Transcripts
1. Introduction: When you observe the
most productive people, you'll notice that their
productivity is seemingly effortless because
they're working smarter rather than harder. They have structures set up in their life to streamline
their productivity. Hi, I'm Mike. I'm a
Personal Development Coach. I've been teaching
millions of people over on my YouTube channel Product
Ceylon and coaching hundreds of clients one-on-one on how to live with intention and
be more productive. In this class, you go through a 21-day challenge where you learn how to form habits to make your productivity easier. We'll start by
defining your goals. Then using the Pareto principle, we'll go through how to choose
your habits strategically to efficiently and effectively
arrive at your goals. I've consolidated the most important
fundamental strategies I've learned over the
last eight years, and in this class, I'll break them down into
three fundamental concepts. The first is the idea
that productivity doesn't have to be time-consuming,
or arduous. We tend to be at our most productive when we're
in a state of flow, where we forget about
what's going on around us and we almost
lose track of time. Having a set of powerful habits helps us enter into
that flow state. The second concept is the
idea that implementing habits helps significantly with the consistency of
your productivity. Some days you'll feel
inspired and productive, whereas other days,
we just don't. A powerful set of
habits will help balance out your
productivity and output. The third concept is
that small habits can lead to massive
changes in your life. Anyone that has achieved incredible things in their life, it doesn't just
happen all at once. It takes incremental
improvements, honing in on your own craft, getting a fraction
of a percentage better every single day. This class is designed really for anyone that is
struggling with procrastination or a
lack of productivity, or maybe you've been
struggling to stay consistent with a skill
that you've been learning. By the end of this class, you'll have a set of powerful habit-building tools
and skills that will help improve your productivity by making your life easier. I'm super happy
that you've decided to take this class
with me and I look forward to helping
you build a system of habits to automate
parts of your life, therefore, effortlessly
increasing your productivity. [MUSIC]
2. Class Project: I've designed this
class project to be a 21-day challenge, where I challenge you to
complete the daily set of habits that you will build throughout this
course for 21 days. There's a theory that it takes 21 days for a habit
to become automatic, meaning after 21 days of
using self-discipline to force yourself through a
habit after the 21st day, the actions should
become a lot easier. This 21 day period was first introduced
by Maxwell Maltz, a plastic surgeon in the 1950s. He discovered that a patient
who had, for example, a face operation would need 21 days to get used to
seeing their new face. He came to the conclusion that these and many other commonly observed phenomena
tend to show that it requires a minimum
of about 21 days for an old mental image to dissolve
and a new one to jell. Word spread and soon the
quote was short into, it takes 21 days to
form a new habit. There have however been
studies that show that this theory may not be
completely accurate. A study in the European Journal of Social Psychology analyzed the habits of 96 people
over a period of 12 weeks. On average, it is said
that a habit takes around two months to
become automatic behavior, 66 days to be exact, and for some, it may
take eight months. However, there was a very
strong positive correlation between how long a habit is implemented for and how easy it is to carry
out that habit. Meaning that the longer
you maintain a habit, the less self-discipline
is needed to carry it out, and the easier it becomes. Now, this is a very
personal message for me because back in 2013, I was incredibly uninspired
and unmotivated. I remember I graduated from
high school with a 1.3 GPA and I was rejected from four out of the five
universities I applied for. It was a very bleak and
miserable time in my life, but I used that
negativity and what I saw as failure
to my advantage. I flipped it around and
within just one year, I graduated with a 4.0 GPA and in the top 5%
at my university. Since then, I've been intrigued with this process
of streamlining and automating my life and
making productivity easier using a
structure of habits. For this 21-day challenge
and the class project, I've included a workbook
of the lessons, define your goals
80/20 your habits, and the evaluation of the week. With the define your
goals worksheet, we'll find the one thing
that if you achieved in the next 1-3 years would have the biggest positive
impact on your life. If you don't know what that
thing is yet, don't worry, that's exactly what
we're going to find out in the exercise. I'm really looking for some ambitious and
visionary goals here because I think most of us are capable of far more
than we think we are. After you've completed
the worksheet, you'll have a solid and
ambitious goal or goals to then become laser-focused in on and build your habits around. The 80/20 your habits
worksheet is about being extremely strategic and
