Is There Life After MonkMode?
It's over - is there more? Can there be more? Should there be more?
You know that feeling of the excitement you felt when you were younger, the night before Christmas? Not tired due to excitement but tired because you knew that you had to be asleep or else Santa wouldn’t come? Well, the eve of February 1 felt like that to me! I was buzzing with a sense of euphoria as I lay in bed glaring at my whiteboard marked full of X’s. An empowering feeling to say the least.
On Christmas you wake up to presents under the tree, I wasn’t waking up to presents. I wasn’t waking up to breakfast in bed. I wasn’t waking up to a mission out on some adventurous holiday. Actually, I wasn’t waking up to anything.
~ Nothing ~
Except for that whiteboard beaming down on me.
Upon waking up I just spent a few minutes looking at the board, taking in the fact that I had accomplished what I said I would. Far too often we work hard to achieve something without actually appreciating our efforts. When I had come back to the present moment, realising the fact that it was getting late and I was just lying in bed feeling smug, it was time to take on the day of freedom! And my day of freedom from MonkMode was a very interesting day indeed.
I could do anything.
Whatever I felt like, I could do. There was no plan, there was nothing holding me back. I could eat anything. If I wanted to crack open a beer, I could do that. If I wanted to eat ice cream for breakfast to accompany my beer, easily achievable.
But, um, I didn’t know what to do. So I sat on the couch and read a bit. Followed by re-downloading Instagram to connect with the world again. So I mindlessly scrolled for some time on the dopamine machine until my room mate walked in and noticed me being very out of character.
I was proud of myself for what I had done but like, now what?
The purpose of MonkMode was not just to get ahead of the things I needed to do but to become the person I wanted to be by embodying the habits and traits of what I thought this person would be like — so on my day off, I did the opposite. I decided that it was a day for self reflection. I showered up and got dressed into my old uniform. The same clothes I would have worn 6 months prior to MonkMode. A baggy shirt that I’ve worn the shit out of and my maroon coloured corduroy pants, also on the baggy side. My old jewellery accompanied my hands and I was ready to rock ‘n roll.
I must add, ya boy was looking pretty snazzy ay. Would definitely be the coolest cat at the skatepark.
The walk was met with torrential rain and when I was far enough away from home I managed to pull off that famous scene from the movies by saying to myself, ‘at least it can’t get worse than this’. Well my bruh, it got worse.
By the time I got home, my snow-proof, water-proof jacket was soaked through, my feet frozen in my wet socks and my hands purple. Whilst this may sound all too terrible of a walk, it wasn’t. It was particularly marvellous and exactly what I needed on the day that it was. The rest of this day was quite an emotional one.
I had a week until MonkMode 2 — it was my room mates birthday on the weekend and I wanted to celebrate with her. So it was a week without any strict rules, no set goals and what one could say was a person living a hedonistic lifestyle.
I learned a lot from this week and my MonkMode experience, so let’s get into it.
Some Stats
With tracking each day, I now have an assortment of numbers and notes to look through. Which to me is pretty damn exciting. If you ever want to improve at anything, track it. This will help you to understand your merits and your faults. It’ll help you move towards a more automated life where you no longer have to worry about the task but can rather focus on making it better.
MonkMode 1 spanned the month of January with day 1 being New years day and day 31 being the final day of sticking to protocol. This was a 5 week month — I’d say it was more of a 4 week month since we only had 3 days in that last week.
I shall discuss my changes for MonkMode 2 further down in the article — when I committed to the protocol, I decided I was not going to change anything. I wanted to test the system as I created it for the full length of the protocol. This lead me to discover what really worked for me and what didn’t.
- Highest Achieving Week -> Week 1 (Averaged 8 / 10)
- Highest Achieving Day -> Friday (Averaged 7.875 / 10)
- Highest Happy Week -> Week 1 (Averaged 8.2)
- Highest Happy Day -> Friday (Averaged 8.5)
Just getting into the month, I was very excited, so I went in with a lot of enthusiasm. Both the achievement and happiness levels were higher through those days.
Most notably, when I performed more, I was happier. The more I achieved during the day and the more effort and time I was able to employ into my tasks, the happier I was when going to bed. The only time this wasn’t the case were the days I spent with friends. These were the days where I got less done but was still at my happiest. They were actually the best days overall since I made sure to make time to accomplish everything and then I had the day off which allowed me to fully enjoy my time spent with my friends.
Over time I also reluctantly adjusted my scale a bit. Which you can quite clearly see in the graph above. It was out of 10 which I have discovered, at least for now, is too wide a range to rank on. This has been changed now which I will go into detail about further on. As the month went on I scored myself more harshly and therefore the scores lowered. I too found that week 4 was particularly difficult, I am yet to discover exactly what it was that made that week so weird.
