That's an obviously good idea, now that I see it written out, and I'm going to try it.

For example, locating a more convenient gym counts, creating the habit of exercising regularly counts, but exercise itself does not.

Some of those things really are one-time, like finding a more convenient gym. Creating a habit takes determination over a longer time-span, though. When I try it, I need about a week before I no longer need to spend conscious effort maintaining a new habit, and another week before it's entrenched and I don't have to think about it anymore. I suppose you can still classify this as a one-time act, that just happens to take a while.

I wonder, what are some other Naritai Projects? I want some, so if anybody has some ideas, please post them. Some of my ideas:

• Minor dietary change: exclude or strongly limit a single type of food. If you regularly eat candy, your dental health will probably benefit a lot if you swear off hard candy and strongly limit your consumption of any other sort of candy. I did this after my dentist had to do some unpleasant drilling, and it was a two-week process, as described above. The same sort of method can apply to alcohol, if you find yourself drinking too much.

• If you're in college: go on a several-hour study binge on one of your classes where you try to understand the subject in greater detail than the class requires. Power-read a textbook, hit up Wikipedia, prove theorems while pacing back and forth in an unused classroom, whatever. And skim way ahead, even if you don't understand everything. Surprisingly, this gives a lasting boost to performance in that class. Improving your understanding early on improves how fast you learn, which improves how fast you learn, and so on -- education yields compound interest. It also improves your morale, at least temporarily.

(And yes, I know this is a horrible abuse of Japanese grammar. Looking up the correct conjugation isn't important to me.)

But looking it up would be a one-time thing, and would make your grammar more correct forever! ;-)

I know that using the correct grammar would actually make your phrase harder for LWers to remember, so it would be a net loss. Still, it suggests another Naritai Project:

• Learn something new that you stand a reasonable chance of using in the future. Interested in databases? Redis is great. Want to become slightly cooler? Learn to sing some songs. (Assuming, of course, that this actually makes you cooler. I think it does, but I'm hardly a representative sample.)