Hello and happy Monday!

Today I just wanted to give a progress report on how I’ve doing on my personal-development program: The Xavier Project.

I’m coming up on one full month for the current version of this system and I have to say I’m really excited with the progress I’ve made already!

I’ve already progressed through half of my levels and have locked in three daily habits:
– Wake up on time
– Mental exercises (Practicing German & using the Lumosity app)
– Reducing internet browsing to less than a half hour per day.

Now, how I have the system laid out for developing habits, I’m not focusing on conventional (and flawed) number of 21 days for habit building, because each habit is unique in form and to the individual to adopt and so I’m just focused on creating the initial spark of 5 day winning streaks and quietly trying to keep the momentum going after those initial 5 days. What has been encouraging about this tactic is to see the continued success in these habits after I moved onto a new project. My first habit (and the hardest one for me to master), waking up on time, has been going well! I’ve hit my goal 21/28 days so far.

Other cool things to note from my progress:

Books- Today I completed my 8th book since I started the system (average 2 books per week)

Fitness- I have completed 15 weight room workouts, and as well as a couple of runs and bike rides.

Sleep- This isn’t represented in the system currently, but through the system I’m in the middle of an experiment on myself on how to optimize my sleep time and see if I can reduce the hours of sleep while maintaining the same energy levels.

Mental exercises- This was one of my daily habits that I worked on, and other than my slip up yesterday, I was on a 13-day winning streak!

Room for improvement:

My internet browsing habit was good for the first 5 days to lock it, but once I took the pressure off the habit, I was on a 3-day losing streak. My dang phone is just too convenient! Will need to work on that some more.

One of the more disappointing elements that I haven’t utilized yet is the pre-meal exercise. This was something I learned about in Tim Ferriss’ book: The 4 Hour Body, and he talks about how one of the little tricks to boost his metabolism and muscle development was basically training his body to use the nutrients to be more efficient. That is by doing quick little exercises that only take a minute and cause the body to react as if he was about to do a full-blown workout. So when he would then sit down for a meal right afterwards, his body would feed all those proteins into the muscles that were aggravated and start building up more muscle tissue.

I still don’t know how accurate that is yet, but it does fit with the knowledge I do have about human physiology and so I wanted to try it out… Except I keep forgetting to do it!

So that’s just a quick update on my system, if you want to track my progress, just go to TheXavierProject.com If you have any questions or comments on how this all works, feel free to leave me a comment!