just do a little bit each day?