One Change At A Time
One of the responses to my first post on the 6 Changes method of developing habits was from someone who admired how I had combined a few different things that I wanted to get done each day into a single habit that I did each night before going to bed. I took that to heart and tried to do the same again in March and April by bringing together some bad habits I wanted to overcome with my desire to start blogging regularly to create a single habit to work on. I started off well, setting aside time each day to write, timeboxing my internet surfing, etc. But because the individual steps weren’t really incremental improvements toward a single habit, I didn’t benefit from the slow but steady accumulation of conditioned responses. And because of that, some of the changes haven’t stuck at all. Others I manage to do sometimes, but I cannot say that they’ve become habits I’ll keep my whole life.
Basically, I fell into the classic beginners trap. Some initial success made me think I was more capable than I really was. So I tackled something even harder, only to have my true abilities and limitations made glaringly clear. The experience has taught me the value of some of the points Leo makes at 6Changes.com. I understood what he was saying my first time through the material, but I didn’t value them enough to make them a part of my efforts to develop new habits.
Pick One Thing
First, pick one thing to work on. That should be obvious from what I just said, but I want to emphasize this. If your “one thing” requires a blog post to explain how each incremental step is related to your overall habit, you’ve probably got more than one thing. If you find yourself explaining to a spouse or friend how this week’s “incremental step” fits into the overall goal, even if it doesn’t really build on last week’s, you’ve probably got more than one thing. If, after three weeks, you’ve got three separate triggers for the habit you’re developing, you’ve probably got more than one thing.
One thing means that there is one trigger for one simple activity that can be explained in a sentence of ten words or less, preferably without commas in the sentence. Yes, when you pick a habit like this, your weekly incremental steps will seem amazingly insignificant. That’s the point! To develop a habit that will last you need to do the same things over and over and over again.
Build Incrementally
Second, incrementally build the habit from the beginning to the end. My nightly planning session has largely stuck, despite being a few different activities, because I do them all at the same time. One thing I believe I did get right with that habit is that I built it up from start to finish. I didn’t begin with the things I felt would be most beneficial: planning my day, or writing in my journal, or going through my inbox. I began with simply organizing my desk area, putting things where they went. It was kind of hard at the time to start with something so simple, but by slowly building on what had gone before each week, it gave me a set of conditioned responses that are almost hard not to do each night.
If, instead, I had started with the things I most wanted done, and then added other steps before those, I would have broken that set of conditioned responses, possibly each week during the two months I focused on developing that habit. I never would have built up the conditioning that makes it effortless to keep practicing my habit.
Do The Core Quickly
Third, don’t leave the most important steps of your habit to the end. Just as you shouldn’t push the most important incremental steps for developing your habit to the first weeks if that will break up your conditioned responses, so you also shouldn’t leave them to the last weeks. However, the challenge here is a different one: you just won’t have as much time to solidify the habit if you add it at the end of your two months, before you move on to the next habit. The steps I added to my nightly planning in the last two weeks of February are still the weakest part of that habit. Partly, that’s due to the fact that I was trying to do more than one thing. But it’s also because I only did those steps for a week or two before focusing my mind and efforts on my next habit. This leads me to believe the best use for the last couple of weeks of habit development is reinforcement of earlier steps. It may be appropriate to divvy up your habit into 6 incremental steps and then for the last two or three weeks focus on those aspects of your habit that are the weakest.
Physical Actions
Fourth, physical actions are important. The habits and steps that involve physical action, even if it’s just typing on my keyboard, stick better than purely mental, emotional, or spiritual work. The physical actions of my nightly planning habit - sitting down, processing my inbox, typing on my keyboard, and kneeling in prayer - are easy and habitual. I have no problem doing them each day, and just doing them is a great benefit. But I know that my habit would be much more beneficial if I could really change and improve the mental and emotional aspects of the habit - the analysis of the past day, truly examining and consciously choosing what to do with my inbox items, as well as the plan for the next days activities, deeply communicating with God in prayer without being distracted by other thoughts, etc. Those changes are much harder to make. By their very nature, these mental activities cannot be both habitual and consciously chosen. If they are habitual, they lose their effectiveness.
However, if I could somehow tie them more closely to physical actions I suspect I could improve them more easily. I’d be interested in others thoughts on how to work on these aspects of developing habits.
Checkpoint
Steve Pavlina has said that you can do just about anything for a month. And he’s used that maxim to get him through some interesting changes in habit. But he also reserves the right to drop something if it’s not working out for him. I like this idea, and I feel that it would be a good addition to my current attempts to develop habits over the course of two months. I can take a step back after the first month and consider how the habit is helping and whether I want to keep it up. For most habits, especially the ones I’m working on initially, I suspect that the answers will be yes, but giving myself that kind of leeway can make it easier to start something more risky, something I’m not sure I want to commit to as a lifelong habit, even if I later decide to.
Exercise
So lets apply this learning to my next habit: exercise. My exercise of choice has always been running, and I recently got some Vibram Five Fingers to see if they would help me with some foot pain I’ve had off and on over the last few years. Overall, I think just wearing them on my commute is helping a little. It’s time to start running in them, and see how that goes. One of the things that probably contributed to past injuries was trying to run each day. So, although I’d like to work on my habit daily, I know I shouldn’t be running each day. And besides, I’d also like to develop some strength, by doing simple strength training (i.e. no weights, just stuff like situps and pushups). I can set aside 20-30 minutes for this each day, and possibly a little more on Saturday’s, though it will be hard to make Saturday’s workout follow a standard trigger.
For the pushups I’ll follow the program at http://hundredpushups.com, to develop a habit of doing them regularly. I’ll do the pushups on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. On Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday I’ll be running, initially very short distances. The pushups program by it’s nature is gradual, so I’m not worried about that. The running program I’ll follow will also be simple, and very gradual since I’m getting used to the Vibram Five Fingers:
- Dress to run, then shower
- Dress to run, Run a block and back, then shower
- Do a full 1/4 mile warmup
- Run 1/2 mile
- Run 1/2 mile, sprint all out for block or two
- Run 3/4 mile, sprint all out in the middle
- Run a full mile, sprint all out in the middle
- Reinforcement
- Reinforcement
Finally, I’ll want to do the checkpoint at one month just to decide how the running is going with the VFF’s and also because I’ve had some minor pain in one of my arms, and may need to stop the pushups. Overall, I’ m excited to get started on this one.
