Daily Habits

I read somewhere that upwards of 90% of what we do is purely habitual. Done automatically, without thought. Ergo, one major key to productivity, to efficiency, to self-improvement, to whatever-you’re-striving-to-do-here, is to replace bad habits with good ones. Re-program yourself, without fail and without thought, to do those little daily tasks, day after day after day, that you know you should do, those little tasks that are the little bricks in the great cathedral that will become your life.

Makes sense on paper. However, as I’ve found out, it is extremely difficult to carry out in real life.

Couple of years ago I made a list of everything I should do, every day, and came up with a simple schedule. At least, I thought it was simple. It turns out that my day would be so rigidly planned, from rising to retiring, that I’d have no wiggle room, no room for spontaneity, no room for simple relaxation.

My body rebelled; I don’t think I made it a single day on that schedule.

What did I have to do?

Well, I scheduled daily exercise. Time to read. Time to spend with my daughter, with my wife. Five minutes to blueprint my workday with a prioritized to-do list. Time to write. When I should have breaks (and what I should eat during breaks, too, such as fruit and other healthy snacks). It doesn’t seem bad, but if you saw my daily schedule, you’d shake your head, and maybe arch your eyebrows.

At heart I’m an absolutist, an all-or-nothing kind of guy. That’s one reason why I can’t implement the schedule. Too much to do all at once. Another is the simple fact that bad habits are nearly impossible to break, especially when you’re trying to implement a whole host of better ones. Yet ... If I spent, say, thirty days establishing one replacement habit, then thirty days on another, then thirty days on another, etc, and started this way back when I first read of the schedule concept, I’d be a different, hopefully better man, right now.

So, no better time than the present to implement a change. One change, that is. I’ve been blogging for about three weeks now, so I figure its almost habitual. By mid-April it’ll be thirty days of blogging. Then, I’ll move on to change two; one change at a time, remember. I have a good idea what it is, and I’ll share it with you (I already mentioned it above).

The moral: Hoppers need to remember – stay small and stick to it!