When we think about incorporating new habits, we tend to associate it with hard work, difficulty, and exhaustion. Sometimes even with the frustration of having tried so many times without results.
But building new habits doesn’t have to be this way. Having good and healthy habits for our life brings us closer to our goal, so separating it from the negative feelings is crucial.
You probably don’t believe me at all because you’ve already tried. You tried regular advice such as meditating, visualizing your goal, attracting it with positive thoughts and good faith, and forcing yourself to do things.
None of that worked for you, right?
Well, while meditation, positive thinking, and visualization are proven ways to get closer to your goals, it takes more than that.
There are certain actions and methods to incorporate habits that I like to call golden rules, and thanks to applying them to my daily life over and over again, I:
- I went from being extremely unable to wake up to the alarm and snoozing eternally, to getting up at 5.30 every morning (because that’s the time I want to wake up).
- From not exercising at all during the pandemic to taking a walk every day and exercising twice a week.
- From not achieving anything at the end of the day to building and running two blogs, getting freelance clients, and volunteering in two organizations.
And it wasn’t hard. The hardest part of the process was when I was trying all sorts of stuff that didn’t work and I got frustrated.
But once I put into practice these 4 golden rules it was simple, and I started seeing results fast. And you can, too.
So keep reading if you want to learn how to apply them to bring healthy habits into your daily life without much effort, and without dying in the attempt.
How to Incorporate a New Habit, Golden Rule #1: The Two-Minute Rule
The two-minute rule is extremely successful at incorporating new habits because it saves you time and helps you organize your tasks.
It’s also the way to stop procrastinating and get things done smoothly, instead of endlessly fighting with yourself.
The two-minute rule is deeply addressed in the GTD Methodology. Read on to learn how you can use it to incorporate new habits and stop procrastinating.
GTD Methodology: Getting Things Done
GTD or Getting Things Done methodology was developed by Management Consultant and Productivity Instructor David Allen.
It’s a methodology for stress-free performance, based on one principle:
“Only when our minds are clear and our thoughts are organized can we achieve effective results and unleash our creative potential.”
It contains a series of actionable steps that take you from confusion, overwhelm, and anxiety to clarity and peace, that help you be effective and achieve your goals.
The human mind is not made for remembering and holding thoughts, so the theory Allen follows consists of putting it into a trusted external system that does that for people.
For that, there are five crucial steps, that Allen calls Stages of mastering workflow:
1. Collect: this is the stage where you collect everything that draws your attention in your daily life. This is like “cleaning up” your mind to make space and understand what’s there. Because what tends to lead to chaos is the fact that there are usually many things in your mind, that you don’t even know are there. And they suddenly pop up when you’re carrying out another task. What will you collect? “All the things you consider incomplete in your world.”
2. Process: this stage is all about understanding what all those collected things are, and what they mean to you to then put them where they belong. In this phase, you’ll focus on what is that you’ve collected and what you need to do about that (if you need to do anything at all).
3. Organize: here is where you put everything where it needs to go. If you’re tidying up your room, for example, first you see what’s there, secondly, you decide whether you keep things, give them to someone else, or throw them away, and then you put everything where it needs to go. Well, this is the stage where you put everything where it needs to go. Your emails, thoughts, ideas, etc.
4. Review: once you’re done with the previous stages, you’ll have built a system that you’ll need to go through periodically to make sure you do everything you need to do when you need to do it. This is the review stage. So if you had a list of ideas, or a calendar, or a to-do list, this is the stage where you go through them before you get to the action.
5. Do: simply take action. Thanks to the previous steps, the only thing that remains is to do.
The two-minute rule
Did it ever happen to you, that you’re working on something and there’s an interruption? Or that you’re checking your email and identify three or four tasks that you should do for an issue to move forward.
Well, if it takes 2 minutes or less, do it! You’ll be surprised about how this little change in your behavior and task organization improves your productivity and increases your free time.
The two-minute rule belongs to the “process” stage of the GTD methodology and is part of a three-option step: Do it, Delegate it, Defer it.
According to this step, if the action takes 2 minutes or less, you need to do it now.
By doing that, you save lots of time that otherwise, you’d waste by taking care of these small accumulated tasks.
Another way to look at this rule is that you can break habits you want to incorporate or heavy tasks that you need to take care of, into small 2 minutes actions.
