<ul><li>Using your habit tracker consistently is a habit in itself. So make it stick</li><li>Keep your habit tracker simple, accessible, quick to complete and resistant to wear and tear. Friction is the enemy of action. </li><li>If it’s a behavior you have already made into a habit or one you don’t want to, don’t add to your habit tracker. It detracts from what matters and is needless work.</li><li>Start a new habit tracker if you can’t stand looking at the failures in the current one.</li><li>When you fail, don't give up or indulge in old ways. Missing sometimes is inevitable, but don’t miss twice in a row so you don’t lose momentum.</li><li>Start with a single key habit and don’t try to develop new ones until you’re comfortable that the first will stick.</li><li>Make your habit realistic and consider simplifying it and building it up over time so you don’t overwhelm yourself.</li><li> Make your habit relevant and exciting to you. It’s easier to keep them this way than aiming for habits because others say they're important.</li><li>Do it under the same conditions each day so your brain links habit and context, and thus easier to stick to.</li><li>Use habits as cues for more habits. So when you complete habit A, you always start habit B.</li><li>Track your habits until you can't imagine them not being part of your day.&nbsp;</li><li>Accept relapses as normal and track them again until reestablishment.</li></ul>

How To Use Your Habit Tracker Effectively 

A habit is any behavior you often and regularly do, by and large automatically. Manipulating habits is a powerful life skill because many consistently repeated behaviors compound into big, life-altering outcomes.Turning good behaviors into habits makes them our default, automatic choices of action. This all but eliminates the willful effort required to repeat/stop them, which increases the odds of achieving the outcomes it leads to.

From Behavior To Habit

A habit tracker is any tool that monitors if and when you complete that behavior; thus helping you consistently do, or not do, a behavior until it becomes automatic, i. e. , a habit. The ideal habit tracker adds as few extra steps as possible to your habit so it doesn’t become another detractor in your quest for change. If your habit tracker takes more than five minutes to set up, you are wasting time, and you’re more likely to abandon it if it gets messy.&nbsp;

Habit Trackers

<ul><li>Good habit trackers take less than 1 minute to fill and its benefits outweigh those costs. </li><li>Unlike us, habit trackers have unlimited, unbiased memory. Without them, it's easy to miss patterns that you can use to improve, lose track of your failures or forget to compound your victories. </li><li>We do many things, but most are done haphazardly. Habit trackers repeatedly remind us of our priorities, helping us stay on track and do less, and consequently achieve more. </li><li>It’s cathartic to successfully complete a task. Completion triggers a cascade of “feel good” chemicals in your brain that works as a reward.</li></ul>

Benefits Of Habit Trackers

<ol><li>Avoidance habits: to set one, simply put the word "no" in front of your chosen behavior (e. G. , "no smoking") and then track how you do on each day.</li><li>Metrics tracking: measuring how often you engage in the habit (e. G. , “number of cigarettes smoked") and then gradually reduce consumption over time. It’s especially helpful for compulsive, unconscious behaviors as it makes you more mindful of the behavior and its triggers. </li><li>Override habits: is any good habit that replaces bad ones. A well-chosen one is always more powerful than an avoidance habit.</li></ol>

The 3 Main Bad-Habit-Breaking Approaches

When a cue triggers a craving, you automatically try to execute the habit to get the reward. You never forget a habit, but developing stronger ones you can bypass it.&nbsp;A few definitions:<ul><li>A reward is anything that increases pleasure&nbsp;or decreases pain&nbsp;</li><li>A ritual is any set of actions that predictably leads to reward. Building a good habit that offers a deeper, more attractive pathway from cue to the same reward.</li><li>A craving is an urge to act in a way that yields an expected reward. Meditation, gratitude or prayer can soften the urges.</li><li>A cue is anything, internal or external, that kicks off a craving. Habit tracking will help you identify and avoid cues.</li></ul>

How Habits Work

Values → ← Quick-Start Home N.B., Click here to get a FREE blank, printable Habit Tracker template as part of FASTER TO MASTER's FREE Productivity Templates download. If I could wish for one superpower, the ability to turn good, compounding behaviours into habits wouldn't be my first choice (hello #timetravel ⏳).

