The 7 Habits of… Habits

So we’re almost through January already? Time is a tricky master, eh. If you still feel like you haven’t fully nailed that whole ‘new year, new you’ thing, don’t worry. I’m here to help.

Because of ‘Productivity Ninja’, I’m asked a lot about New Years’ Resolutions — the best way to think about them, how to make them stick, whether it’s all just a nonsense, whether I have some secret ‘hack’ for them… and so on. The focus of these discussions or articles is almost always on the resolutions themselves, rather than on the implementation. I think this misses the most important bit. How we design and implement new habits is what matters. So, with a couple of ideas from Productivity Ninja and a couple from Charles Duhig’s brilliant book, The Power of Habit, here’s a few ways to design the habits and behaviours you need to make the changes you want:

1. Question your expectations and motivations. There’s nothing more useless than working hard to do things that didn’t need doing, spending your whole life shaping yourself to be someone else’s version of you instead of your own, or spending the year stressed about 10 outcomes and failing when you could have focussed on the 4 that mattered most and hit all your goals.

2. Cues and Rewards. In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhig talks about using cues and rewards to make things stick. There are a few different ways to design these.

• Time-based cues, like making the your new run part of your morning routine, or setting an alarm for a meditation break at the same time each day.
• Location-based cues, like putting the water bottle on the desk, or moving the biscuits to another cupboard (aside: If I have biscuits and chocolate in my house, they’re being eaten, so basically I just concentrate on making sure I don’t bring them in the house — we cover this in How to Have The Energy if you’re interested).
• Emotional rewards, which can be positive emotions, like sales targets (yessss!) or learning to curb negative emotions, such as making sure you leave the room or have a break when you feel yourself getting angry with someone.
• Designing to the last event. We pick up our phone because it buzzed. We cook more vegetables because we ordered a veg box, and so on.
• If/then behaviour chains. IF I’m doing the school run, THEN I’ll put my running gear on and run afterwards. IF I’m scheduled for a Zoom meeting, THEN I’ll put 10 minutes in my diary either side of the meeting for preparation and follow-through, to reduce that ‘back to back’ feeling.

3. Double-Bubble. Focus on designing habits that can both eliminate what you don’t want AND create things you do want. Blocking out more time in my diary for quiet thinking and planning also means fewer hours are available to your team to book you into meetings. Reading instead of scrolling. Exercise on a Friday night instead of home drinking. That kind of thing. Most resolutions focus on adding, which on its own is unrealistic, because let’s face it, you were feeling busy before! So what’s going to create the space?

4. Keystone Habits. Charles Duhig writes about ‘keystone’ habits. If you make a keystone habit to have a weekly meeting about sales, then all week your team will be giving thought to being accountable in that meeting, and in the meeting you’ll have created the space to focus on sales ideas. If you start going to a yoga class with a friend, you’re motivated to go because you don’t want to let your friend down, even on the days when you’re feeling like you don’t want to show up for you. If you learn to cook with vegetables, chances are you’ll eat less meat.

5. Specificity. ‘Get fit’? What does that mean? What does it look like? How will you measure it? Being specific helps make it real enough to make the action part easy. This is actually just Productivity 101. For anything you want to create or change, you need two things:

• Big picture/strategy: A clear, desired, measurable outcome. A project, in other words.
• Down in the details/tactics: The Next Physical Action you need to take to get momentum.

6. Hello, Lizard Brain! If you’ve read ‘Productivity Ninja’, you’ll know that our amygdala (the ‘lizard brain’) is crazy, irrational and loves to sabotage our best laid plans. Stuff like coaching, counselling, mindfulness or walking in the woods can all help us unearth the irrational thoughts of our inner-lizard. Be aware of the stories you’re telling yourself, notice the tasks or projects you’re avoiding, and listen to your gut — if, as you look at your list of New Year’s Resolutions you’re hearing a little voice in your head saying “well, I’ll try my best, but…” then your lizard brain is already hard at work derailing you — and you’ll fail unless you pick some of the 6 things above and put proactive work in to make it all happen.

7. Make them mainstream. Often the trouble with New Years’ Resolutions is that we write them in the abstract. We deliberately go away from our desks to think of them, so they exist a little bit removed from real life. Whilst that can be a good strategy for clear-thinking or blue-sky visioning, it’s a terrible thing for the implementation. Maybe you wrote them down on a piece of paper, or in your journal, or in a Word Doc. That’s not where you live! So tell people who will support you to change. And the most important person to tell? Yourself. Make sure each thing you want to work on is a project, in your ‘second brain’ just as any other. That each of these projects has a well-defined ‘next physical action’, just like every other project should. It’s the foundation of all productivity: what gets measured gets managed. You become what you focus on, not what you dreamt about on December 30th.

You’ve got this. Have a great week.

Graham

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