How to Stick to Good Habits

1. Harness the dopamine effect: identify the desired outcome. Mentally walking yourself through the process of success and the joys and benefits it brings can teach your brain to be motivated by something other than dread.
2. Start with baby-steps: identify the “tiny habits”  behaviors — we should start with small actions that we can celebrate.
3. Use triggers: these new habits follow other routines that are already ingrained into your daily life(triggers), so every time you complete this already existing behavior, there will be a trigger, or an automatic reminder, in your brain to do the new one.
4. Let it snowball.

• Some of our daily to-dos should not require a constant daily effort and could be optimized further. Look for such habits and if the daily effort is straining you, look for other innovative solutions.

• Time and Energy are limited resources, and as we grow, our habits may become obsolete. We could use the same time and energy to explore new and better options.

• It is a good idea to pay attention to where we spend our time and see if there is something we do daily but have outgrown long ago.

Being consistent can also lead to burnout and lack of growth, and to be creative and innovative, we sometimes need a break from our daily activity. When we stop and do something new, we start to be part of a creative process, instead of simply repeating the same thing every day.

The key is to not rely on a rigid consistency but to be resilient enough to withstand any breaks. Our resilient habits are usually the old ones and have some psychological rewards while involving some external accountability. 

Design your life like a choice architect:

• Encourage smarter decisions you want to do by making them more accessible.
• Add friction to habits you want to quit, making them less accessible, or remove the option to perform them completely.

“First, never underestimate the power of inertia. Second, that power can be harnessed.” 

Wake up early and you can spend some undisturbed time alone and do your most important tasks or get ready for what is coming during the day.

You may feel uneasy and uncomfortable at first, but you need to overcome it and turn it into a habit. Wake up 15 minutes earlier and gradually improve from there can be a good strategy.

You can do this either in the morning before you start your day or before you sleep at night. Read relevant books that will improve your knowledge or just read personal development books.

All of the habits that you have right now — good or bad — are in your life because they provide a benefit to you, even if they are bad for you in other ways.

And because bad habits provide some type of benefit in your life, it's very difficult to simply eliminate them. Instead, you need to replace a bad habit with a new habit that provides a similar benefit.

• Choose a substitute for your bad habit. 
• Cut out as many triggers as possible. 
• Surround yourself with people who live the way you want to live.
• Visualize yourself succeeding and avoid negative self-talk.
• Plan for failure and find things that can help you bounce back when you make a mistake.
  

• Deep work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. Creates value.
• Shallow work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. Doesn't create value.

• Monastic: maximize Deep Work by minimizing or removing shallow obligations. Isolate yourself for long periods of time without distractions; no shallow work allowed
• Bimodal: divide your time into some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leave the rest open to everything else. Reserve a few consecutive days when you will be working like a monastic. You need at least one day a week
• Rhythmic: involves creating a routine where you define a specific time period — ideally three to four hours every day — that you can devote to Deep Work
• Journalistic: alternate your day between deep and shallow work as it fits your blocks of time. Not recommended to try out first.

Meditation, often talked about but rarely practiced, is the key to focus and something that will help us in our endeavors no matter who we are.

Like Meditation, Yoga is the one all solution to all the problems of our body. It is a holistic, and safe way to take care of your body, mind, and soul.

It takes you 15 consecutive minutes of focus before you can fully engage in a task. Once you do, you fall into flow, a state of increased productivity.

Click in and out of your work enough times to check the news of social media, and you can go through an entire day without experiencing flow.

We freeze up when it’s time to get started because we know that our ideas aren’t perfect and what we produce might not be any good.

But you can never produce something great if you don't get started and give your ideas time to evolve.

Long term change is better served by building better habits, than by forcing your willpower. 

You will choose the apple over the cake for a number of times ... and then give up. Building a habit to start the day by going to the gym will work better.

 ...to familiar environmental cues. 

They form when you engage in a behavior repeatedly in the presence of consistent stimuli.