Developing a new habit? This will make it easier.
Anyone who has tried to develop new habits knows how difficult it is at the beginning to make them stick. If there’s anything i’ve learned in the past few years while working on building my own habits, is that you are unlikely to “Just do it” all the time. That’s the reality. Whether it be building a business or going to the gym regularly, you’ll ride a wave of momentum in the beginning, then lose steam a few weeks (or days) down the road. You experience falloff (which is exactly what it sounds like. You fall off track and no longer stick to your plan).
What’s helped me stay consistent with new habits has been to embrace the inevitability of falloff. I’ve failed at developing new habits enough times to know that at some point i’ll fall off track. However, anticipating falloff and planning for it makes a huge difference in your ability to stay on track. In fact, it makes staying on track pretty damn easy.
Full disclosure: planning for falloff takes some effort at first. You actually have to take time to think and plan what you will do when you inevitably have no motivation to follow through. But the beauty of this process is that you set your plan at the very beginning when you are still feeling fresh and pumped about developing your new habit. Once you have your plan written down, following the system becomes very easy.
When you plan for falloff there are two questions you need to ask yourself:
- What situations are likely to lead to falling off track?
- What is the EASIEST thing I can do to put me in a position to stay on track?
“What situations will lead to falling off track?”
This question requires you to be honest with yourself. If you are reading this, you probably have a solid enough understanding of how you act/react in certain situations and scenarios. The key here is to WRITE DOWN (not just think about) what situations are likely to lead you off track from your new habit. Write down as many as you can. For example, the list for me when I wanted to start going to the gym three times a week looked like this:
Situations when I am most likely going to skip a gym day:
- When I am hungover
- When I am tired
- When I am feeling lazy
- When my friends are hanging out at my house
- When i’m hungry
Answering this question gives you a chance to bring awareness to all the things that can stand in your way and is an important step before you can answer the next question.
“What is the EASIEST thing I can do to put me in a position to stay on track?”
The best way to answer this question is to focus on one thing you can do with the least amount of effort, that puts you into the best situation to follow through. For me, the answer to this, in context to going to the gym three times a week, was to simply walk into my gym. That’s it. If I walked into the gym and walked back out, that would still meet my criteria for success.
The point here isn’t to cut corners. The point is to easily put yourself into a position where you will likely follow through. Though all I had to do was walk into the gym, 98% of the time, I would get my workout done before walking out. It’s the same sort of thing that people tell you about flossing. If you want to floss but can’t get yourself to do it, just floss one tooth. It’s likely that you’ll continue to floss your other teeth after the first one. Make sure to WRITE DOWN your own answer.
When you’ve answered both questions, all you have to do is follow what you’ve written down. You’ll be able to anticipate when you are likely to fall off, then have an easy game plan to keep things on track. Just remember that you need to be fair to yourself. Really give yourself the option to do the least amount of work (like flossing one tooth). If you end up just doing the minimum one day, give yourself the credit for following your plan. Over time, you will have more instances where you have followed through then just done the minimum.
Give this process a fair shot. It takes 10–15 minutes to set up for yourself so you really have no excuses. But if in the end you give it a try and decide it’s all a bunch of bullshit, i’d love to hear about it :)