The Ultimate Habit Tracker Guide: Template + Good Habits List

<ul><li>Motivation: Choose a habit you personally care about. If you pick a habit out of a sense of obligation, your motivation will fade and continuation will be dependent on your already limited willpower.</li><li>Regularity: find a habit you can track daily. Each habit repetition enforces it as a behavior and strengthens the pathways in your brain related to it. Eventually making the behavior automatic; a new habit. </li><li>Achievability: choose something achievable so you’ll feel that if you put the effort you can do it. Better a tiny habit that you do every day than a huge one you hardly ever complete.</li></ul>

Factors To Consider When Choosing a New Habit To Track

You can’t fully focus on any behavior if you try to establish several at once. Doing so risks overloading your willpower and your habits may end up competing for priority.

Tackle One Behavior At a Time

The best way to turn a behavior into a habit is to use a trigger to remind yourself to do it. Your trigger needs to be something you always do anyway. Anything you already do without thinking works. As you build new habits, you create new triggers for yourself and stack a new habit onto it. Each existing habit acts as a trigger to remind you to complete the next one until it becomes natural to do both together. That’s when you know you can add something new to the stack.

"Stack" Your Habits

To make your habits automatic faster, plan them into your day. Do them in the same way, in the same place, at the same time every day. If you complete your new habit at any time, on any day, you won’t get the advantage of familiarity that helps you get used to doing that behavior without thinking about it.

Set a Schedule 

<ul><li>Paper: if you use a diary or daily planner, make notes each day if you completed your habit or not. If you do a regular weekly or monthly review, this is a great time to check back through your notes to see how you’re progressing over time.</li><li>Spreadsheet: you can set up a simple sheet to track if you complete your habit each day. This is a good way to make your tracking more visual so you can get an idea of a glance about how you’re going.</li><li>Mobile Apps: these are convenient and you can access them anywhere.</li></ul>

How To Keep Track

I've been tracking my habits on and off for the past couple of years, but when I went through a brief stint of not tracking habits, I didn't do a very good job of building them, either.

Why You Should Be Tracking Your Habits (and How to Do It Well)

“People don’t decide their futures; they decide their habits and their habits decide their futures.” F.M. Alexander

When it comes to setting new habits, we have some resistance to deal with and the luster of starting a new practice dissipates sooner than we’d like to admit.To help establish them, we need a feedback loop to keep us committed when motivation ebbs. We can do this by setting up a tracking system, on a spreadsheet or app, that allows us to give ourselves a check-mark/cross mark for each habit execution.

We Need a Tracking System 

The extra work involved with tracking things&nbsp;discourages and can make some self-rationalize not tracking their habits for the long term. Tracking your habits makes it easier to stick to your desired patterns in the long term. And it’s important to persist as your habits determine your current and future life.

You Have Negative Beliefs About Tracking

Sometimes, even when you fail to achieve your target, just the fact that you kept tracking lets you feel a good sense of progress, or bad about the lack of progress. That emotional feedback helps you maintain new habits for the long term. Find a system fits you, so you’re more likely to track your habits every day. And remember that whatever system you use, when starting new habits, ticking them all off daily for months on end is unlikely. Focus on improvement in the long-term, as opposed to perfection.

The Importance Of Regular Feedback 

<ol><li>You increase confidence and control of your destiny.</li><li>You increase motivation as you get a sense of everyday accomplishment.</li><li>You learn which habits you find difficult being consistent in, thus making it likelier that you’ll make adjustments.</li><li>You feel in control of your life and won’t look back with a sense of forgetfulness – you’ll know what you did and didn’t do.</li><li>You can break your social media addiction by daily tracking your accesses.</li><li>You can better appreciate the connections between your habits and your current life and use them in your favor.</li><li>You recognize that people’s place in life come from the compound effect of their habit</li></ol>

Benefits To Tracking Your Habits

Many of us try out new habits to improve the quality of our lives. Often they do; whether it's starting a daily practice of flossing, reading, or writing - or else; new habits can transform our life experience. But if you've tried to instill new daily habits before, you'll know that they can be challenging ...