smart with your habits. You're going to be doing these
habits every single day. It's so important that
they help you reach your long-term goals in the
fastest, most direct way. After six months or a year, or two years with the
help of these habits, you will achieve your goals. Finally, the evaluation of the week worksheet is all about reflecting on and refining your habits that you've
created throughout the class. It's likely that your
first set of habits will need adjusting slightly
within the first seven days. Maybe they're too challenging or maybe they're too
easy to achieve. By the end of this worksheet and really refining your
structure of habits, you'll have the perfect set of daily habits that each day, step-by-step will move
you closer to your goals. I really encourage
you to evaluate yourself every seven days
and report back here either in the
discussion section or the Project Gallery
section if you've managed to achieve all
your habits for that week, or maybe you've
missed a day or two, which is completely
okay because that's all part of the habit
forming process. You can print off the
workbook and follow through as we go
through those lessons because I too will be filling
in the workbook alongside you and showing you how I answer the exercise
questions myself. The final project will be
the completed work that goes through your thought process
and the stages you took when planning and building
your system of habits from your initial set of
goals to your daily habits, and finally any
adjustments you had to make your habits to
finalize the entire system. This class was designed to be
interactive and for you to participate because that's
how we learn by doing. I encourage you all to take screenshots of the
workbook if you're filling it in digitally or if you've
printed out the workbook, take pictures on your
phone of your workbook and upload your progress in
the Project Gallery. I've also included
a habit tracker in the projects and
resources section to keep track of your habits
and mark them as complete as you move
through the week. Habit trackers are an
awesome way of assessing tangible goals because when
you see your daily progress, it really does help keep
you motivated and on track. The second option
you have is to track your habits using a habit
tracker on your phone. I'll go through some of
the recommended apps, whether you're on Android or
Apple later in the class. Because by posting
your progress, whether it's before you start or in seven days or in 14 days, or in 21 days of the challenge, you're making a public
commitment not only to me, but to all the other students also taking part in the class. We'll give you feedback and support on your habits
and your goals. I'm really curious what you
guys have come up with. [MUSIC] With that, let's move on to why forming habits is so integral to purposeful
productivity and achieving your dreams.
3. Why Form Habits?: [MUSIC] In this lesson, we'll explore why forming
habits are so powerful because life shouldn't be this constant uphill battle
all of the time. You shouldn't have to be forcing yourself to be productive every day and wrestling with procrastination just
to get things done. But we've all been there. We all know what
it's like to feel completely unmotivated
and unproductive. That's because naturally, our levels of motivation
fluctuate throughout the year. Sometimes we feel motivated, and sometimes you don't. When you are feeling
motivated to change, when you are feeling inspired, that's when you need to
create a structure of habits, so when your
motivation does drop, you have a system of
habits to fall back onto and keep your productivity
levels consistent. Because it's this set of habits that are going to automate
certain processes in your life so you
don't have to rely on self-discipline or motivation to follow through with them. Let me give you an example. When you wake up in the
morning, you brush your teeth. You don't even have to think
about it, you just do it. That's because you've trained
your brain to know that, that's just what you
do when you wake up. You've automated the process. What if you could automate the process of
other actions too, like waking up at
4:00 AM every morning or learning a language
for 30 minutes every day, or sitting down at
your desk to study for a free hour study
block every evening from 6:00 PM until 9:00 PM. That's what habits
are all about, to help you become significantly more productive while
at the same time streamlining your life
so you're not having to battle with procrastination
every single day. The reason why I
created this course on forming habits for
purposeful productivity is because I only learned about how powerful automation can be around seven or
eight years ago. Prior to about 2015, I was a night owl, I'd sleep at 2:00 or 3:00 AM and I'd wake up at 11:00 in
the morning, maybe 12:00. For my whole life, I
just felt that that was my natural circadian
rhythm telling me that, that was the time that
I had to wake up and sleep because whenever I
did try to wake up early, like 7:00 or 8:00 AM, I'd feel absolutely exhausted
for the first few hours. But then in 2015, I started studying
foreign economics and finance degree
at university, and I had to wake up
at 7:00 AM for class. But what I did
differently this time, was I made it into a habit, meaning I didn't just wake
