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A Week Like Last: Why routine and habit has become crucial to my functioning

I’m writing this from North Carolina and I’m very happy about that. Willy finished his final papers and exams at 5PM Friday evening. It was an intense two weeks of assignments and exams for him. I joked with my coworkers that he was hardly a whole human being anymore. His life was studying and writing, save sleep and a short time for meals. I had a busy week consolidating things at the end of the school year, having final meetings before we went on vacation and then switched gears to start working on a new project when I return.

Last week was a big reminder that I still need to grow in developing habits and routines in my schedule that are non-negotiable. Buying groceries is one of those things. There was much chaos last week and I’m confident we could have maintained a sense of normalcy if I had a structured time I did groceries (we didn’t have much in the fridge last week and were too busy to go get some), still making time for other things.

My ideal has become building a series of habits and routines that reduces the amount that I need to think and maximizes getting things done. “Things” being primarily the things I don’t like doing and don’t want to do and therefore don’t make proper time for: Like washing my floors and grocery shopping.

I can’t remember if I’ve posted about this before, but this isn’t the first time that I’ve felt like my life is a bit of a gongshow and I think to myself: I know how to fix this, I just have to do it.

Just doing it is half the trouble, right?

But this week is about chilling out, enjoying the sun, eating really cheap food here in America, and relaxing.

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Using Information To Reach Your Goals and Build Stronger Habits

Info-Habits

Last fall I was forced to sit through a seminar at work about Leading with Data. I was about as excited as you were when you read the above title. As it turns out, it’s really helpful. I’ve applied this to my personal life and again finding it useful. What am I talking about?

Unless you’re a data analyst or took a business degree, you probably are going through life a little like me: you have an idea of what’s going on but you’re not sure. As I’ve learned, real data is helpful because it’s raw facts. You can’t argue with facts. This spring I wrote about how I didn’t do a good job in December of using my light therapy because I didn’t feel like it. The facts said: if you don’t use this you will feel worse. I trusted my feelings instead of the facts. Guess which one was right? The facts. I ended up having a crappy Christmas again because I just felt really blah. That could have been prevented if I had trusted the facts (“No, I need to do my light therapy whether I feel like it or not.”).

Why real data helps

Data helps in achieving goals because we have real information about how we’re doing. It helps us to evaluate and adapt based on how we’re actually doing. Am I eating veggies every day? More or less. I have that info tracked in LiftApp. As I begin to track it, I become more aware of it as we talked about in my post on Keystone Habits. Now I can say, “I’ve flossed once a week for the past four weeks” because I’m tracking that behaviour on LiftApp. If I scour my memory for those occasions I can remember one or two. If I rely on my memory, I wont have the full picture of what is really happening. 

Take the info, adapt

After you have a bunch of data about the habits or goals that you’re trying to track, take some time to consider what it says. Are you having a hard time getting out of bed on Mondays and so you never manage to go for a run or write or do whatever it is your goal is to do that morning? You maybe haven’t noticed this pattern before, but you see it in the data. I never wake up on time on Mondays. OK, so what are you going to do to make sure you do get up? Maybe you need to go out and buy a coffee maker that will automatically turn on. Monday morning you’ll smell that coffee when you wake up and all you need to do is stumble out of bed and get it.

How to track?

There are several ways you can track your habits and goals. In your personal agenda, on your calendar, in a small notebook like a small Moleskine or FieldNotes that you carry with you. Maybe just a note on your smartphone, or perhaps in Evernote, or LiftApp. Think about what it is you want to know more about and think of a way that will be simple enough that it wont be a bother to input the information every day.

Respond

Ok guys, I know this is a really nerdy post. I want to know what your immediate reaction is: ‘I’ll never do this’ or ‘I don’t see why it will help me’ or ‘I’m skeptical, but I’ll give it a whirl.’ Go ahead and leave a comment here. 

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The role of ‘productivity’ in reaching our goals

goals
Source: THEMACGIRL*
Don’t forget the giveaway that finishes tomorrow. Click here for more details.

As I’ve been working on this blog and flushing out my ideas, I’ve realized that maybe I haven’t really been clear about the link between productivity and reaching my goals. In my head it’s clear, but you might be thinking “if this blog is about reaching her goals, why does she talk about productivity so much?”

Why productivity?

When I was thinking through topics I know about and enjoy learning more about productivity was on the list. I didn’t want my blog to be just another talking about the exact same things as everyone else, but more importantly, I wanted it to be something that was true to me. Over the last few years I’ve learned things about working more efficiently that I’ve tried to pass on to others, but didn’t really have one place I could send the people I was teaching. This blog is now that one place.

More than that, I do believe that if we can harness some of our wasted energy we have more to put in other places that require more energy. This is where productivity comes in. If I build good habits now, I’ll be that much more likely to have success in accomplishing my goals as my life becomes more and more complex. I’m still in the early stages of a lot of these goals, as you very well know. I’m determined to do my best to make them happen, which involves tweaking things in the process to achieving those goals.

What do you mean?