7 Reasons to Start Tracking Your Habits | Wealthy Gorilla

When you don’t track your habits you’re more likely to talk yourself out of certain activities when you don’t feel like doing them. Tracking reminds and confronts you with your failures, effectively punishing you. Tracking&nbsp;also gamefies your habits, providing extra motivation to being consistent. That sets a chain reaction of benefits in motion that starts to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Being Productive Through Tracking

<ul><li>You can use tracking apps, sheets or a journal to track your behaviour. </li><li>Decide which habits you want to track. </li><li>Decide on a timeframe for tracking. </li><li>Set a target for how many times you want to successfully follow each habit in your chosen timeframe. </li><li>Decide on which days you want to do which habits, or even schedule it in your calendar. </li><li>Mark successful and unsuccessful habit executions.</li></ul>

Effectively Tracking Habits

A success rate gives you a number that informs your performance analysis. You will shortly be able to see if you’ve improved or not. Calculate your ‘success rate’ to measure your progress over time. The formula is: Success Rate = (Completed Amount / Target Amount) * 100%&nbsp;

Success Rate

People tend to let themselves off the hook and take the easy way out much more often than they realize. Often, we hold on to an image or identity that we have of ourselves and let that image distort our reality.When you track yourself you have factual evidence of your slip ups; making you less likely to mindlessly justify them or pretend they didn’t happen, as often happens when you self-track.

Track Yourself And Stop Lying Yourself

As humans, we have this tendency to let ourselves off the hook and take the easy way out much more often than we fully realize. Oftentimes, we hold on to an image or identity that we have of ourselves and let that image distort our reality.

Why Tracking Your Habits Will Make You More Productive, Consistent And Successful

Early philosophies shaped the different ways people live and think about big questions that concern us all. Most don’t consciously articulate the philosophical assumptions they absorbed and are often unaware that they have any, but our assumptions are deeply embedded in our cultures and frame our thinking regardless.To the detriment of other philosophies and of a better understanding of the world, Western philosophy is presented as the universal philosophy, the ultimate inquiry into human understanding. That ignores the fact that only by synthesizing all perspectives can the whole be seen.

The Arrogance Of Western Philosophy

To understand others we need to avoid overestimating differences and commonalities. At the same time, differences in ways of thinking can be both deep and subtle. Assuming that we can see things from others’ points of view, we end up seeing them from a variation of our own.Our shared humanity and it’s problems mean that we can always learn from and identify with the thoughts and practices of others. To learn another’s philosophies is a chance to challenge the beliefs and ways of thinking we take for granted, which leads to a greater understanding of ourselves and our beliefs.&nbsp;

Learning About Ourselves Through Others

All cultures have a sense of past, present and future, and although the West sees time as a linear period, for much of human history this has been underpinned by a more fundamental sense of time as cyclical. A sense that the beginning and the end have always been the same.Linear time makes us wonder what came before the beginning and why it doesn’t have an end. While a circle lets us visualize going backwards or forwards forever, at no point coming up against an ultimate beginning or end.

Time And Culture

Thinking of time cyclically especially made sense in premodern societies, where innovations were few across generations and people lived similar lives to those of their ancestors going back many generations. Without change, progress was unimaginable and meaning could only be found in embracing the cycle of life and playing your part in it well.Linear progress is a kind of default way of thinking about history in the modern west and this risks blinding us to the ways in which gains can be lost, advances reversed. It also fosters a sense of the superiority of the present age over supposedly less “advanced” times. Finally, it occludes the extent to which history doesn’t repeat itself but does rhyme.

The Problem With Linear Time

More important than the distinction between linear or cyclical time is if time is separated from or connected to place. Thinking the latter is especially alien to the modern west, where a pursuit of objectivity systematically downplays the particular, the specifically located.If you’re not conceptually and experimentally separating those dimensions, then they would tend to flow together. Many indigenous people talk less of time or place independently, and more of located events. The when is not as important as how something is related to other events.

