How to Pragmatically Integrate Any Habit in Your Life

This has been one of my main issues related to learning in the past. The problem that I wanted to solve is: Now that I know that I should act in a certain way, how do I actually remember and do it?

Let’s be honest, how many times you’ve read a top ten list about how to be exceptional at something? Nice stuff, but what happened after you read it? Nothing, in most cases.

I’ve already talked about how to keep track of what you’ve learnt, but this time I want to focus on how to integrate what you’ve learnt in your lifestyle.

Exploring the problem

For understanding how this system works, let’s analize a typical day on the web. You go to your favorite news aggregator and you read a new exciting and world-changing top ten list on how to become successful, or how to become a ninja warrior programmer, and then, as I said earlier, you just move to the next page and nothing happens. Cool.

But what should you do instead to take value from it? You should act of course, but that’s not enough. Even if you keep track of everything you read, it’s difficult to apply all at once without feeling overwhelmed. You need a system that supports your changing nature.

A big help on creating this system comes from Benjamin Franklin and his famous 13 virtues. He basically focused on practicing only one virtue per week, and he also kept a notebook to track his results.

I think he had a great system, because he focused on only one thing at a time while still enjoying long term benefits. The only problem is that his system is not intended to be used for anything outside values. For example if you want to grow the habit of reading 20 minutes per day, then you have to find something else.

The solution

The solution is to create a system that can track different kinds of information and support their implementation.

It turns out that pen and paper is enough to create this system. All you need is to create several columns and list the habits you want to master in each of them. Here’s an example of what I mean:

In column one, I have things I want to focus for one entire week each. For example I want to focus for one entire week on silence before focusing on order. In column two, I have things I want to focus for one day each. In my specific case, I have a list of 30 sentences for a millionaire mindset, and it makes sense to focus each day on a specific one. In column three, I have daily routines, things that I want to do every day no matter what.

The beauty of this system is that it’s asynchrony, in fact in the same day I can focus on a value, a priority for my blog, a specific sentence and still do my daily routines, without feeling overwhelmed.

Of course if I think I’m done with a specific habit or routine, I simply remove it from the list. If it’s already part of yourself, then it doesn’t make sense to keep it on the list

Implementation

Creating a system like this is straightforward. All you need is a sheet of paper and a list of something to implement in your life.

For important values I suggest to focus for at least one week in each of them. For long lists instead, daily is better.

To know what you should do on a particular day, you simply look at the number in the lists.

As a general rule, you start from number one on each list and practice the item for the required amount of time (1 week, 1 day, custom), and when you are at the end of the list, you simply start over again.

Daily implementation

Every day, as soon as I wake up, I make a list of everything I have to focus for the day, and then I fill my todo list accordingly if needed.

Every few hours I take a look at my daily list (not todo list), so I can refresh my mind and reinforce the values for the particular day. This works because it’s a constant reminder of how I should act.

At the end of the day I can then draw my considerations and think about what could be improved.

Why this works

This works (for me) because I get exposed to the same information multiple times per day, and at the same time I have a system that I trust which lets me integrate new habits into my life. It still takes application, experience and time to form a new habit or to add a value, but at least I can focus on it rather than trying to remember about it.

A time saver

The truth is that with a system like this, you need less time to browse the web looking for the next way to improve your life. You just need to find it once, and then apply it. After that, sadly, you have more time to do real work :D

Posted on December 05 2009

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