So going out for a daily walk becomes putting your shoes on.
Reading thirty minutes becomes reading one page, and so.
This is how I stopped procrastinating. By breaking bit assignments and daily life tasks into small actions that take less than two minutes, I started doing more, in less time.
It simply didn’t seem so overwhelming.
This may sound hard to believe, but listen to me and do it. Then let me know how it went.
Great aspects of the 2-minute rule:
- It’s not about performance, but incorporating the habit of showing up and gain consistency at doing something.
- It shows the importance of taking small steps for success.
- It takes big, heavy, and sometimes boring tasks, and turns them into actually doable small actions that take nothing and help you get going.
- It shows how things happen when we, humans, take action.
So if you want to stop procrastinating and get things done, try the 2-minute rule. You won’t regret it.
Stick to a Morning Routine: Golden Rule #2 for Building New Habits
“If you win the morning, you win the day”
Tim Ferriss (Entrepreneur, author, podcaster and more).
It’s not that important to talk about time management as it is to talk about energy management.
Energy above time. This mindset switch will bring you positive changes.
Focusing on time makes you feel overwhelmed because you can’t change how fast time goes by, but you can change how you feel and make something about it.
Having a morning routine is perfect for leveraging your energy at the most, because:
- It helps you start your day with a victory: If you complete a set of tasks that are positive and take you a step closer to your goals, you’ll start your day with a feeling of accomplishment that will motivate you for the rest of the day.
- It’s the perfect time to locate those activities that you never have time to do, such as reading, exercising, etc.
- It gives you enough time to connect with yourself, your goals, and your mission before you start your day and interact with others.
Tips for designing an effective and energizing morning routine
There’s no correct formula or set of activities for a morning routine. It needs to work for you. The more energizing and fulfilling your morning routine is, the better you start your day.
The first important thing to do is to wake up every day at the same time. Consistency sends a message to the brain and after doing so for some time it becomes a habit.
It’s not about imitating others and waking up early. It’s about finding a time that helps you be more productive and achieve your goals more effectively.
Again, there’s no specific correct time. For me, it’s 5.30 because I’m a morning person so I need to leverage my morning as much as I can. Also, if I wake up late, I feel like everyone already started their day, and it gives me a feeling of being “behind”.
The second important thing is to identify which things can make your day better if you do them as soon as you wake up as part of a morning ritual.
For me, this is having a tasty and nutritive breakfast (that helps me go through the entire morning) while I read a spiritual book for an hour, praying, and then going for a 30-minute walk while listening to an educational podcast.
Which are those activities, for you? Is it exercising? Is it writing, reading, listening to a podcast? Think about what you’d like to do, the ideal way to start your day, and try to build a routine that includes those activities.
Then, think about what time you’d need to wake up in order to carry them on.
Having a morning routine prepares you for your day and helps you be more connected with what you want in life and who you want to be.
Tips for getting up every day
Did you ever experience that horrible feeling of frustration when you try to get up at a certain time, but instead you snooze the alarm 10 times and you end up waking up late?
It’s horrible, and it makes you start your day with a feeling of underachievement and frustration.
If you’re anything like me, you could sleep for ten hours even when you’re ok with 8. If you’re not, good for you! It’s awful.
So, as waking up without an alarm is not an option for me, at least during weekdays, I need to be strict about this.
When the alarm goes off, I have 2 options:
- Snoozing
- Getting up as soon as it starts ringing.
I use the last one and it proved to work for me.
Getting up has always been tremendously hard for me. So I started using a simple trick that you may have heard of: putting my cellphone (which I use to wake up) far from the bed.
I had tried it before and without results, because it would eventually stop ringing. But the one that I have right now doesn’t stop unless you turn it off.
You may say that you don’t hear the sound because you have deep sleep. Put a sound that you can hear, there’s no such noise in the world that won’t wake you up at some point.
But let me give you a piece of advice: DON’T SNOOZE! According to Reena Mehra, sleep Disorder Research Director at Cleveland Clinic, snoozing the alarm is bad for our health.
When we sleep, we go through different stages. One of them is REM sleep, which is restorative sleep.
When the alarm sounds, we’re generally in this phase. If we snooze instead of getting up, we interrupt REM sleep and we don’t get to rest between alarms at all.
This has a clear negative effect. That’s why you feel exhausted when you get up every morning after snoozing the alarm.
