Predicting Ourselves, A Journey to Track Our Habit

Predicting to change our bad habit

One day in my writing class, one of the participants asked me, “How can we change our bad habit, for example setting our mood to write?”

I asked her when she felt lazy and where she usually lost her mood to write.

She answered, “In my home, but how can I avoid my home if almost all of my time is spent there?”

That’s the problem. In some cases, we can’t avoid the place. We should break the pattern to solve it, especially in a bad habit. When I read ‘The Power of Habit’ by Charles Duhigg, people often think if their bad habit is formed without any intention. If they want to change a bad habit, people should build their awareness about what they do and tracking it.

Predicting the public transportation

when I was a junior high school student, I should ride public transportation from my grandmother’s house to my school. After some months passed, I can predict how many minutes I can ride my bike to my grandmother’s house and I could guess what time the public transportation would arrive.

FYI, I live in Indonesia. And my country didn’t have an exact schedule for every public transportation. We can’t know it so we just wait for it at the side of the street. Then, I rode the same public transportation since Monday until Wednesday. The time when it arrived it was quite the same. I also could count my time to cycle my bike. This is the same with our habit. At the first take, we do with our intention, and if that activity is repeated, again and again, it will be our new habit. We plant our bad habit in our conscious mind until it has happened as autopilot.

Tracking is the key

Track our daily activities from morning until night before we sleep. Check and analyze how we spend our times. If we know what time we become lazy, check again where the exact place is. Perhaps it is our lazy spot. I used to track my time when I went to school then I could predict the public transportation arrival. So it will be useful for tracking my habit.

In fact, almost all of our bad habits are occurred because of our approval. Let’s say, we procrastinate on an important task until the deadline is coming up. If we often continue it, procrastinating will become our habit.

After knowing the pattern, force ourselves to break the bad cycle. Little by little until it compounds to be a new good habit.