Here’s an example: if I have a weekly routine of work, meal planning and prep, getting groceries, running, my morning routine etc. then I don’t have to think about it. I have a lot less resistance due to less decision fatigue. If that freaks you out because it’s too repetitive, I agree. However, I’ve learned that there is tremendous freedom in structure.

Your turn

Have you had an experience where you found yourself running on optimized performance or running on all cylinders because you had planned and structured your life well? Do you think you could never organize yourself well enough to do that? I’d love to hear your feedback in the comments.

 

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Developing Keystone Habits

Don’t forget the giveaway that’s going on right now. Click here for more details.

I’ve already gushed about Lift App before. This time, it’s not because I’ve actually received the T-shirt they sent me to say thanks for the first post (though I did). This time, it’s because I’ve experienced some cool psychology that I had only read about until now and I believe it’s thanks to Lift App.

Remember when I read The Power of Habit? I learned a lot from that book including about what Duhigg calls Keystone Habits. Research shows that committing to one keystone habit can improve and bring positive results the rest of your life. One example is food journaling. You can read in detail about it in this HuffPo article but the summary version is this: ask a group of people who want to lose weight to track their food intake. At the beginning they may forget a lot. Slowly they’ll remember to track one meal a day or maybe one day a week. Over time, they’ll remember more and more until they’ve started tracking everything. Then what happens? They become more aware of what’s going in their bellies.

“The researchers hadn’t suggested any of these behaviors. They had simply asked everyone to write down what they ate once a week. But this keystone habit — food journaling — created a structure that helped other habits to flourish. Six months into the study, people who kept daily food records had lost twice as much weight as everyone else.

“After a while, the journal got inside my head,” one person told me. “I started thinking about meals differently. It gave me a system for thinking about food without becoming depressed.” (article)

I’m totally experiencing this with Lift. I have a list of thirteen habits I’m tracking. Not all I’m trying to do daily, but ideally I would get to that point. I had an 18 day streak with reading my Bible until we did a lot of travelling this past weekend. I’ve been writing and reading more because I’m tracking these habits.

But flossing?

I’ve flossed 5 times since I started tracking in January. Three of which were this month.

In February I had had enough of the “Floss!” at the top of my screen always taunting me. “You should floss,” it said. “I don’t want to,” I would reply and then consider deleting that goal from the list. I’m not sure why I didn’t. Probably because my dentist wouldn’t be very happy with me and neither would my wallet for having to pay my dentist so much.

As I saw everything else on my list being lit up in green as I checked them off, the 1 minute it took to floss started seeming less daunting. I became more and more motivated to get the Floss lit green too.

So I decided: I’ll try to floss once a week. That is SO manageable.

Then when I did that two weeks in a row, feeling on top of the world, I decided I could manage twice a week. See where this is going?

Last night as I looked at where I was in my list as I was thinking about my evening and I realized: if I plan things right I can knock them all off. Providence agreed by getting a giant piece of apple (Eat More Fruit) stuck in my teeth, forcing me to floss.

All this to say: you should try Lift, or figure out a system that works for you if an app doesn’t. It’s worth it!

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Overcoming resistance

slow
Source: Herr Olsen

Forgive me if you’re sick of me making reference to Michael Hyatt. He’s clearly an influencer in my life right now and if that annoys you, maybe this isn’t the blog for you! Michael recently did a podcast called How to Overcome Resistance that I found helpful. You can listen to the whole thing here or skip down to the summary.

What is resistance?

Michael brings up a subject that I face on a regular basis and I’m sure you do too. Resistance’ according to Hyatt is, “that invisible, destructive force that opposes you every time you try to start a new project or make an improvement in any area of your life.”

Sound familiar? Know why I’m bringing it up? We all face it.

“You might not experience resistance if you decide to eat dessert but you will experience it if you decide to go on a diet.”

True words, no?

How to overcome it

Michael says we typically have 3 responses to to resistance. They are fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Also sound familiar? Hyatt does a great job in his podcast through telling a story of how he persisted in getting one of his books bought by a skeptical publisher after tons of rejections, only to have it hit the best seller list. He advises a response for each of those ugly responses: to start, focus and finish.

  1. I’ve heard this before in reading The Now Habit. The response to fear is procrastination and the response to procrastination needs to be: to start.
  2. The typical response to uncertainty is distraction and the counter-measure needs to be to focus. Remember when I was doing Nanowrimo last November? In a millisecond, without thinking, I learned that could open a new tab and be on Facebook without thinking. It’s a habit I have unwittingly developed for the moment when my brain has a lull. So thanks to the recommendation of my friend Diane, I installed StayFocused in my browser and blocked Facebook and Twitter during my writing hours. It worked.
  3. The third response to resistance is to doubt (should I really be doing this?) and the counter-measure should be just to finish. Push-through. This is where going public with things helps, you have a bunch of people who you can turn to help you finish.

If you found this post helpful, I encourage you to listen to the whole podcast. He finishes the podcast by answering questions that his listeners have asked him.

Can you think of a time when you overcame resistance? I’d love to hear a story from you! Don’t be shy and leave it in the comments here.

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