This is a collection of exercises and activities that are designed to satisfy a bunch of useful criteria:
- They should always be achievable unless you are in some way actively prevented from achieving them, to the point that struggling to do them when you usually can should be taken as diagnostic that you're not in a good state right now.
- They should not be too time consuming - twenty minutes maximum, but ideally much less.
- They should be moderately life improving, or at least better than doom scrolling, watching TV, etc.
- They should be things that are endlessly repeatable, possibly by making them harder as you get used to them.
Ideally when you find yourself at a loss for what to do you should be able to just pick up an arbitrary one of these exercises, do that, and have your day be slightly improved thereby.
Currently they're mostly designed with an audience and user base of one, me, but I'd really like other people to try them out and let me know how they find them. Please do, and please file issues with questions, comments, ideas, etc.
I'd rather not accept pull requests for anything more than typo corrections etc as I've vague plans to do stuff with this that make it important that I retain ownership of it.
- Toss and catch a ball - an easy and fun way to spend a brief period of time focusing on physical movement and working on hand-eye coordination.
- Read out loud - a good way to do more reading and to spend some time listening to the sound of your own voice.
- Describe an object - practice writing and observational skills by picking some mundane object and writing about it.
- Write down some things you can do right now - a tool for figuring out some current possibilities, and an exercise for practicing idea generation.
- Body Check In - more observational writing work, and helps develop skills of paying attention to your body.
- Brain Dump - a free writing exercise. Good for practicing unstructure writing and for getting you unstuck on something.
- Lie Down and Listen - a good brain/body reset for when you're feeling spacey. Requires a podcast or audio book or similar.
- Jump Up and Down - a comparatively easy way to get your heart rate up and do some in place exercise
- Surface things you'd like to eat more of - good exercise in inventory taking and helps enjoy your diet more.
- Write down all your problems - helps surface things about your life that you could improve and have been ignoring