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What's the Best Way to Make a Habit? Comparing Seven Different Approaches | Scott H Young
Don’t Break the Chain
Keep track of how many days in a row you’ve successfully followed your habit. As your chain gets longer and longer, you become increasingly committed to the habit.
Pros:
- Maintains habits over a longer timeframe than a 30-day trial.
- Better for things you already do (or are easy to do).
- The longer your chain, the more serious your commitment.
Cons:
- Accidental slip-ups or situations where your habit becomes impossible can collapse your motivation.
- Many habits don’t work on an easy daily or weekly interval.
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Key Ideas
The 2 ways you can approach your habits: Progressive and Consistent
- Progressive. You start off easy, make it a little bit harder each time, until you eventually do very difficult things, with a lot less effort.
- Consistent. Do the same...
When you set up a progressive habit, you’re on a path to improvement
Small, incremental adjustments in difficulty are almost certain to push your level up. The downside with progressive habits is that they are harder to sustain.
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Ways to improve your life
There are a few different ways you can go about setting a goal or creating a new habit.
- Target the minimum output. You focus on always doing at least a little bit so t...
When to Focus on the Minimum
Minimum targeting works well for establishing long-term habits.
A goal of, for instance, doing fifty push-ups every day might not be ideal for fitness, but doing something is better than doing nothing.
Another reason to focus on the minimum is that it assumes the difficulty is in starting. To start a process can often be the hardest. Then you want to set a lower threshold to make starting as easy as possible.
When to Target the Average
Focusing on the average makes sense when you're hoping to sustain something, even if it is not always a perfectly easy and consistent output.
It works when you are already putting in a bit of effort, but want to improve that effort over the long-term.
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Key Ideas
Habits Are Not Blind Routines
Conventional wisdom states that strong habits improve our productivity. Daily habits done in an autopilot mode are not the only route to peak performance.
While our habits help us stick to g...
Revisit What You Do Daily
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.
Consistency and Boredom
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.