Unusual Holidays

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You can create your own holidays! On this page I share some of mine.

Backup Day January 5th

  • Check your backup document which lists where all important data is stored
  • All important data should have at least one clearly-documented backup location (ideally two)
  • Consider automating your backups if they are not already
  • Consider if you have to back up anything physical (IDs, passports, tax documents, mail)
  • Make sure your backups actually work

Security Audit Day February 5th

  • Upgrade all your computers, servers, firewalls, and packages
  • Do basic penetration testing, remove deprecated software
  • Delete accounts/info you don’t need, attempt to doxx yourself if you want more opsec
  • Briefly go over physical security with a reasonable threat model too (keys, cameras, etc are cheap)

Digital Organization Day March 5th

  • Organize and categorize all your files and directories on all your devices
  • Clean your desktop, home screen, task bar, delete unused apps

Physical Organization Day April 5th

  • Organize and categorize all the objects in your living space
  • Buy anything that helps you become more organized such as cable ties, organizers, plastic bags, extension cables, label maker, etc
  • Don’t be averse to replacing old or sub-optimal items if you can afford newer ones – it’s usually worth it

Cancel Subscriptions Day May 5th

  • Cancel or reduce as many reoccurring payments as possible
  • Check all credit cards, bank accounts, mortgage accounts, brokerage accounts, business accounts, etc and repeat this process
  • Consider the rest of your personal finances too, but you should do this more than once a year!

Habit Breaking Day June 5th

  • Break as many habits as you can: stop yourself before you perform any habitual action and first attempt an alternative
  • You are not allowed to engage in a habit before at first consciously stopping to analyze at least one alternative (including simply not doing it) and performing a basic EV analysis
  • Try to apply this at a low level, e.g. including phone apps you open – It’s very hard!
  • You will probably want to modify your environment both physically (keep your phone further away) and digitally (block common websites) for a reasonably serious attempt

Cold Outreach Day July 5th

  • Do cold outbound!
  • If you don’t know anyone you want to talk to or meet, look for new people

Digital Exploration Day August 5th

  • The Internet is a large place and is not actually only composed of four apps
  • Explore it! Find places you’d never normally go to – links were made to be clicked!
  • You may naturally find yourself falling into Internet rabbit holes, but the intent of today is to dig new holes rather than fall into pre-existing patterns
  • Optionally pair with learning new skills, hobbies, or interacting with new types of people

Belief Audit Day September 5th

  • Spend at least several hours auditing beliefs that you hold dear
  • Make a document and recursively lists beliefs you hold about the world and yourself with reasons for why
  • Then red-team the ideas and attempt to falsify them.
  • It’s likely that this is most difficult for beliefs which are harming you the most.
  • Suggested to be done entirely in written format, although walks are also acceptable for single topics

Health Analysis Day October 5th

  • Analyze your personal health data and think of new data you may want to collect
  • With generative AI you can code and parse data much more quickly than before. It took me 10 minutes to import apple health data into a custom sql database starting with nothing but Claude
  • Consider blood tests – you can order them yourself with services like privatemdlabs and it’s one of the best ways to find ways to improve yourself (your goal should not be to fall “within the range” but rather to be at optimal levels of useful biomarkers like hormones, A1C, CRP, Lp(a), homocysteine, triglycerides. If you’re taking a test that’s important to you, you don’t shoot for a 60 or 70, but instead a perfect score.
  • If you can find ways to spend money to improve your health, it’s probably worth it. It’s easy to have fun with data from an (apple watch, eight sleep, whoop, oura, cgm, dexascan), but make sure the product is actually what you need to improve yourself beforehand. Data is fun, but actionable data is even more fun!

X Celebration Day November 5th

  • Today is the day to celebrate X, something which you love but for some reason the rest of humanity has not made a national holiday for
  • If you really love X, you could make this a monthly celebration, or perhaps even…
  • Spread this holiday to as many people as possible if you’d like a shot at it becoming a real national holiday

Bespoke Holiday Day December 5th

  • Are your bespoke holidays helping?
  • Can you improve them or add new ones?
  • My original list had twice as many holidays, so I’m confident you can come up with more!

Celebrate these holidays with just a few clicks!

You can add all of the above holidays to your calendar with this link!
Google calendar instructions: Open your calendar and find the bottom left hand panel where it says Other calendars. Click + and then from URL and paste in the above link.

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