Thoughts on building habits

In 2020, I was facing a dilemma. It was during the summer of the pandemic (well, the first summer), and despite having plenty of time on my hands, I found myself spending it poorly. There were a couple of daily habits that I wanted to implement, but most days I arrived at the end of the day with those habits still left undone. I decided to try to make some changes, and something happened that I didn't expect–it worked! While I had made many previous attempts that had failed, something was different that enabled me to actually turn these aspirations into reality.

Since then I have reflected on what I did differently, and it boils down to three key reasons:

1. Effective habits mean a change of identity
2. Make the habit stupid easy
3. Track my habits every day

Effective habits mean a change of identity

The first change I wanted to make was reading scriptures. Despite believing that it was an important spiritual practice for my life, I never seemed to "find the time" for it. One day in August 2020, while I was reflecting on my inability to read scriptures daily, I had an internal conversation that went something like this:

As a result of this conversation, I realized that I wasn't really the type of person who reads their scriptures every day–I was the type of person who read them sporadically. In that moment I had a bit of an "aha" moment, where I decided to internalize the habit into becoming part of my identity. I decided I wanted to become the type of person who reads scripture every day. I defined "daily reading" as 15 minutes per day, and determined that I wouldn't take a single day off, ever. I downloaded a streaks app and started building a chain of days where I did the habit.

When I decided to become the type of person who did the habit I wanted, I divided my life into the before and after. Once I had embraced my new identity as the type of person who does the thing, the experience became less about "do I want to do this thing today?" and more about "who am I today? am I the person who I claim to be?". When my identity was at stake, it was much easier to find the motivation to do the thing.

Make the habit stupid easy

That fall I decided to hike Mount Mitchell with my brother. I started running as a way to train for the hike, and when the hike was over, I wanted to keep up my newly formed habit. But I knew from many broken new years resolutions that setting a daily habit of running a certain amount of days wasn't going to work for me. That approach often led to burnout followed by a long period of inactivity. Instead, I decided to begin forming a habit but set the bar lower than before–much lower.

My new habit was this: "do something intentional that works out your body". That's it. No time limit, no requirement for type of workout. I decided to make the habit so stupid easy that skipping out on it was worse than just doing something towards it. Sometimes that was 5 pushups at the end of the day, sometimes it was walking the dog, sometimes it was riding the stationary bike. The focus of the habit was the outcome of the lifestyle instead of trying to hit a certain level of effort every day.

By setting the habit to be something that was stupid easy, I found that I would end up doing more effort overall than the previous hit-hard-then-burnout method. I could keep the momentum of the habit going even on days when I was really busy or my schedule was upside down. It helped me avoid the guilt of breaking a habit and feeling like a failure.

Track the habit every day

In both of these cases, I found that tracking the habit every day was critical to keeping me on track. I looked at a few different habit or goal trackers, but ultimately the most important thing was simplicity. I shouldn't need to be elaborate or have any additional friction when tracking a habit beyond checking a box. I like the Seinfeld "don't break the chain" methodology, and have been using Streaks to manage my habits for 4 years (I highly recommend that app, it's the best one for tracking habits!).

Looking forward

Years later, I still track some of these habits, keeping myself accountable. Despite these learnings, I still find it difficult to develop new habits! I guess having the drive to develop habits will always be a challenge–but at least I have a better starting point now than before.