Adjustments have been made for MonkMode 2 — I would like to either have the averages going up or staying at a constant level.
Personality Shift
Mentioned above is my week of ‘freedom’. This had the most damning effect on me. I went from living a day as my prior self to a week of living as this person rather than the person I was proud to be.
For my roommates birthday, we celebrated with a good old house party. The night was a lot of fun and went on until the wee hours of the following morning. The not so fun part was the anxiety I felt building inside of me that started the morning of the party.
I went from finally finding the confidence in myself through my habits and rituals to feeling quite insecure and unsure of my person. I found myself having to look back at my journal a number of times throughout the day to see who I really was.
It took me a while to get into the groove of the party. Only after a few hours and people getting settled in, myself included did I begin to feel good. In the end we all had a great time.
Getting back into MonkMode now was like that Christmas feeling all over again, just the other way around! I am back to feeling confident. I am back to feeling myself. My board has been set up again with a slightly different layout this time. I am energetic throughout the entire day and get all my shit done.
Our habits are how we embody our identities. This is something I learned late in life but I am so glad I have found the understanding of it. I have been able to stop many negative thoughts as I have completely proved them all wrong.
And proving to yourself that those negative thoughts are wrong — probably the most powerful and important thing you could ever do.
MonkMode 2 — The Modifications
The scoring system has changed! Instead of the scoring 1–10, for this month I have made it a lot smaller. I can now score between 1 and 4. I know that this will change in the future again too. The thought behind this smaller and even-numbered scoring system is that I cannot ever be in the middle. It’s always either going to be on the good or bad side.
1 — Bare minimum effort, just enough to cross it off the list
2 — Little effort / just got on with it
3 — Good effort
4 — Pushed really hard today — the effort that would make others cry
The happiness scale follows the same system just you know, altered emotionally. A 1 would be sad and a 4 would be over-the-moon-stoked.
The things I am tracking have been cut down a lot. It’s gone from 14 things to 8. I still have my non-negotiables to be mostly the same, gym/ stretch, meditate and I’ve changed the ‘learn’ to commit to at least 1 deep work session per day. The reason that got changed was because my learning was focused on just a few subjects. I’ve now made a schedule for what I would learn each day — Sunday being an exception. Sunday is a day purely for writing my article.
My ‘Daily 3’ where I create tasks for the day, now has strict categories of focus — chore, Loughy Studios, learning outcome. Sunday is again the exception where I am not doing learning so instead I have replaced it with finding a question of the week. Something I am particularly excited to get started with. The idea is to find one question, literally anything, write it down and think about it for the week. Then next Sunday, I will come back to it with my answer. I am particularly excited for this on my days I go to gym without music.
On my board I added a space to be able to write myself a personal note — everyday. A takeaway from MonkMode 1 is that I found the days where I wrote little notes to myself, to be happier days. Little words of encouragement here and there, especially on the hard days. Just noticing the things I did well in.
MonkMode can be quite isolating and the few people around don’t know how much effort something took even if it didn’t look like it was hard at all. So this space is for me to just find that in myself each day.
Lastly, I’ve extended the length of MonkMode from 31 days to 41 days. I go on holiday a few days after the 41st day, so the days in between will be for holiday prep and creating a protocol for my holiday because — as I discovered in my week off, not having set goals and things to work towards just doesn’t align with the person that I want to be.
The Fish and Chips (takeaway)
MonkMode 1 was a great success — I made it through the entire month without slipping up and holding myself accountable to the protocol with everything that I set up. Alongside this I was able to successfully align myself with the habits of the person I wanted to be and now I can confidently and very proudly say — the person that I am.
It took me a long time to work towards being able to do MonkMode as I know if I had tried this a number of years ago, I don’t even think I would be able to survive a day. It’s something I highly recommend to anyone that is struggling or feeling lost in life. If you are not feeling lost, then I am genuinely happy for you, however I too recommend this because it will vault you so far ahead of your competition and further yourself in every aspect of life.
The important thing is to make sure you cater it towards what is truly important to you. You will not be able to succeed with it if it’s not for you. It requires effort to set up, effort to stick to it and effort to walk out of it with all the X’s on your calendar.
If you do it correctly and hold yourself accountable, you will be so proud of yourself afterwards. If you think that this is not that hard, all good bruv, try 75 hard on for size!
Thanks for reading — this is really just an update article. If you enjoyed it and got some benefits out of it, please let me know. Please subscribe for more as we are back to normal and next weeks article is gonna be a banger.
Check you soon 🤙🏼