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Write a little everyday, without hope, without despair.
-Isak Dinesen
Found in Writing to Change the World by Mary Pipher
Wow, I could use that sentiment in a lot of areas of my life:
“Exercise a little everyday, without hope, without despair.”
“Reach out to other people a little everyday, without hope, without despair.”
“Plant a few seeds everyday, without hope, without despair.”
“Cook a little everyday, without hope, without despair.
Hi!
As promised, here are my …
Habit Forming Tips for easy habit forming:
I’m all about the grand gestures, and sometimes they work for me when it involves big goals like running a marathon or going to grad school. However, when I am trying to learn new HABITS rather than complete big PROJECTS, when I plan to overhaul my lifestyle, grand plans for change have failed!
In the past, when I have become sickened with my slothful ways, I have made charts about how I will spend my time. One hour for exercise, one hour for food preparation etc… After being shocked about how every single minute will be dull and accounted for with my new plan, I usually just end up feeling a lot of fear about the new super disciplined (and really tedious seeming) life I will be leading, and pre-emptively quit or quit soon thereafter. And the worst part is, I don’t just half-way quit, I grandly quit just like I grandly started, and I don’t implement my planned for habits!
Learn from my mistakes, internet people. I know how it is when you just feel you’ve got so much to change and you’ve waited long enough and you’ve got to do it all RIGHT NOW, but IF you want to make a behavior into a habit that becomes such an integral part of your life that you don’t want to have to think about it anymore, I suggest starting small.
How small? So small that it doesn’t scare any part of you.
For more tips and motivation about starting small, check out the relief inducing book Kaizen. (Here is an article about how a fiction writer is using small steps.)
For ease of habit formation, choose a habit that you can attach to something else you already do everyday.
For example, I want to move my body more. One of the next habits I am going to form is moving for 5-10 minutes right when I get out of bed. Attaching my new habit to my already formed habit of getting out of bed everyday makes it easier to start for the simple reason that it’s easier to remember to do it.
What is really cool about a new habit to an old habit is that this integrates the new behavior with your current life. For example, with my new habit, I’m just going to warm up and stretch without having to go to another room or put on exercise clothes.
I want movement to be that integral to my life, that it is just a part of how I do things, including how I wake up. It’s not that I’m exercising more (oh no, we wouldn’t want to do that now would we), it’s that warming up and stretching is the way I get out of bed. (see the genius?) In the future, I will attach movement to other parts of my life as well.
Integrating habits takes away the stress of “changing your life” and makes your new behavior just part of the easy way you already live.
Do you have any new behaviors that you would like to incorporate into you life? Do you have any habit forming tips?
In the coming weeks, I’ll share the behaviors I want to make habitual, and update you on my habit forming progress.
Joe’s Goals seems to be the most talked about online habit tracker. My first impression was that I didn’t like the way it looks. It seems a bit unwieldy to me compared to the Habit Calendar, which is the only other habit tracking tool I was able to find online.
The Habit Calendar has a calendar look, which I like better than the list form of Joe’s Goals. I like seeing those green success days adding up on the calendar. (They both use green for “success” and red for “failure.”) I also like that it’s referred to as the HABIT calendar, as that is what I am measuring.
However, there is no way to add it to my blog, which I would really like, and it takes me just a bit longer (like 1 or 2 seconds) to add my success mark. These two factors combined pushed me towards. Joe’s Goals.
The pluses:
Joe’s Goals
The minuses:
Neutral:
Here is what the blog badge looks like:
Tune in tomorrow for my habit forming tips!
(“Her tips are habit forming? They must be good!”)
Tags: goals, habit tracker, habit tracking, HabitCal, habits, Joe's Goals, reviews, technology
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