The Art of Making Habits

We all know what needs to be done to make our self better but only a few of us do it and become successful.

Just like million others, I have also read tons of self-help articles noting down good ideas and quotes and in turn have got an impulsive boost in confidence , just like everyone would get after reading a good motivating article.

In fact, I have tried to implement the knowledge gained by reading those self-improvement articles, but the motivation to do it never lasted more than a week. I generally write down things which I want to make a habit so that I can make myself a better person, but these things never became a part of my daily life.

I have been stuck in an infinite loop of reading self-improvement articles, getting a boost in self-confidence, trying to do something, but losing the motivation, then going back to my normal life and again in the wish of improving my life, I start to read self-improvement articles. The cycle goes on and on.

I analyzed why I haven’t been able to incorporate these new habits in my life, why I haven’t been able to do what I know is the best thing to do for self-improvement. But I couldn’t find the problem.

The person who made me realize where I was going wrong was Steve Jobs. After the exit of Jobs in 90s, Apple was churning out multiple versions of each product because of bureaucratic momentum and to satisfy the whims of the retailers. Apple had a dozen version of the Macintosh, each with a different confusing number, ranging from 1400 to 9600. When jobs was brought back to apple, he reviewed the products and ordered to focus only on 4 products, de-cluttering Apple. His thinking saved Apple.

“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.” — JOBS

Our brain has a limited amount of energy, we can focus only on a limited number of tasks at a time. Jobs showed me the most vital thing is to review our life and kick out the unnecessary habits which eat up our limited energy.

Hence I finally realized what was going wrong, I was trying to do all at once in an unorganized manner and when I skipped doing a task for one or two days I lost my motivation and gave up.

So to rectify my mistake, I took out my journal and listed all the things I wanted to make a habit, surprisingly, the list was so long that it went on to have 73 entries, I used Trello to organize my list and rate it.

I filtered the list choosing top 5 tasks from it and assigned triggers to them, i.e. the actions which would remind me to do these tasks. This was a lesson I learned from my failure to incorporate daily habits in my life. If we had a stringent time schedule, we might not be able to stick to it, because each day has its own timing restraints. You may have woke up late, got stuck in traffic, you could have had more work on that day. You might have planned to reach home by 7 and then do something at 7 30 but if you got stuck in traffic and reached home by 8, you lose the mood to do it and chuck it saying you will do it tomorrow, if this keeps happening, your efforts to develop a particular habit goes in drain. Therefore I started using triggers, for example, I decided to read the articles saved in “pocket”, after dinner everyday.

Next, I incorporated streaks in my life. If you take care of the streaks in early stages, it will take care of your motivation in later stages. The chance of your habit getting killed goes down exponentially with the growth of your streak. You wouldn’t want to kill the streak, thereby keeping the habit. I should thank “Snap-chat” for showing me the power of streak.

Apart from triggers and streaks, I also gave myself rewards(I get to publish my first article ) and punishments (my time on social media gets reduced) depending on my performance

So the basic steps in creating habits

• Break the work you want to do into smaller tasks. Learn to walk before you can run. Do the small tasks every day till you form a routine and then think about the larger task at hand.For example : Do one or two (depending on your mindset ) push-ups every day instead of doing 10 push-ups a day( which probably is your aim) The task should be so small that, your mind shouldn’t be able to find reasons not to do it.
• Another main reason we are not able to do stuff which will reap benefit (not now but later) is we crave for instant gratification. So give yourself small rewards periodically for doing the task to satisfy the cravings.
• Use the trigger → task → reward cycle to keep you on track.
• If you can’t do the above-mentioned ideas on your own, get help from your best friend or your spouse or your parents to track your progress.

The process of developing a habit has three phases :

Motivated phase: Where you are motivated enough to do the tasks you have planned

Test phase: Your motivation fades, and your willpower is under test. This is the phase you need help, where you can use methods such as triggers, rewards, punishments, streaks, responsibility partner.

Victory phase: where you have formed a new habit and its hard to lose the habit.

My experience on what I learned from the first 21 days after gaining the above knowledge:

It is not the knowledge we lack, we are living in the information age where there is immense wisdom that each of them clashes with each other to reach you. What we need to know is how to execute things.

It is not like I accomplished everything I planned, even after implementing minimalism into my habituation process, I haven’t been able to do the tasks planned every day.

Nothing happens magically, even if you know what has to be done, you need the willpower and effort to do it.

I found my motivation accidentally while writing this article. I came across a video about gambling which said, “fear of losing is greater than the desire for winning”

So what drives me now, is my decision that, I will let this article live as long as I do the things I have planned, if I don’t do the things I have planned for three consecutive days I decided to delete this article. So this is going to be my sole motivation, which is going to prevent me from giving up.

I hope my experiences will be helpful to you to realize your new year resolutions and you will be able to make a habit of the things you think is important for you .