Now it’s time to prepare for the habit change. Odds are you’ve tried to break this routine in the past. In all likelihood, you failed because you didn’t have a plan or relied too much on willpower.
Failure in the past doesn’t mean you’ll fail in the future. Usually it’s a direct result of not having a solid strategy for overcoming the habit. In other words, you didn’t follow that age-old adage:
“When you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”
So, before anything else, take time to understand what you’re giving up; then plan for the resistance you’ll experience along the way.
This goes back to the conversation about ego depletion. Remember—you have a limited amount of willpower every day. When it’s depleted, it’s hard to control your impulses.
An important part of this plan is to focus on changing one habit at a time. Think of the New Year’s resolutions many people make. They usually start the year with a lengthy list of habits they’d like change. Instead of focusing on one behavior, they try to fix their entire lives—all on the first of January.
People who make New Year’s resolutions typically fail because it’s almost impossible to change multiple habits at the same time. Most don’t have the willpower necessary to manage multiple new routines. As a result, one failure often snowballs into multiple failures when someone attempts to juggle several new routines at the same time. It’s not unusual for people to get so frustrated with one new routine that they give up on all their new routines.
My point?
Even if you want to change multiple areas of your life, it’s best to commit to one habit change at a time. That way, you can focus all your mental energy on making one change. In the next step, you’ll learn how to do this.
CASE STUDY
As I mentioned in the introduction, the best way to explain the steps in this book is to give you specific examples of how I implemented each step to eliminate a habit I once engaged in on a daily basis.
Like many people, I spend a lot of time on the Internet and immersed in the digital world in general. This is usually a positive habit because it helps me maintain a high level of productivity; however, I eventually developed the bad habit of spending too much time on my cellphone when I wasn’t in front of a computer. By scanning email, looking at business stats, reading pointless “click bait” articles or checking social media, I once wasted a lot of my time on my cellphone.
In May 2014, I read a great article about the idea of taking “digital sabbaticals.” The idea here is to dedicate a day every week (or month) to completely unplug from the digital world. While I frequently do this during the summertime, I decided to take this idea and create a “cellphone sabbatical habit” where I completely disconnect for most of the day.
Obviously, this is a vague outcome that’s almost impossible to track. But as you’ll see later in the book, I was able narrow down this concept and turn it into an actionable strategy. As a result, I no longer fiddle around my phone when I’m trying to relax.