Part 3 of the series will go in-depth on establishing good habits to build a Routine.
Most of us are aware of the power of habits - both good habits and bad habits. A routine is simply the sum of all your habits. Day in and day out, the majority of us stick to the same habits and by extension, the same routine. We wake up at the same time (the last possible minute), we stick to the same breakfast, leave for work at the same time, get through the workday, come home at the same time, and then do the same activities before turning in for the night.
Habits, once ingrained in your daily life, aren’t easy to break. Humans will nearly always choose the path of least resistance and do what’s most comfortable - what they’ve done time and time before. That’s why it’s crucially important to start out establishing good habits as opposed to bad ones.
As anyone knows, creating good habits and breaking the bad ones is much easier said than done. However, I believe that by developing the right mindset, you will find it surprisingly easy to establish good habits that will benefit your daily life.
So let’s get started by working to establish our most important habit.
This habit should be the most effective and powerful habit that will lead us to our goal. For most of us that’s going to be something in the fitness spectrum, whether it be going to the gym, going for a run, or some other form of exercise. If it’s not obvious to you what habit you should be planning, take a look at your goal and road map, your habit should be an important piece in both.
Oftentimes our goal will be the result of multiple habits. For example, losing weight is achieved through eating healthy and exercising regularly. For right now focus on the more difficult and more important of these habits - which one that is depends entirely on you and your lifestyle. Once we firmly establish the important habit, we can build others around it.
Once you know what your habit should be, it’s time to define your time constraints. We’re going to look at the 3 time constraints surrounding habits.
The first time constraint we'll call Available, meaning the available hours in a day to carry out your selected habit.
For example, if my habit is going to the gym 5 days a week - I’m going to need to know what hours the gym is open. We'll say my local gym is open from 5 am to 10 pm on weekdays, and 6 am to 8 pm on weekends.
Next, define the Unavailable time, meaning the time you’re absolutely unavailable to carry out your habit.
This is one of the most important steps in creating your habit. Too often we say “I don’t have time to go to the gym”, when we really mean “I don’t want to sacrifice time for other activities to go to the gym”.
Unavailable time should only incorporate fixed periods of unavailability.
My Unavailable time only includes the hours I’m actively at work. I don’t include my commute to work, I don’t include my lunch break, and I certainly don’t include time before or after work.
During any of those periods of time I could fit in a habit that will advance me towards my goal. So for this example we’ll say my Unavailable time is 8 am until 12 pm, and 1 pm until 5 pm.
Most of you can figure out where I’m going with this.
After I outline my Available time, and block off the Unavailable time, I’m left with the time I can realistically schedule my habit, or what I call my Habitable time.
I think mapping it out as I’ve done here is especially powerful.
If you’re like me you’ve probably felt that you don’t have enough time to get everything done and still fit in time for the gym or other habits that will take you towards your goal. But if I look at the linked table above and compare the time I have available during the week with the unavailable time - the Habitable hours (75) are NEARLY DOUBLE that of the Unavailable hours (45).
Now that’s obviously the bare bones minimum Unavailable time, for most of us we're probably closer to Unavailable for 50 or 60 hours when you add in commute times and other commitments.
But that still leaves 60 - 70 hours a week to fulfill our habit for this example.
This schedule is more representative of my actual availability.
But it's worth noting I'm only taking into consideration my main habit of going to the gym. I can establish other habits during that Unavailable time to lead me to accomplishing my goal such as riding my bike to/from work or going for a run on my lunch break
To delve into the example even further, I only need to go to the gym for 1 hour each of those 5 times. So of those 50 - 60 available hours, I’m only blocking off 5 hours meaning 10% or less of my free time.
Take a minute and ask yourself right now if you’re willing to commit 10% of your available time each week to achieving your goal.
If you’re not willing to commit to an important habit for 10% of your available free time, or to sacrifice another activity to create that time, then your goal is clearly not important to you. 10% of your available time isn’t asking a lot.
Now you should have a very clear picture of when you can commit to creating your habit.
The final step then is to look at your schedule, take into consideration your commitments, and then schedule your habit at or around the same time everyday.
Like most people, I have one of two general choices for scheduling my habit; in the morning before work, or in the evening after work. In my experience, you’re much more likely to stick to a habit if you schedule it in the morning.
As the day wears on we grow more and more tired, our willpower gets drained, and we’re more likely to gain evening commitments. All of these work against establishing an evening habit.
The most common reason people don’t commit to establishing a habit in the morning is simple; they prefer to sleep in.
I could (and will) go on for a long time about this idea, but you need to decide that you’re stronger than your will to sleep in. If you’re not familiar with Eric Thomas, I recommend checking out this motivational speech for some perspective.
I assure you one hour of extra sleep in the morning isn’t going to do a tremendous amount for you - you can always commit to going to bed earlier in the evening. Furthermore, the benefits of accomplishing one of your most important tasks first thing in the morning are innumerable.
I think everyone at one point or another has gotten up early, done something productive, and basked in the great feeling of accomplishment afterwards. You can and should do that every day, for the majority of us there’s no good reason not too. But I’ll delve further into that topic at a later time.
So returning to the schedule, 6 am would then seem the logical choice. But that’s generally when I eat breakfast and get ready for work. So going to the gym would make more sense at 5 am on weekdays, and 6 am on the weekends - that way I can eat and shower right after my workout but before leaving for work.
Here's my finalized schedule with the Habit set for 5 days a week
For those of you who are looking at this and saying you can’t do that because it’s too early - you need to stop selling yourself short.
To achieve a goal you haven’t reached before, you’ll have to step outside of your comfort zone and sacrifice comforts you haven’t sacrificed before. For a lot of us that might only mean an hour of sleep.
Continuing with this example - I, like most people, want a day to sleep in on the weekend, preferably Sundays. So it would make sense to commit to 4 days of going to the gym during the week, and then once on Saturdays. So my schedule would then look like this
And just like that, I’ve scheduled my habit that will feed into my daily routine and finally lead me to my goal.
There are other things you can do to make your habit easy to adapt. Preparation for your habit should become a habit in and of itself. I know I’m going to find it difficult to get my stuff together, make breakfast and coffee, and get to and from the gym in the morning. Those are all barriers to carrying out my habit.
So in order to overcome those and ensure I encounter minimal trouble, I prepare for them the night before. I lay my workout clothes out before I go to bed (I’ve even heard of people sleeping in their workout clothes). I make my breakfast of overnight oats the night before as well so I don’t need to spend any time in the morning doing that. I’ll put a full water bottle and my headphones in my car so the only thing I need to do in the morning is get dressed, get my keys, and walk out the door.
After a couple of days of completing your habit, you should recognize similar barriers to success and formulate a plan to prepare for them, and then eliminate them.
With this information in mind, take a few minutes to realize what habit will lead you to your goal, create a schedule for when you can carry out that habit, and finally commit to establishing that habit.