Time And Space

Time and space have become theoretical universalist abstractions in modern physics and written Western philosophical traditions, but in human culture they are concrete realities. Realities in which things don’t exist exclusively in space, nor in time, but stand in relation to everything else.The Maori and Indigenous Australians, have as a cultural principle that the a way of being is specific to the resources and needs of a time and place, and that one’s conduct, is informed by responsibility specific to that place. Rights, duties and values exist only in actual human cultures, and their shape and form will depend on the nature of those situations.

Connectedness And Culture

Western philosophy strives for a universality that glosses over differences of time and place. This refusal to accept any practice as a legitimate custom fostered an intolerance for many unjust traditions of the West itself, leading to their eventual abandonment. The universalist aspiration also legitimized some prejudices by confusing them with universal truths, like cultural or genetic superiority. Misused it becomes an insistence on the uniform that ignores the different needs of different cultures at different times and places, or reduces other ways of thinking to local aberrations. We should not be afraid to ground ourselves in our own traditions, but we should not be bound by them.&nbsp;

Western Philosophy And Universalism

The long read: By gaining greater knowledge of how others think, we can become less certain of the knowledge we think we have, which is always the first step to greater understanding. By Julian Baggini

philosophy

Philosophy

religionandspirituality

Religion & Spirituality

history

History

sciencefiction

Science Fiction

mindfulness

Mindfulness

About time: why western philosophy can only teach us so much

<ul><li>People who can always find something else to blame.</li><li>People who blame themselves for everything, even when they’ve had nothing to do with an unfortunate outcome. </li><li>People who blame fate or a higher power, especially when there’s no one else who could conceivably have caused the outcome.</li><li>People who excuse themselves for the same negative behavior that they blame others for doing.</li></ul>

Four Types Of People Who Blame

This isn’t just false modesty or fishing for reassurance; some people do believe that they cause every bad thing all or most of the time.Blaming yourself when something goes wrong might, relates to a general tendency to make internal attributions for failure in which you see yourself as inept, foolish, or irresponsible. That tendency might motivate you to attribute your successes to external factors, such as fate, chance or luck, as well.&nbsp;

Why People Blame Themselves

Theoretically anyone who intentionally practices an immoral act is culpable regardless of the consequences. But in most cases people sign up to what is called “moral luck”.Moral luck is the belief that you should hold someone to blame only if the action causes harms to others, not for their intent, and according to it, those whose actions bring harm are more culpable.

Blame And Consequence

<ol><li>Blame is a good defense mechanism and protects your self-esteem by avoiding awareness of your own failings.</li><li>Blame is a tool of attack that can hurt others, and a destructive conflict resolution method.</li><li>We’re bad at analyzing people's behavior, or even our own. The attributions we make get distorted by our illogical judgments and our lack of ability to judge blameworthiness of actions in terms of intent vs. Outcome.</li><li>Taking responsibility is harder than blaming others. It takes effort to accept your culpability, and changing so you don't do it again.</li><li>It’s easy to blame someone else even though you know you’re at fault, especially knowing it would be hard for them to prove otherwise.</li></ol>

Five Reasons We Blame

The more often you play the blame game, the more you lose. Learning to tell when you need to own up to your role in a bad situation will help you grow from your experiences, and ultimately help you achieve more fulfilling relationships.

Rising Above Blame

When something goes wrong in your life, is your first reaction to blame someone else? If so, you're engaging in the very common behavior of the blame game. Unfortunately, there are no winners in this game, so knowing the 5 reasons for why you do this will benefit your relationships.

5 Reasons We Play the Blame Game

Quit judging yourself according to other people's definitions of success. Decide the most important things in your life and, find a way to measure your progress for each.

1. Create Your Own Standards. 

Status and material possessions by themselves don’t mean much unless you are living the life you were meant to live. Listen to your heart and, aiming for inner fulfillment instead of symbols of success, find your calling in life.

2. Choose The Path Of Fulfillment. 

It's important to set goals, but once you know where you're heading, it's time to turn your focus to each step of the journey. If you commit yourself to doing today a little bit more than yesterday, you will get to success faster.

