Habit-a-week-thingies tend to fail. I’ve seen a few people attempt a “gain a new habit a week” thing. It seemed like the default outcome was “not much progress.” Malcolm’s post was the greatest success story, and I think it succeeded by focusing on triggers that happen multiple times per day so you can learn faster. (I wasn’t sure if the thing you were going for was more like routines, or reflexes—routines seem to take 3 months to learn, Malcolm seemed to prove you could go faster with more-frequently-trigger-habits)
Nightly checkins—The biggest shift for me was when myself and a few friends all read Superhuman by Habit together and then adopted a nightly check in about our habits (we used to mostly live in the same house, now we skype in together, which I don’t think would have worked if we tried it initially). However, social habit-practices are fragile, so if you can find a way to succeed without them that seems better.
Morning Routine. For routine-style habits, a huge win for me was actually getting a morning routine. It used to be that I’d get up, go to work immediately, and at work there was too much going on to accomplish any habits, and then I’d get home and random times and often be tired. Nowadays, I’ve set aside enough time in the morning for a habit chain that goes:
Shower
Brush teeth
Floss
12 reps of some kind of exercise
one minute of meditation
Another 12 reps of same exercise
Check my habit spreadsheet to verify what I did the previous day
Reflect on my goals for day, and goals for previous day
I aiming for reflexes, as I feel I’ve got a morning and pre-bed routine solidly ingrained.
Thanks for the link to Malcom’s experiment, there’s good stuff there. What got me started was trying a similar “Hands of Face” habit for a week.
Habit-a-week-thingies tend to fail.
Yeah, I’m not going into this expecting to make a permenant reflex change each week. My intentions are more in the vein of “get in the practice of trying TAPs for an extended period, and pay close attention to the mechanisms at work”. I hope to collaterally pick up some better reflexes, but for now that main objective is to better understand the problem.
Also, I remember from Sunset at Noon you said that “never skip twice” was a game changer for you. Do you/would you use that attitude on reflexes, or just routines?
Things I’ve noticed:
Habit-a-week-thingies tend to fail. I’ve seen a few people attempt a “gain a new habit a week” thing. It seemed like the default outcome was “not much progress.” Malcolm’s post was the greatest success story, and I think it succeeded by focusing on triggers that happen multiple times per day so you can learn faster. (I wasn’t sure if the thing you were going for was more like routines, or reflexes—routines seem to take 3 months to learn, Malcolm seemed to prove you could go faster with more-frequently-trigger-habits)
Nightly checkins—The biggest shift for me was when myself and a few friends all read Superhuman by Habit together and then adopted a nightly check in about our habits (we used to mostly live in the same house, now we skype in together, which I don’t think would have worked if we tried it initially). However, social habit-practices are fragile, so if you can find a way to succeed without them that seems better.
Morning Routine. For routine-style habits, a huge win for me was actually getting a morning routine. It used to be that I’d get up, go to work immediately, and at work there was too much going on to accomplish any habits, and then I’d get home and random times and often be tired. Nowadays, I’ve set aside enough time in the morning for a habit chain that goes:
Shower
Brush teeth
Floss
12 reps of some kind of exercise
one minute of meditation
Another 12 reps of same exercise
Check my habit spreadsheet to verify what I did the previous day
Reflect on my goals for day, and goals for previous day
I aiming for reflexes, as I feel I’ve got a morning and pre-bed routine solidly ingrained.
Thanks for the link to Malcom’s experiment, there’s good stuff there. What got me started was trying a similar “Hands of Face” habit for a week.
Yeah, I’m not going into this expecting to make a permenant reflex change each week. My intentions are more in the vein of “get in the practice of trying TAPs for an extended period, and pay close attention to the mechanisms at work”. I hope to collaterally pick up some better reflexes, but for now that main objective is to better understand the problem.
Also, I remember from Sunset at Noon you said that “never skip twice” was a game changer for you. Do you/would you use that attitude on reflexes, or just routines?