Do One New Thing A Day To Solve Your Problems
Published on 2025-10-03
People don't explore enough. They rely on cached thoughts and actions to get through their day, not even trying to solve most of their problems, be they major or minor. The solution is simple. Do one new thing a day to solve one of your problems. That's what I did for one month.
Intellectually, I knew that annoying, persistent problems are often solved with 5 seconds of true thought. But it still suprised me to see so many of my problems, even major ones, yield to a brief burst of focused thought each day.
For example, I had a wobbly chair. It was wobbling more as time went on, and I worried it would break. One day, I decided to try something new: spend a minute tracing down the cause of the problem. 1 minute and 10 turns of an allen key later, my chair wobbled no more.
Another example, the one that started this self-experiment: I had a minute attention span. I kept wasting all my time constantly refreshing pages in the hopes of the tiniest dopamine hit. This sucked. I couldn't read anything longer than a page without getting distracted, I couldn't practice skills for more than a moment, or write anything longer than a tweet. Then I decided to try something new.
First, I blocked out two hours in the morning, banning all electronics. This sorta worked. I spent the morning exercising my brain and my brawn. But my momentum would fade after the two hours were up. A few days later, I decided to go to the library after my electronic fast. This sorta worked, too. I did not doom scroll in the library.
But alas! The internet is infested with attention-hijacking processes which are out to get you. They got their hooks back in, my friends. I doom scrolled in the library. So I divided my day in two hour blocks. For two hours, I could use electronics, then for two hours I could not. Rinse and repeat. This kinda worked. I thought that the two hour blocks would halt the feedback loops of the attention-hijackers. I was cocky.
Which is why I banned myself from electronics for one day each week. And that sorta worked, too.
Individually, each hack was a fragile, feeble thing. Together, they were stable, and strong. They let me pause my feedback loops at will. And when my attention gets hijacked again. Compared to the months it might have taken before, that's big. Huge, even.
And now that I have enough time to be bored, I find myself doing things like talking to my family, going to new libraries where I read any book that catches my fancy, picking up my notepad to write down ideas when they catch my attention, setting up co-working sessions with my team, and so on.
None of the major issues in my life are fully solved. Or even mostly solved. Wait, scratch that, the biggest one is basically solved, in part because I tried doing new things to solve my problems bit by bit over the decades. But as for the rest, I have made so much more progress in the last year than I ever have before. All because I made the choice to spend one month doing one new thing a day to solve my problems.
I can only imagine what would happen if I did that for a year.
What would your life look like, if you did that too?