So, get up as soon as the alarm rings and start your day. It’s hard, but that horrible feeling will last for a moment, while the frustration of not getting up at all can last all day.
Golden Rule #3 for New Habits: Build a System
It’s all about the system. If you want to make sure something works, having a good system around it will do.
According to Oxford Languages, a system is “a set of things working together as parts of a mechanism or an interconnecting network; a complex whole,” and “a set of principles or procedures according to which something is done; an organized scheme or method.”
Let’s say you want your meals to be healthier because right now you have horrible eating habits.
You skip meals, eat a lot of junk food, and order a lot instead of cooking. But you want to improve.
What’s your problem right now?
You identify that at the office you don’t always find the time to have a proper lunch, so you end up taking a biscuit from the snacks machine.
And when you get home, there aren’t usually prepared meals in the fridge, so you call for delivery because you’re pretty tired to cook and you don’t have the ingredients, anyway.
Maybe if you always had something already cooked in your fridge, and if you always took lunch to the office, the problem would be solved.
For this, you need to establish a frequency for going to the supermarket, and a standard list of food to buy.
So you set up a time and day to buy food and you make sure there’s always a cooked meal in your fridge.
That’s it! By changing two behaviors of your daily life, you’re going to eat healthier and feel better, which will probably impact your daily work, your relationship with yourself and others, etc.
But it’s not just about going to the supermarket but also building a schedule that specifies when you’ll do it every week and what you’ll buy.
Being effective and organized requires a set of predefined actions and elements that occur in a certain way and time.
By building a system, you “make room” in your brain so you can focus on solving current tasks instead of having to remember everything and think about it all the time.
If you want to incorporate new habits, build an effective system
Building effective systems for your daily life is not a million-hour job. It’s just about finding the right set of tools and putting everything where it needs to go.
Having a morning routine, for example, is part of a system.
The two-minute rule, it’s also about creating a system so you don’t overcharge your brain by assigning it functions that it’s not designed to do (and believe me, it’s pretty bad at them).
The brain is not made to remember stuff. In his book Getting Things Done, Allen compares our minds with the RAM of electronic devices.
We can only remember two to three things at once.
This means that the things that we are worrying about create an overload and make us unable to focus on what we need to be doing at a certain moment.
So if you want to achieve your goals, you need to create systems around your life that take care of the things “for you.”
A set of elements and tasks performed a certain way at a specific time, work together as a system that guarantees effective results.
How to incorporate habits with effective systems
Ok, you may tell me that you already tried all this and failed.
The problem is that we often confuse making a big effort and being busy with achieving results.
And that’s related to the work culture, where sometimes people seem to get paid to spend 9 hours (and even more) at the office.
It’s not true that if you work hard, you’ll eventually get what you want. You need to work well and take the right steps.
The first big step is to start. But the second is to make the right move.
How?
In his book The 4-hour Work Week, Tim Ferriss mentions 2 principles, that combined, achieve effectiveness:
1. The Pareto law
The Pareto law states that 20% of causes determine 80% of the consequences.
Or, applied to this, 20% of your effort and time generate 80% of the results.
Do you often feel that 80% of your efforts and time invested are producing 20% of the results (or even less)?
I know for me it was that way. I was sitting all day in front of the computer. I was too busy to take care of my home, plants, and even my health.
I had to produce. And guess what. At the end of the day, I was nowhere near my end goal of making a living out of my writing.
I wasn’t getting any recurrent clients, I wasn’t making a full income. But I was working full-time.
What was the problem then? I didn’t have a system. I didn’t have a process to follow.
All I did was sit at the computer every day and follow my instinct. And even when some strategies did work, it was all random, and that’s why I didn’t have a steady workflow.
So by following the Pareto law, you can make sure that you focus on those tasks among the 20% that produce 80% of the results.
What do you have to do to achieve x goal? Draft it on a journal. Brainstorm. Try, and if it works, repeat.
4. Parkinson’s law.
According to Parkinson’s law, “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
And I totally agree. Did it ever happen to you, that it takes you three weeks to write a paper that you could write in an hour, just because the deadline’s in three weeks?
It happens to me very often with daily tasks.
So, by assigning the tasks short deadlines and committing to them, you’ll be able to use time more efficiently.
Tim Ferriss’s advice is to combine both principles.
