Ditch Your Habits and Create Rituals Instead
Shift your mindset from productivity to mindfulness, and your life will improve.
I’m a big believer in the efficiency of habits, which is why I’ve spent the better part of a decade trying to make desirable behavior automatic.
Did I succeed? Umm, no. I’ll leave it to Tim Ferris and James Clear to hack their own behaviors because mine is about as compliant as a spoiled sloth.
Over the past ten years of conscious efforts to change for the better, I haven’t accomplished much in terms of habits, although all that effort combined resulted in a better lifestyle.
I can’t say I completely failed at habits. I’m on a healthy diet, I have a good career, I’m relatively productive, keep my house acceptably clean, and have done a good job keeping my dog alive for five years now. However, I can’t, for the life of me, master certain habits no matter how hard I try.
This was my latest struggle: 66 consecutive days of (often intense) exercise. After slaying that challenge, I moved on to the next one: 66 consecutive days of waking up early.
Why 66 days? I wrote more about my experience here, but 66 days was supposed to be a fun little representation of the “average” number of days it supposedly takes to form…
