Here is the thing that we all are hoping to follow. Nost of us face difficulties in cultivating good habits that make a huge difference in our future. That is because our thoughts are instant and expect results as quickly as possible. Our brain has less tendency to wait for results or it cannot be curious for a long time. I’d rather say that this kind of mentality is developed ever since the first human is formed.
After 1000s of years, civilization came to existence and humans became how we are now. We follow rules, we earn, we learn and survive. The basic habitual part of humans is, eat, sleep, survive. On top of these basics, we started to differentiate ourselves as thinkers, achievers, and learners.
Developing habits that make a difference for our future don’t convince us. We need incentives to come out of our basic instincts. To do that, we need to follow a few steps that help us to make these behavior changes.
As part of my reading process, I read this book, “Atomic Habits” authored by James Clear. He mentioned some interesting ways to cultivate any activity into a habit. It takes simple steps to adapt. Here are those steps that might help you to cultivate good habits that make a huge difference to the future.
Steps:
- Small changes in life lead to big surprises.
- Growth needs to be automated to habits.
- Habits must be attached to cues — Implementation Intentions
- Reward your tasks — Temptation Bundling
- Creating fewer friction rules
- Find alternate ways to get instant satisfaction
- Creating a framework to track habits
Step 1: Small changes in life leads to big surprises
We don’t concentrate on smaller changes in life. It may seem doesn’t make sense at that time but for the long term, it changes everything for you. In my life when I was in college, I use to eat pizzas every day but the day after day I was thinking like its the last day and that doesn’t change the fact of the future. After a year when I calculated the money I spent on eating them made me wonder that 3 to 4 poor students would’ve completed their whole college with that money.
That thinking gave me some eyeopener feel and I decided to control eating or spending more money. I got sick about that every time I spent money I was regretting it. It almost took me 4 years to change my mind to be sensible in spending money. I tried to control it every day until I found a simple way that worked for me.
I started to spend money to buy gifts for the person I love instead of spending money on myself. That was my cue.
When you can’t see through or control the habits that make you regret, change the direction of it. It takes time to adapt but it will definitely work. For me, it was about finding my cue i.e the person I loved.
Step 2: Growth needs to be automated to habits
Think of habits that you want to cultivate in life. When an activity is done by humans automatically, it becomes a habit and that is governed by the subconscious mind. Activity will be pushed to the background like the Async task on the computer. To push that activity to your subconscious — like you drink water automatically when you are thirsty instead of juice — you should understand the 4 stages of habit, Cue, Craving, Response, and Reward.
Cue is the moment you know what you need to do. Craving is the change of state in you to do the task. The response is the action you perform. And Reward is the aftermath of the action performed, in this case, it is serving thirst after drinking.
To make any activity turned into a habit, you must keep doing it consistently until it is automated. In my case, I started to read 54 days ago and I have been doing it every day since. Apply 21-days rule to any activity. Keep repeating it for 21 days. It will become an automated task by itself. Now, without reading, no day will pass in my life. It has become a normal task like eating food or drinking tea every day.
Step 3: Habits must be attached to cues — Implementation Intentions
We saw how habit helps our long term goal and also we learned how to create one. Now, How do we make that habit a good one by motivating ourselves to achieve?
Let’s take a simple example, drinking water more is a good habit but most of the people fail to drink 8 glasses a day i.e. 2 liters. So to make this habit easy or we need to make sure that we should not come to our conscious to object the thought of doing it. I kept a water bottle on my table beside my workstation so that whenever I see that water bottle or I feel to take a break for a minute or two, the first thing I did was, drinking a sip of water. The same applies to other habits as well.
If you find harder to focus on your work, find a girl who looks pretty. Automatically our mind gets attracted to her and you start to go to work happily without any laziness or procrastinating about it. This applies to students as well.
Implementation intentions are simple, just you need to follow harder work to do your favorite work. Tie the difficult work and the hard work together. For example, I hated creating reports every day in an excel sheet to my customers regarding their application that has reported problems. I had to create 25 to 30 rows at the end of the day. What I did is, I automated that task and my application started reporting each problem in an excel at the end of the day leaving me to look after only about the application fixing the bugs of it. For me, coding is a joy so I love that work but the result is, my customer is also happy that they are getting reports. The author says,
Many people think they lack motivation when what they lack is clarity.
Unlike me, you can find a different activity that is hard and you can tie that activity to your favorite ones. This is very helpful to improve your work and daily routines. Get clarity on what you are doing. For example, instead of insisting yourself planning on competing for the Employee of the year, start by doing good today and work better. Complete the difficult task assigned creatively. If you get an idea for your goal, take action now and do something about it. If you think of completing a book in one week, start reading 2 pages of the book. If you like it, you will automatically go on and complete that book in a week or before that time.
Turning an activity that needs to be done without noticing by our conscious mind, pushes that activity to subconscious stack where upon continuing, we will start to like that activity based on the steps we have performed to get that completed.
Step 4: Reward your tasks — Temptation Bundling
Now we learned how to make habits stick even without getting into our conscious. This is better when it comes to good habits and we need to do exactly opposite to bad ones. We understood that small change will make a big difference so we started to embrace those activities and tried to automate it by pushing it to our subconscious stack. Now, it is time to reward the habits after cultivating it.
How can we reward our habits? How it is better when we reward our habits?
Humans are attracted by rewards when we reward our habits, it makes them stick in our life. This happens when our brain releases Dopamine. This dopamine hit, causes humans to feel good about doing anything. This happens whenever we listen to our favorite songs or spend time with our loved ones.
