Everyone loves to jump into their new year rituals, they usually die rather fast. Consider your average to read more, learn a new language, lose weight, and more. These are fantastic to motivate yourself to do, just keep at it! What I’ve chosen happens to be to help me achieve my past goals, but with the new focus approach I’m gunning for, small habits help. As part of my regular blog post approach, to help me not stress about the people driving around me, I have a book a month read to me on my journey to, and from, work.
The Review
Photo’s below were created using a Licensed image by Tengyart on Unsplash
The one thing I still regularly struggle with is my routine, as a whole. You heard, last week, I focus on way too much as a whole. As part of minimizing my focus, I felt I should pick up this book, from my friend’s recommendations. While I’m going through it a second time, already, it’s something to share sooner which can help others.
The idea is rather simple, to put it in simple terms, you can achieve way more when you work towards successful smaller habits. Much like prioritizing your areas of focus, inside each area, you can make smaller habits to achieve regularly. With the book teaching this to me, I’ve gotten to the point I’m reliably picking up my habits again. Smaller is better!
Let’s first consider the idea behind starting smaller habits in your focus:
- General – spend 5 minutes on your in-progress task every day
- Programming – spend 5 minutes on your in-progress task every day
This way, 7 days a week, you lose only 10 minutes out of your 2,040 minutes of the day. Similarly, since the focus is on habits here, you can prioritize the others which didn’t make it into your areas of focus. Then we add the personal additions, you can understand what I’m suggesting:
- Exercise – spend at least 5 minutes on your exercising every day Monday to Friday
- Novel – Spend at least 5 minutes on your novel progress every day
- YouTube – Spend at least 5 minutes on your YouTube videos every day
A tiny bit above 1% of your day, bound to the habits you want to build. Making it easier helps, I’m finding it already helps with my consistency.
The 4 laws put it in an easy-to-understand way for choosing what you’ll do.
Make it obvious, this way you can’t get lost in what you want to achieve. My task of finishing my new exercise app moved from a broad idea into smaller tasks to achieve, like putting the exercises in, my current task, and next making the app usable. I’ve already completed a few of the small tasks, such as organising the database implementation, it just means in each 5 minutes minimum I spend I have a focused intention.
Make it attractive, when you make it look good for yourself will make you want to finish it sooner, and better. My exercise app intends to become a passive income for me on the Google Play Store, on Android. It’s attractive to have the possibility of earning extra income soon, which we should all strive to do. It’s also making me put extra effort into making it look way better, and cooler than my past lazy exercise apps.
Make it easy, the smaller tasks being obvious help, it goes well with this idea. We can have sub-tasks in our habits that make managing it a step easier. The database, for instance, becomes make the data types, make the database creation, make the backup method, make the import method, I’m sure you understand. Simplify it, it will be obvious, and a bunch of small easy tasks you can use to build the habits.
Make it satisfying, whatever you ever do must satisfy you. If what you want as a habit doesn’t satisfy you, it will never be easy to build. Consider the 5 minutes above, this way the habit being built can bring you closer to your goals, in an understandable manner that satisfies you. It has helped, every 5 minutes spent building the new habits feel incredibly satisfying.
The biggest way to help build the habits is to live by the rule of never miss twice. With this rule in mind, it becomes simpler. We’re human, we’ll miss a day occasionally, no matter what happens. You might have a days flight to the other side of the world, it would break my habit chain. In your hotel, do a minimum of 5 minutes to stick to the habits. Even if it’s just with pen and paper, you can achieve your minimum 1% of the day’s habits.
My Thoughts
I know many people, past and present, in my life who would benefit from this book. It isn’t about changing yourself to a completely different person, rather, it’s about the idea that you can make your habits more minimal, and achievable, and you can achieve what you want to.
Building great habits can help you achieve the goals you focus on in your life. This book explains it all in a fantastic manner, it can help understand how to make long lasting habits.
