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How Small Habits Can Lead to Big Changes
Micro-steps For Big Gains
- Turn off your devices a few hours before sleeping.
- Set an ‘it’s bedtime’ alarm to remind yourself.
- Eat with mindfulness, in a seated and relaxed manner.
- Walk around instead of sitting during a meeting, for more creative output.
- Turn off all notifications except the crucial contacts.
- Reduce all time-sucking distractions from your smartphone and make it a tool instead of a toy.
- Leave time aside to be intentionally bored, instead of fiddling with your device.
- Answer email in blocks of time and not 24/7.
- Set aside time to write about your worries and concerns.
- Be comfortable with having unfinished work at the end of the day.
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3
Key Ideas
Personal needs
Working parents tend to focus all their energy on work or family and put their own needs on hold. With the current crisis, parents have even less time for their own needs while they juggle work and...
Know what you need
Take two minutes right now and list what would most benefit you. It could be taking 15 minutes to decompress after work. Or to have a few hours a week to read a book. Or even guitar lessons.
Highlight what sticks out to you the most on your list. Then decide what top few choices are suitable for your available time and finances.
Communicate your needs
To have a successful and productive conversation with your partner about your needs and desires:
- Timing is everything. Set a time aside together that is free of distractions, relatively peaceful, and not when you are overtired.
- Remember, you're on the same team. Handle the conversation with gentleness and without criticism.
- Actively listen. To encourage understanding, don't just listen to respond. Truly try to understand how your partner feels.
- It's about giving and taking. Relationships are about mutual understanding, compassion, and sacrifice.
- Do regular relationship checkups to foster connection and open communication.
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Key Ideas
“Micro quotas”
In the process of finding a balance between your desire to dream big and your day-to-day activities, create macro quotas.
These refer to the minimum amounts of work that...
Behavior chains
Creating new habits that stick is easier if we make use of our current routines, instead of trying to fight them.
Use "if-then planning": choose a regular part of your schedule and then build another “link in the chain” by adding a new habit. For example: "If it is lunch time, then I will only eat meat and vegetables.”
Simplify decision-making
Making repeated choices depletes our mental energy, even if these choices are mundane and pleasant.
If you want to maintain long term discipline, aim for fewer decisions during the day: identify the aspects of your life that you consider mundane and then ‘routinize’ those aspects as much as possible.
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Key Ideas
Stressing about sleep
Before a stressful work event, we tend to worry about what will happen if we don’t sleep well:
- We worry that we’ll be physically tired.
- We worry that ...
Sleep mistakes
... we make when it comes to sleeping well before a big day:
- We try too hard to sleep and we end up making it harder to fall asleep.
- We overestimate the negative consequences of poor sleep.
Sleep restriction
It's a technique for improving the quality of your sleep by using the power of Sleep Drive (the body’s natural need for sleep). Sleep Drive is built during the day: the longer you’re awake the stronger your need for sleep.
Sleep Restriction temporarily restricts the quantity of your sleep so that you’re awake longer and therefore build up more Sleep Drive.