I started on the 26th with a new habit I wanted to acquire: Writing down my 3 most important tasks in the morning.

So far, I’ve written them down every morning. That’s excellent.

It’s much better than having a really long to-do list, which will always disappoint because you can never finish it. I’ll add other things to the list, but I make sure to take care of the important things first. As Baltasar Gracian wrote, “A wise man does at once, what a fool does at last.”

Of the 5 days I’ve been doing this, I didn’t finish the MITs on two days. They were both Tuesday and Thursday, when I have the biggest class load. On Tuesday, I finished two of three MITs. On Thursday, I decided to only give myself two MITs, and then I ended up doing none of them. I got a lot more done on Friday, though, which I felt made up for it.

I was able to focus enough to finish my 3 current projects. As I wrote down my next 3 goals, I wanted to do so much more. I stopped myself. I limited myself to only 3 things.

We’ll see what happens as I get further into the school year, and the work piles up. For now, I’ll be proud of these small achievements. They’re the bricks, the foundation of something larger that we’ll only see a year from now.