3. Focus On Improving. 

Decide what facets of your character you want to build upon while pursuing your goals. Creating success measures that are intrinsically rooted, rather than ego based, will help you create real change and sustain your motivation during challenging times.

4. Set Intrinsic Goals

Knowing that you have done your part to make the world a better place can bring the greatest sense of fulfillment of all. When you measure your success, ask yourself if you have made a difference to someone's life and if your efforts help improve your world.

5. Gift It Forward. 

Regardless of your goals or how you measure success, there will be roadblocks in your way and you’ll make mistakes. The difference between success and failure is if you learn from those mistakes and persevere in the face of setbacks, or if you give up on your dream.

6. Develop Resilience. 

Last year my good friend captured this beautiful candid moment with my then 4-month-old daughter Zoe. When I saw it for the first time, tears began streaming down my face. These weren't tears of sadness, rather tears of immense joy.

career

Career

motivationandinspiration

Motivation & Inspiration

business

Business

startup

Startups

books

Books

6 Steps to Creating Your Own Measures of Success

Being able to achieve a success metric is hard, but knowing which metric to achieve is even more important. Discover what you value and choose your own metrics for success, otherwise your environment will dictate it for you, which could be unfulfilling for you.Work towards your own idea of success and don’t let “FOMO” make you feel like a failure because you’re not meeting someone else’s metrics for success.

1. Discover Your Values

Social comparison bias is a cognitive bias that explains that our judgments are often influenced by comparisons to other people. A benchmark makes it easier to make a judgment, but it will not necessarily be a reasonable or more accurate judgment.Don’t measure yourself by what you’ve accomplished, but rather by what you should have accomplished with your abilities. True success is attained only through knowing you did your best to achieve your potential.&nbsp;

2. Compare Yourself Only To Yourself

It’s easy to measure financial success. You can see a number in your bank account and compare it to others’ bank accounts.But many important things for a satisfying life, like mental and physical health, relationships, freedom, and fulfillment are harder to measure. Nevertheless, you should incorporate some qualitative analysis into how you measure success.

3. Measure What’s Hard To Measure

Success usually takes many failures to achieve. So don’t use immediate tangible results to define success. Consider what you’ve learned and how it will help you succeed in the future.Opportunities that take time to deliver results can be great as many people crave immediate results. Don’t define yourself solely by your current circumstances. Consider who you are becoming.

4. Measure Results Over The Long-Term

It’s easy to measure proxies for success. Secondary metrics don’t always translate to business results and care must be taken so they don’t become a proxy for actually knowing and fulfilling your customers’ needs.Do what helps you achieve success and measure success in terms of the outcomes you’re trying to achieve.

5. Measure Outcomes, Not Proxies

Dynamic inconsistency is a situation where the best plan for the future is not optimal when that future period arrives. We and our environments change and so must our concept of success. Change how you measure success as you change as a person, else you risk wasting your efforts and even failure.

6. Learn And Iterate

Wealth, job title, and happiness are some of the most common measures of success. It's important to measure success the right way because it informs how you spend your time and effort. If you don't measure success in terms of what's truly important to you, you can't work towards getting there.

entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

How Do You Measure Success?

Work avoidance, procrastination, multi-tasking, and distractions all sidetrack essential work, add stress, and make any workload seem bigger than it is. To better handle those:<ol><li>Put two columns on a page.</li><li>On the left, record your three to five biggest, most important and performance-influencing priorities.</li><li>On the right, track daily the work you do and the amount of time each task takes. Then, track the percentage of time you spend on your priority tasks.</li><li>I just accordingly to give your priorities the right amount of attention and leave the less critical work for later to decrease feelings of overload.</li></ol>

1. Percent Of Time Spent On Your Top Three Priorities

Poor communication often happens because we think more about what we have to say, than how others need to hear it. Not tailoring your communication style to your audience, can make you come across in unintended ways, harm the delivery of your message and make people unnecessarily less receptive to it.You will communicate more effectively when you keep your audience’s needs in mind. Look at the different communication styles around you and try to reframe your messages so others will better receive them.