Use Pareto to work only on necessary stuff, and use Parkinson to do the work in a shorter period of time.
Keep this in mind for building your systems, and you’ll be able to incorporate new, great habits fast and well.
The Power of Rituals: How to Create Effective Systems to Build New Habits
So I already told you how I went from procrastinating all the time without achieving neither big nor small tasks to getting things done with the 2-minute rule.
I also talked about how I went from waking up late and feeling frustrated to getting up at 5.30 every morning and being productive all day by designing a powerful morning routine.
Now, how did I build effective systems to incorporate more habits? By having rituals.
A ritual is a set of habits that by being chained make the others happen. The morning routine is an example of a ritual.
I wake up and make breakfast. I read while I eat, and then I pray, put my sneakers on and go for a walk while listening to an educational podcast.
If I woke up late, I’d probably eat something fast without reading, I wouldn’t pray and I wouldn’t go for a walk, for sure. And the educational podcast wouldn’t happen, either.
But being chained, one habit makes the others happen.
Another system example is the meals’ story that I stated above. To solve a bad eating problem, you establish a system by which you have a specific shopping day, and maybe even specific hours for cooking.
If you always do it at the same time, there’s no chance you don’t have prepared meals in the fridge, so you’ll always have something to eat and will avoid skipping meals or eating junk or processed food instead.
Build powerful systems that work for you and your routines, and stick to them. You’ll have incorporated new habits without even realizing it.
Keep Track: Golden Rule #4
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”
Peter Drucker
A few weeks ago I was looking at my habit tracker and I saw that I hadn’t accomplished my exercise goals for three weeks in a row.
When I started asking myself why, it took one fast check to other habits to realize where the problem was.
I wasn’t sleeping much. Again, for the past three weeks, I’d only slept 7 hours or more during weekends.
On the other days of the week, my average sleep time was 5 to 6 hours. And why was that? Again, another fast check was enough to learn that I wasn’t going to bed at the time I was supposed to, to achieve a 7-hour sleep.
This fast check through my habit tracker, helped me see that I wasn’t exercising because I was tired and that I was tired because I was going to bed late, and even that I was going to bed late because I wasn’t planning my meals, so I was having dinner later than usual.
All this was thanks to having a habit tracker.
Every day I take five minutes (because really, that’s all that it takes) to track the most important habits for me. The ones that I want to conquer and the ones that I’ve already incorporated into my life.
This is extremely valuable information to detect problems.
If I’m arguing a lot or feel frustrated during a significant amount of days, I take a look at my habit tracker. And I always draw interesting and useful conclusions from it.
This is the same for your job or your business. If you’re not getting enough revenue, you can look at different stats or data of your business and you’ll soon know what’s going on.
Other things I track are: my reading time, podcast hours, leisure time, how many times I see family and friends, etc.
This helps me understand my moods, and keeps me updated about things like “ok, I should call x person because it has been a while since we talked.”
And it happens the same with money.
If you don’t know where your money goes, there’s no way you can understand how much you need to earn, or if you’ll be able to take a vacation at the end of the year.
Having information turns chaos into clarity. Clarity gives you the freedom to decide about your next actions and increases your chances to succeed.
To Sum Up
Habits are actions sustained in time. There’s no way to do something every day if your life’s not organized and you don’t have clarity and precise information to decide on your actions.
Sometimes we’re told that building habits, requires painful effort, discipline, deprivation, and lots of time.
But the truth is that if you: divide the heavy and big tasks into 2-minute small actions, establish a morning routine that you like to start your day fresh, motivated, and energized, build systems around your goals and track your actions, this will happen smoothly.
By following what I like to call The 4 Golden Rules, I succeeded at incorporating new habits that made me a better person and took me closer to where I want to be in life.
Yes, thanks to these golden rules I went:
- From waking up late and feeling frustrated, to waking up at 5.30 every day
- From not exercising at all, to taking a 30-minute walk every day and exercising twice a week.
- From not achieving a single working goal during the day to being productive, having clients, and building two blogs.
But I also feel better, I’m healthier, I have better relationships and I feel happier.
Because by using these four golden rules to incorporate new, healthy habits into my life, I accidentally incorporated many more.
And you can, too. Try this!
Have you heard about these 4 Golden Rules? Do you have yours?
Tell me in the comments 🙂
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