This weekend, after reading some of the Hustle materials from Ramit, I became inspired to try a 28 Day Challenge to change some habits.

What is this challenge?

The challenge is to select up to three habits you want to change, and track completion every day.

Why 28 Days?

This comes from the adage “it takes 28 days to make or break a habit.”  You can do almost anything for 28 days, right?  And if you hate it, you only lost 28 days.  Its a good (if arbitrary) number.

My goals

For the next 28  27 days I will eat more protein, call more people, and sleep whenever I’m tired.

• More protein. I’ve hit some weight lifting plateaus, and after monitoring my diet I determined I’m consuming maybe 100g a day of protein,  too little protein to gain muscle.  So I’m tracking everything I eat, and I can’t sleep until I reach 250g of protein every day.  My hypothesis is this will give me more energy and improve my strength numbers.
• Call people. Working at home makes it easy to stare at a monitor every waking hour.  But I notice I almost always feel better when I have some positive phone conversations.  And I need to be better about keeping in touch with people.  So everyday I will  call at least three people every day.
• Sleep whenever. The advantage of working at home is experimenting with your sleep.  I’ve considered trying polyphasic sleep for awhile, but after reading this article I decided it would be better to focus on free running sleep.  Basically, this means I don’t try to sleep unless I feel tired enough to pass out immediately, and I don’t use an alarm clock.  It helps to avoid caffeine (except for specific times) but I already have a good habit going with that.

So there it is.  Bring it on, world.

(2023 Update: I gave up on massive amounts of protein, but I now have the habits of calling people instead of texting and sleeping without an alarm clock.)