PRINCIPLE 5, Create New Habits, is the secret to making lasting changes that will actually improve your life. There is a series of habit changes recommended in every chapter of this book, but if you attempt to master all of them at once, you’ll be overwhelmed and your focus will be spread out too thin. And in a matter of weeks, the changes you attempt will be for naught.
Principle 5: Create new habits to make long-lasting improvements.
Instead, the only way you’ll form long-lasting habits is by applying the Power of Less: Focus on one habit at a time, one month at a time, so that you’ll be able to focus all your energy on creating that one habit.
The tool that you’ll use to form each habit is an extremely powerful one: the Power of Less Challenge, a thirty-day challenge that has proven very effective in forming habits for thousands of readers of my Zen Habits blog.
Here’s how it works:
1. Select one habit for the Challenge. Only one habit per month. You can choose any habit—whatever you think will have the biggest impact on your life.
2. Write down your plan. You will need to specifically state what your goal will be each day, when you’ll do it, what your “trigger” will be (the event that will immediately precede the habit that’s already a part of your routine—such as exercising right after you brush your teeth), and who you will report to (see below).
3. Post your goal publicly. Tell as many people as possible that you are trying to form your new habit. I suggest an online forum, but you could e-mail it to coworkers and family and friends or otherwise get the word out to a large group.
4. Report on your progress daily. Each day, tell the same group of people whether or not you succeeded at your goal.
5. Celebrate your new habit! After thirty days, you will have a new habit. You will still need to make sure you do the habit each day, but it’ll be fairly well entrenched if you were consistent all month.
WHY IT WORKS
This thirty-day Challenge is one of the best ways to form a habit, and it has worked repeatedly for several reasons:
- Commitment. Just the act of committing to the Challenge, and setting a measurable goal, and declaring it to a bunch of others, is a huge step toward making the habit change a success.
- Accountability. The daily check-in makes you want to do your daily habit, so you can report your success to others. There is a very positive feeling (reward) you get when you report that you did your habit today.
- Encouragement. There is also value in reporting your struggles. For example, during one challenge, when I got sick for a few days, I asked my group to motivate me. They were extremely encouraging, and I got back into my habit.
- Inspiration. When you see everyone else doing so great, it’s inspiring. If they can do it, so can you! And there are always some really inspiring people in each group of challengers.
Now, you don’t need to join the Monthly Challenge on the Zen Habits forums to achieve a positive habit change, but I highly recommend you find a group—online or off—to help you stick to your habit change. There are plenty of online forums and community groups to help with these kinds of things—the power of a group can help leverage your power to change a habit.
THE RULES
There are only a few rules you need to follow to make this Challenge a success. If you follow these rules, it would be hard for you not to form a new habit by the end of the thirty days.
- Do only one habit at a time. Do not break this rule, because I assure you that if you do multiple habits at once, you will be much less likely to succeed. Trust me—I’ve tried both ways many times, and in my experience there is a 100 percent rate of failure for forming multiple habits at once, and a 50 to 80 percent rate of success if you do just one habit at a time—depending on whether you follow the rest of these rules.
- Choose an easy goal. Don’t decide to do something really hard, at least for now. Later, when you’re good at habit changes, you can choose something harder. But for now, do something you know you can do every day. In fact, choose something easier than you think you can do every day. If you think you can exercise for thirty minutes a day, choose ten minutes—making it super easy is one of the best ways to ensure you’ll succeed.
- Choose something measurable. You should be able to say, definitively, whether you were successful or not today. If you choose exercise, set a number of minutes or something similar (twenty minutes of exercise daily, for example). Whatever your goal, have a measurement.
- Be consistent. You want to do your habit change at the same time every day, if possible. If you’re going to exercise, do it at 7 a.m. (or 6 p.m.) every day, for example. This makes it more likely to become a habit.
- Report daily. You could check in every two or three days, but you’ll be more likely to succeed if you report daily. This has been proven over and over again in the Challenges.
- Keep a positive attitude! Expect setbacks now and then, but just note them and move on. No embarrassment in this challenge.
12 KEY HABITS TO START WITH
You can choose any habits in this book that you think will help you most, at work and in the rest of your life. But if I had to recommend twelve habits to start with (one each month for a year), these are the twelve I think could make the most difference in the lives of the average person (more on each habit in later chapters):
- Set your 3 MITs (Most Important Tasks) each morning.
- Single-task. When you work on a task, don’t switch to other tasks.
- Process your in-box to empty.
- Check e-mail just twice a day.
- Exercise five to ten minutes a day.
- Work while disconnected, with no distractions.
- Follow a morning routine.
- Eat more fruits and veggies every day.
- Keep your desk decluttered.
- Say no to commitments and requests that aren’t on your Short List (see Chapter 13, Simple Commitments).
- Declutter your house for fifteen minutes a day.
- Stick to a five-sentence limit for e-mails.