We can use temptation bundling to reward habits and this comes from the example I mentioned in the above section. I mentioned how I made my habit automated by building an application that generates reports.
If we think about daily habits, for example when I go for a walk I read articles. My instructions about this task are, I love to read and I was failing to walk every day consistently hence I have decided to read when I go for a walk. I found a place outside 1.5 miles from my home to sit and read. Every day I go to that place to read. This has become my routine now. Like this, I do this for listening podcasts as well. I listen to podcasts when I am walking.
Instructing you brain to work like, “If this — than that” helps you to build a platform of good habits in you. Like hitting 2 birds with a stone. When you couple good and hard habits with your favorite habits, results will be astonishing.
Step 5: Creating fewer friction rules
Habits need to be easy and helpful in practice. If you cultivate a habit that takes 3 hours of your day to complete doesn’t make sense. They need to be short and must have less friction to complete. The good thing with this step is, you can apply this to the habits that are bad to remove them.
When you keep drinking water on your table all the time, helps you to stay healthy, not storing wine alcohol at home creates friction. You need to get out to drink instead. As this happens, your brain feels tired of going out every time to get alcohol. When you store fruit juice at home more, instead of going out and drinking alcohol, you tend to drink fruit juice instead. This habit keeps you healthy and far from bad habits.
You can apply this to your productivity at work as well. Cultivate a habit of putting your cellphone as far as possible from your work station and make it hard to reach. Every time you want to check your phone, you have to find it and this creates friction in your mind. Instead of checking the phone you feel to look at the screen of the work station and work on it. Make sure to put your phone in silent mode.
When it comes to good habits, you can always have templates to use when it is needed at work. When your manager asks you to create a report, a predefined template helps you to work faster and easier rather than doing it from scratch. Store greetings with you by organizing them on different occasions. As soon as that occasion comes, pick that greeting and send it to your loved ones. This is far better than going out and purchasing one and then send it to them. Be prepared and plan accordingly to make good habits more enjoyable. This is the first step in being productive.
Another trick we can follow to be productive, the two-minute rule. In our daily lives, we come across a lot of reminders about simple works that we postpone to do it later. Instead of doing like that try looking at them in this way, “If that work takes more than 2 minutes or less than that I am going to do it now. If it takes longer, I will schedule it.” this way of looking at the tasks that cone in our way helps to build the productivity mindset and this habit is one of the keys to success.
It is important to cultivate a good habit and creating an environment that is easy to execute that, always plays an important role to stick it for longer period of time.
Step 6: Find alternate ways to get instant satisfaction
Our brain is trained to see instant results for the work we do as I discussed in the intro of this article. Making our minds to get that satisfaction, we have to find alternate ways by not changing that habit instead of embracing them.
In my life, I tried this way and worked out for me well. My dream is to travel the world within 35. But to achieve this, it is not possible for me now. So, I started to save some money. Whenever I prevent myself from eating pizza, I put that amount of money in my savings account and check the balance of it.
When I think about my traveler instincts, instead of thinking about not going on a world trip, I recheck my account balance. This makes me feel something good about myself about my savings and gives me that hope where I can save more to travel one day.
Also I took this step further to enhance my good habits. I have my routine to follow and whenever I fail to follow that routine like, walking, reading writing, meditating, I pay some money to my Mom for failing to do it. That is my strict rule. If I fail to write that day, I pay Mom 500 bucks.
When I write an article and publish it every day, I feel like I saved 500 and I get an immediate feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction for completing this routine. It is not about money. When I feel that satisfaction, it makes me write more and be in a loop of my resolution about writing daily.
I didn’t believe this step before but, when it started to work for me, It all changed. From writing 2 articles per week, I write 8 times a week. This changed the way how I work on my habits. This is because I don’t want to say I failed in front of my Mom.
When we have clarity on the habit, we often tend to experiment with them and make them strong to stick in ourselves. Hence, it is important to make that habit a good one.
Step 7: Creating a framework to track habits
This is a very powerful step to perform after Creating, Automating, Inspiring, Rewarding, Easy-ing and Sticking a habit. Tracking habits are similar to getting satisfaction from it.
We can track them by writing journal, arranging them in To-Do lists, looking at the stats, time to time is enjoyable. Placing milestones to achieve them is also a good habit to practice. Listing out all the work you do or you did and keeping them tracking directs your mind to crave for more higher insights to achieve.
I follow all the tracking systems in my everyday life from reading articles to tracking my listening minutes. I evaluate them every month to check my progress. When it says, I have written 20,000 words, I try to increase that count next month. Breaking my records helps me to compete with myself. As long as I compete, I get better with the habits I included in my routine.
Tracking is very important for our brain. It keeps us updated. Think of yourself achieving more everytime when you beat that stat. It will become habitual practice that aids you in real world of competition.
Conclusion:
Habits are the primary part of human beings. When we cultivate it for good reasons, we often do good to the people around us. Follow these 7 steps to convert any activity into a habit. It is important for us to different activities that help us to plan the future from those who give temporary satisfaction. Long term changes exist in bad habits as well. Our health deteriorates when we smoke every day instead of just smoking at that moment. It may not give disease momentarily but it makes a difference if you make it a habit. The immediate pleasure when you get while smoking may seem fair to you but the pieces of immediate pleasure constructed as a mountain that can’t be destroyed after 10 or 20 years.
Steps for cultivating good or bad habits are the same. These 7 steps are like a weapon to save ourselves or to destroy ourselves. When we use it to improve, it gives great results. If we use it to destroy ourselves, nothing can stop us from infecting the people around us.
