Code name your projects and habits

Over the course of our lives we have heard the phrases “Go study” “Why aren’t you studying” “Have you studied yet” “Make sure you study” from teachers, friends, parents,.. everyone, so many times that we have developed a very negative emotional reaction to the word Study. We used it ourselves a million times “I have to study.” “I can’t I’m studying”... And after such a long time and so many repetitions the word is almost toxic to us. So when we were rethinking our study habits we noticed the negative emotional charge we felt every time we talked about studying. That’s when we decided to rename it and remove the trigger of negative emotions.

We started doing this for all of our new habits and projects now. Studying is named "Forest" because we used to study with the app Forest and the name just stuck with us. We liked the idea of growing a tree each day and making a forest of knowledge through time. So we still even use the phrase "Ready? Set? Plant!" even though we now use Toggl. We got used to just saying: "Let's go plant a tree," and that seemed a lot less daunting then to "go study". So it stuck.

After that we named our blog writing "Project Salix" and removing one item per day just became "1 item" on our habit tracker. This also has the benefit that you can keep your habit trackers up while you have visitors without anyone actually knowing what those projects on it mean (if you aren't ready/don't want to share your projects with them).

All of our new projects from now on get code names. Since there's two of us, some of the projects sometimes "slip" in conversation with others and we can just shrug it off as: "Oh, it's just something, nothing important really." if it's an ongoing project that we aren't ready to share yet.

Giving projects code names can also make what you’re doing sound cool or cute or much more fun than what the thing actually is.

And that's really it. Make it fun, make it pleasant, eliminate the bad connotation you have to the specific daunting task and you'll notice less resistance towards it. Use flower names, movie characters, anything that comes to mind really and makes it fun for you. It can be a name that has a hidden meaning or connection to the task (i.e. using the code name forest for creating a forest of knowledge) or it can be something completely unrelated.

We'd love it if you'd share your code names in the comments, we're always looking for new project name ideas.