A Guide to Hack Habit Building [Template Inside]
By: Viren Baid
Tags: Life, Habit Building, Life Hacking, Motivation, Productivity

Why I Failed At Building New Habits

1. Doing Too Many Things At The Same Time

There is a very small reserve of will power that humans have to build new habits, so whenever I’ve tried to workout, meditate, read and cook all at the same time I’ve never really gone past the first week successfully.

2. No Accountability

We are always able to consistently work on our KPI’s at work, day in and day out but not our personal goals. Why? Accountability. In the case of personal goals, the only person we’re letting down is ourselves, which we can generally live with, in the short term.

3. Aggressive/No Targets

Too often I’ve tried to pick up new habits with very aggressive targets. Example: I’m going to write for 30 mins every day. Obviously, that doesn’t work.

On the flip side, going to the gym two consecutive days can sometimes leave me feeling that I’ve been working out consistently even without going for the rest of the week.

So what changed now?

My Framework For Habit Building

Note: This worked for me. Don’t consume on face value. Feel free to adopt, iterate and make it your own.

Here is what I did.

1. I Wanted To Do Too Many Things. Introducing, Habit Categories!

I know I mentioned that you should not do too many things at the same time, however, I can’t help it. I am attracted to too many things at the same time. I want to learn to play the guitar, workout, meditate, do yoga, write articles and so on.

So I bucketed all these habits into 5 categories: Mental Health, Physical Health, Learn — Job-Related, Learn — Non-Job Related and Content Creation.

Each of these categories had tasks defined under them.

Example:

Mental Health includes 15 mins of meditation or 15 mins of journaling. Now on a given day, I can pick between either of these habits (whichever I’m in the mood for) to complete my Mental Health tasks for the day.

The hypothesis is that in the larger time frame if I did either of them every day I would end up creating a habit around both meditation and journaling.

2. Accountability

This one is easy. Once you have a target set up for each of your habit categories (I’ll show you how a little later), all you need to do is give a friend some money, which should be enough in value to keep you motivated.

The rules are simple: You don’t hit your habit goals, you don’t get the money back.

3. Finally, The Tracker & Targets (Template Links At The End)

This is probably a byproduct of my profession but, as a product manager, I’m wired to look at my data on a sheet rather than an app.

I created a simple Google Form which I would fill whenever I accomplished a task in any of the habit categories I had created. This is what the form looks like.

Of course, this data was being populated on a Google Sheet in the background and I used it to make a monthly target for myself.

To begin with, I assigned a conservative weekly target on each category and made a projection for the month based on the current numbers to understand if I was on track to achieve my targets or not.

This helped me understand which category of habit building I had been neglecting and needed to work on.

In the end

Overall, I’ve been able to do multiple things in the same month without stressing myself on having to do the same thing, again and again, every day.

Additionally, over time I’ve been able to comfortably move forward with all the habits that I wanted to build.

Below are the links to Google Form and Sheet that you can use to duplicate and create your own version.

Links

Sample Google Form: Click Here

Tracking Sheet: Click Here

How are you hacking habit-building? Would love to hear.

Twitter: virenbaid