Rohan Monteiro

  Lifehack #5 Build Systems, not habits. This advice was given by james Clear in Atomic habits. I love the idea. I used to try building a habit to write 1000 words every day. It didn't work. It annoyed me . And it was very easy to give up. A habit is the thing you do. A system is the setup that makes you do it. Most of us obsess over habits. We say we’re going to wake up early, write every day, exercise more, save money. Those are all behaviors. They sound concrete, but they rely heavily on motivation, and motivation is fickle. Some days you have it. Most days you don’t. Clear’s argument is that focusing on the habit alone is backwards. Instead of trying to force yourself to behave better, you redesign the environment around you so the behavior becomes the path of least resistance. If you want to write, the habit is “write 500 words.” The system is having a fixed time, a clear desk, your document already open, and your phone out of reach. If you want to work out, the habit is exerc...

I am seeing a lot of current competitions that are banning the use of AI completely, and I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I see what they are trying to do. The rise of AI-generated slop, not to mention the disturbing level of AI use even on forums like Reddit and Quora, in emails and in social media posts, is annoying at best and a serious concern at worst. Scammers are more sophisticated with their phishing. I miss the Nigerian princes. And the American soldier in Iraq who found a ton of gold. Some of those tales were actually pretty good. Fake news, which was always a concern, now requires even lower effort to generate, and the content is really mind-numbingly stupid. In this environment, it makes sense to carve out a space for ourselves and declare this off-limits to AI. To insist that writing is exclusively for humans.A place where writing is supposed to come from sweat, misery, caffeine, and years of craft. Soulless machines have to wait by the door. Noble. Slightly ...

 There are several things that we know we need to do, but somehow we don't get around to doing them.  Multiple reasons - we are lazy, we forget, it doesn't seem important but at some level we know its the right thing to do and we resist it. I see this with my kids when its time to brush their teeth. On some level, I get it - When you are a teenage boy, hygiene isn't  really a top concern- which also probably explains why I was a virgin for so long. The point of this post is for me to list down a few things that work for me - I'm going to call them lifehacks because that's how I think of them. They aren't unique ideas - you probably have heard of them or even implement them occasionally. But these have often helped me the most. Lifehack #1 - Goal Setting I set up 2 or 3 goals for the year in January. These are written down and revisited once a month. My Goals for 2026 Write Book 3 of the Waking Dead series Pitch my non-fiction to a non Indian publisher Write the ...