2. Tailor Your Communication To Your Listener

Not having strong work relationships, harms work and creates a negative environment. Don’t let the differences divide you in the workplace, overcome them by intentionally creating and nurturing relationships with those who aren’t like you.Give authentic compliments, hang with different people during lunches and coffee breaks, invite people to discuss and resolve issues. Taking action to nurture relationships strengthens your ties with the team and boosts your own self-confidence, as well.

3. Actions Taken To Nurture Work Relations

Last week, I conducted a workshop for a team of healthcare professionals as they kicked off a new fiscal year. Prior to the workshop, I had the attendees complete a survey about their work: what was going well and where they encountered challenges.

remotework

Remote Work

corporateculture

Corporate Culture

teamwork

Teamwork

humanresources

Human Resources

3 Way-Better Ways to Measure Your Success

Measuring the wrong thing is a common mistake in business that can lead to decisions that undermine performance. Businesses often rely on crude measurements and expert’s intuition to set courses instead of a proper statistical analysis. But doing so risks ignoring hidden data and being subject to cognitive biases and patterns that could harm decision making.

The Risks Of Nonstatistical Measurements

People’s deep confidence in their capabilities is often unrealistic. Without proper statistical analysis there’s no way to assert if a course is the best one, even if it seems to be.

The Overconfidence Bias 

The availability heuristic is a strategy we use to assess the cause or probability of events based on how readily similar examples come to mind. This can lead to overestimation of the importance recently encountered information, that is frequently repeated, or that is top of mind for other reasons.

They Availability Bias 

It's people's tendency to avoid risks that come with change, even when they stand to win, and that is in part responsible for the status quo. A business consequence of this bias is that when performance drivers invariably change executives often resist adapting to new metrics, breeding&nbsp;inefficiency.

The Status Quo Bias 

To find useful statistics you must determine their objective and what factors influence it. Reliable statistics reveal cause and effect and have two defining characteristics: They are persistent, showing similar outcomes for the same action; and they are predictive, showing a causal relationship between the action measured and the desired outcome.Most companies seek to maximize their return on investment over the long term and often rely on earnings per share (EPS) as a measurement statistic. But although EPS growth and value creation can coincide, it is also possible to increase it while destroying value when long-term economic value is sacrificed to deliver short-term earnings.&nbsp;

Considering Cause And Effect

Most companies don’t go much beyond financial performance measuring and haven’t done modeling to determine the causes of measured effects, nor have they considered a non-financial measure’s persistence and its predictive value.But research indicates that the companies that consider it earn returns on equity 1. 5 times greater than those of companies that don’t. Linking non-financial measures and value creation improves results.

The Power Of Non-financial Analysis

To choose metrics that allow you to understand, track, and manage the cause-and-effect relationships that influence performance, start with a blank slate and work through these four steps in sequence:<ol><li>Clearly define your governing objective to guide the allocation of capital. Creating economic value is a logical one for companies operating in a free market system, but not the only one.</li><li>Theorize on cause and effect to find presumed drivers of the objective. Analyze financial and non-financial metrics, then determine if, and to which degree, they influence the financial measures that deliver value. </li><li>Identify employees'&nbsp;activities that can help achieve the governing objective. The relationship between those and the objective is also persistent and predictive.</li><li>Regularly reevaluate the measures used to link employee activities with the governing objective as the drivers of value change over time.</li></ol>

Picking Statistics

About a dozen years ago, when I was working for a large financial services firm, one of the senior executives asked me to take on a project to better understand the company's profitability. I was in the equity division, which generated fees and commissions by catering to investment managers and sought to maximize revenues by providing high-quality research, responsive trading, and coveted initial public offerings.

The Ultimate Habit Tracker Guide: Template + Good Habits List

Why You Should Be Tracking Your Habits (and How to Do It Well)

7 Reasons to Start Tracking Your Habits | Wealthy Gorilla

Why Tracking Your Habits Will Make You More Productive, Consistent And Successful

About time: why western philosophy can only teach us so much

Paulo Roberto Silva Santos Junior