On Building Habits
There are likely hundreds if not thousands of Medium articles about building habits. However, I’d like to add my own experience on it as well as share some tools and resources that I used to build and keep track of habits.
First and foremost, I want to recommend everyone to check out the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. I had only found out about the book several months ago and realized a lot of the techniques I had were beautifully described in the book, put into words much better than I could have.
When I failed out of college because of my addiction to gaming, I knew I had to make signficant changes (I’m 99% sure I wrote this verbatim on my re-entry essay). One of those changes was building the right habits that allowed me to consistently complete the things I needed to get done, which at the time was schoolwork. What I started doing was simply adding the assignments I needed into Todoist. I was still having trouble focusing on completing the assignment, and I found a great pairing that enabled me to complete the task without loosing focus. Using PomoDone App, I was able to use the Pomodoro Technique on specific assignments, and that was a very powerful combination for me.
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Fast forward to when I was back at college. I was very motivated to get in shape as I recognized the opportunity to be able to carefully control what I ate and the freedom of going to the gym (the specific process of doing that is definitely an essay for another time). The parking lot by my gym was restricted to staff use only, except before 7 AM, and by those circumstances I was forced to wake up early. It did suck a lot at first and the bitter cold of Illinois winters did not help, but I kept at it and eventually it got to a point where if I didn’t go, I felt “off”, which means I had successfully formed that habit.
There are several habits that I do daily, such as my skincare routine, taking my vitamins, and reading. For these habits, I use an app called Strides to track my adherence to these habits. I have found that it’s quite effective to remind me of these daily tasks and provides me useful analytics for how I am doing.
Habits are not easy to make or keep, and Atomic Habits goes in-depth on how to do so. What the book doesn’t really talk about are these tools I’ve mentioned such as Todoist and Strides, and hopefully from reading my experience, it will help you to create and continue the habits that you want to make. As always, thanks for reading!
#100DaysToOffload
