One of the big challenges that I've always had is creating this habits. I recently discovered an interesting thing:

* I use email everyday. It's important that it is clean and not full of shit. I care about it.

* At my startup (Happy Scribe), we recently implemented a small feature where the tech team gets emailed/called/sms every 10m if there's any user with a problem, or for wired 5xx request (Stripe style [1]).

* With this simple conditioning, because no one wants to have a bloated inbox, we solved 95% of the issues our customers had in the past 3 months in just a week.

With this observation, we thought it had potential, and we abstracted the concept. It would be great to add to ourselves arbitrary recurrent tasks, where you're forced to do them. Much like if you were a computer doing CRON jobs.

So that's what we did. We built a super simple prototype at https://headfocus.herokuapp.com/ where:

* You can add tasks with recurrence (CRON style)

* It has an Email interface that integrates with our actual workflow.

   * You get emailed once per task with a link to take action

   * If you don't take action, 3h later you start to get emailed/sms/called every 10m.

And so far I've sticked to daily jorunaling, and planning the day in the morning, for 2 months. The journaling also has been pretty interesting, as I'm using google forms, and I have a couple of scalar parameters (like ranking the day 1-5) that I can correlate to the most used words. If anyone is interested in trying it out feel free to create an account and send feedback :)

[1] https://youtu.be/nnllRegL_NI?t=14m29s