In the past few months I’ve been putting a lot of focus on effectively building habits. This isn’t the first time I’ve made an attempt like this. First, the burst of motivation, plans to start going to the gym, eating healthy, developing new skills. For a couple weeks, it goes fairly well. I stay on task and seem to be heading in a good direction. Then it inevitably happens, I slip up for a couple days. Sometimes, it’s for legitimate reasons, other times it’s because I get lazy. Then because I missed going to the gym, it doesn’t seem as important to keep track of my TODO list. The spiral continue until I’m back where I started.

Something needed to change. I sat down and tried to figure out what was wrong. Overwhelming myself by trying to fix everything at once was not working. I’d miss one which would nag and ultimately demotivate me. So I decided to try something new. I would pick the smallest possible habits and slowly build on them. Additionally, I would only try to tackle one habit at a time. The impact has been obviously powerful.

The strategy can be broken down as follows:

  1. Every month I pick one habit to develop
  2. Each week I pick one small piece of the habit, starting with the smallest and easiest piece
  3. At the end of each week, I evaluate what’s stopping me from successfully implementing the habit

What I’ve discovered is developing a routine is the hard part of building habits. Once I develop a routine, it’s much easier to tack on small pieces. So why not start with the easy part? It prevents me from getting overwhelmed and self-control is a muscle.