Some Thoughts on How to Acquire Good Habits

Summary: Every entrepreneur has this daily struggle as of flexible working hours and being self employed, many times still working from home. In the following post I share some of the things I realized about this process of acquiring a habit. 

Unfortunately habits were never my strong side, and as a person that always trying to do things as efficiently as possible it’s really tough. With a flexible working time, where work  is due ALWAYS and NEVER at the same time its’ even harder.

I decided I want to put an end to some of my bad habits and put borders to my life where I felt it’s right and would serve my purpose of being efficient and therefore happier. As example, I love waking up early, 5:00 is my goal. How many times did that happen in the last few years? ZERO!

How many of you have the same feeling? You know getting up early would make you focused, more efficient and happier, but you don’t succeed in doing this ( I have a friend who wake up at that hour naturally, I’m totally jealous of him!). I always wake up late, and I’m talking about much later….

once every year I have an attempt and decide that I’ll try waking up earlier. So, there are a couple of days I try different things on each attempt.

Sometimes it’s with a short snooze of just one minute (very annoying!), so it would go off 37 times before I’m really out of bed or I’d just turn the alarm off and keep sleeping. Sometimes, it’s a “no snooze attempt” saying: “If I know there is a snooze afterwards I just keep sleeping. So no more snooze. get up of bed at 1st attempt.”  Guess how this works…

I can’t say I found the magic solution at all!

But there are some things I realized that If I won’t have discipline about, it won’t work, or at least would interfere with this goal.

1. Go to sleep early – I do try to wake up before 6:30 AM, my ultimate goal is waking up by 5 AM and I’m not there yet.  But in order to do that, I know I should go to sleep early, which would help me achieve that. It’s harder (though not impossible) to wake up at 6:30 AM  (6:17 AM alarm goes off) if I went to sleep at 12:30 AM.

Also, my inner voice says it’s okay to get up later, as I went to sleep late. Problem is that by doing so after waking up late, I’m angry at myself, as things turned out this way. So, yes, you need discipline to go to sleep at a reasonable hour, and fall asleep by 11PM.

2. no coffee at evening time – In previous years, I thought I didn’t have this problem and could drink caffeine whenever I wanted and fall asleep. So, I can’t…

I don’t have a specific time of the day I know I shouldn’t drink coffee afterwards, but I know it influences me.  My wife BTW is a complete opposite. She drinks coffee right before heading to sleep. talk about unfairness…

3. let go – sometime it’s okay to wake up late – There are days when you wake up late and this is how it should have been. For me, deep inside I already know it the night before. I know I”ll wake up late, and then the struggle is just affirming this in the morning after saying it was okay for this to happen.

4. Use external help – External help is something that most of us need, a person can’t pull himself out of the mud by pulling his own hair. This is why we have trainers , coaches, advisers  consultants and…yes…self help books. Every person is looking for the best external help for him and it’s individual to each person.

I started to use Lift app as my external help. Lift had a list of pre chosen good habits. Then people can join that group for working on that good habit, so each day you do that good habit you check in and other people can see that either comment or encourage you (‘prop’). Can’t say it’s working flawlessly for me, there are days I don’t do any of my habits and there are other days I do them all.

 

These are my habits I’m trying to follow each day ( I even checked in today the “write for 30 minutes”, for writing this post).

Personally for me, listing them on a difficulty level order would be (from most to least difficult):

1. Write for 30 minutes ( You would think someone who have a blog can do it much easier….)

2. Waking up by 6:30AM

3. Meditate

4. Set priorities for the day.

 

It’s a daily struggle for me, I want to succeed in, and I always wonder when I would acquire this as a habit, so it would just be a routine thing, like eating….

 

Now over to you

There are many entrepreneurs around here and freelancers with a flexible working schedule. What’s your take on this? What are your top 3 good habits to achieve and how you achieve them? share it on the comments.

 

Image credit by theps.net