Build a Daily Habit List
I’d read a book, <Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength>, about two months ago. The book is brilliant in both theoretical and practical aspects. The top three most important ideas I learnt from this book are:
- WILLPOWER is kind of mind muscle, and it can be strenthened and improved through exercises.
- Body muscles get tired, so is our willpower.
- When you’ve practised frequently and long enough, the “muscle” would remember the things you ask it to do, thus make doing such things costs much less effort.
Because of these ideas, and the extraordinary benefits a strong willpower could bring, I decided to do something to “exercise” my mind muscles. I’ve never been an expert of any kinds of sports, but I know the only way to succeed in any kind of sport is persistent, effective practising without getting oneself burnt out. Therefore, I’ve decided to build my own Daily Habit List.
Just as the name suggests, the Daily Habit List is a list of something you do everyday. More specifically, it’s a list of things I want to have yourself get used to doing everyday, those I want to integrate into your daily life, the same as brushing teeth, washing faces or taking showers. Write them down, execute them everyday. That’s it.
Yes, that’s it, simple and neat. Every a 4-year old child could understand it without doubts. But it’s truly helpful for me, and I believe it would be helpful for many other people as well. For example, the first item I put on the list is “write down what you’ve done for each day”. It’s a helpful tip for myself to track the outcome and efficiency of my work and study. I had the idea (or heard from someone or a book? I can’t remember) a long time ago, but I had never been able to carried it out for more than two weeks; now I’ve been doing this for nearly two months, I benefits significantly from the tip itself as well as the List.
Why? Well, my feeling is, each time I’m executing items on this list, I’m trying to use my willpower to cross the obstacles(laziness, for example) inside my mind. As my willpower is used, it get exercised, and it’s being stronger and stronger. As it grows stronger, I can rely on it to overcome larger and tougher obstacles. At the meantime, I believe it’s important not to forsake those efforts to dealing with “easy” item on the List, unless I think are they’re not useful nor appropriate any more and clear them out of the List.
Of course, the List can also contain things I want to get yourself used to be doing every two or three day, once a week, once a month, etc. But I believe that starting from once a day is the easiest, and the fastest way to see the outcome and get myself confidence on this.
Now, if you’re going to try this method, I have several tips. First of all, the List must be explicitly recorded, either written down on a note or saved in your time management app, or any other way. No matter how, it must be recorded on something you’ll read at least once a day. For me, I put it on my Wunderlist.
Second, the List changes, just like human hearts. When you’re convinced that some items on the list is no longer helpful, or it’s impossible for you to spare time on it, or you want to replace them with something more helpful, feel free to evict them, no one, including yourself, could blame you for that.
Third, start small. As mentioned before, willpower, as a kind of “mind muscle”, gets tired. It’s normal, just as practising running or tennis. If you never feel tired, you’re not trying hard enough; but if you’re always tired, you’re burning all your energy out and what you’re doing is not helpful for you at all. So start from small things, like “15 minutes book reading” or “watch one TED talk”, and gradually move to bigger things like “30 minutes of jogging”(I admit this is usually a harder one for me than reading textbooks). Pick the ones you think that are suitable, and of course, desirable for you(and don’t pick too many at a time, for me I usually put two or three items). On the other hand, if you only keep small and easy things on the list, you won’t be making much progress.
Notes: I’ve been applying this method in my life for two months, which is not a very long time, so there must be somewhere deficient in both the method and this article. If you have any opinion, please feel free to comment or contact me.