up early during weekdays, but on weekends too. To train my mind, that's just what I do. Because if you wake up early on weekdays but on weekends
you have a lie-in, you are untraining your mind, so when Monday comes around, you probably struggle
to wake up early again. Just to make sure I
did actually wake up, I put my alarm on the other side of the room
so when it did go off, I had no choice but to get
up out of bed to reset it. Now, I'll be honest,
the first couple of weeks went easy. It took a lot of
self-discipline, a lot of willpower, but what I realized was that after about
two or three weeks, it started to become
a lot easier. Instead of waking up tired, I'd wake up energized. In fact, some nights
I'd wake up naturally 10 or 15 minutes before
my alarm even went off. I even took it one step further because I
realized that I was by far at my most
productive in the morning. Instead of waking
up at 07:00 AM, I started waking up at 04:45
AM which would give me an extra two hours of really focused work in the morning before I
started my day properly. Throughout my bachelor's
degree for three years, every single day I
woke up at 04:45 AM. It was only possible because
I automated the action of firstly waking up
in the morning at 04:45 AM every single day. But I also automated
the action of going to sleep by about
09:30 PM every night, again, seven days a week. I can give you dozens of
examples of how I've formed particular habits
and sticking with them have completely changed
the course of my life. That's why I think the topic is so important because
it's equally important that you have a crystal clear set of goals that you can aim
towards and set up a system of habits to boost
your productivity with no extra effort required to
reach your goals faster. In the next lesson, we'll go through how to set
those goals the right way.
4. Defining Your Goals: The goal for this lesson
is to really clarify what you're trying to achieve in
the short to medium term. This is really important lesson, because it will influence
how you will go on to create your habits
later on in the class. That's why I've
created a worksheet in the class project which
you can access now, and we can work
through it together. It could be a good idea
to pause the lesson now, and print the worksheets
out if you haven't already. Opening up the worksheet, it starts off with the question, what is the one thing
that if you achieved in the next 1-3 years would have the biggest positive
impact on your life? I really want you
to think big here. Now is not the
time to hold back, be as ambitious as you can while keeping
things realistic. For me, there are
two main things. The first thing is learning
to speak Vietnamese fluently. The second thing
is to be able to coach and support 50,000 customers in my
blockchain business within the next 1-3 years. I'm going to keep my answers
relatively brief just because I don't want this
lesson lasting for hours, because I could literally
talk to you about my goals and ambitions
for a long time. But, you can be specific and detailed as possible
with your own answers. Really, the more detailed and thought out your
answers, the better. Moving on to the second
part of the worksheet, if you achieve these goals, how would that change your life? I'm living in Vietnam now, so being able to speak
Vietnamese would open up so many doors both in my personal life and in
my professional life, and being able to serve
50,000 customers with my blockchain
business would take my professional life
to the next level. I'm really passionate
about business. To me it's like playing a game, it's what I'm doing
eight plus hours a day for my whole life. Growing the business
to that level would help me build
out the team, invest back into the business
and exponentially improve the products and
services that I can provide for my customers. There are two ways
that you can go about achieving
your main vision. The first is to just choose
one hugely ambitious goal, and funnel all
your resources and energy towards achieving
that one goal. The second option is to choose 2-4 smaller goals that are may be focused on
different areas of your life. Let me give you an example. Throughout high school, my grades were pretty average. I was relatively
unmotivated and I didn't really know what I
wanted to do with my life. Honestly, I didn't study much, and when I graduated high school my grades reflected that. When starting
university, however, I knew I needed to do something
drastically different, so I set myself a goal of graduating in three years
time with a 4.0 GPA. This was a hugely
ambitious goal for me, because I've never
even achieved at A grade in my entire life. Now at university,
I was planning to graduate with an
average of an A grade, equivalent to a 4.0 GPA. That goal for me was
hugely ambitious, and that's why I only
said one main goal. On my worksheet, I would write down graduate in three years with a 4.0 GPA. Fast-forward to now, and I did graduate
with a 4.0 GPA, and I'm in a far different
place in my life now than I was back then
when I was a student. Right now, I'm focusing
on balancing out my life. In my opinion, in my
definition of success, if you like, there are
four pillars: health, wealth, people and happiness. Happiness is last because
if you have health, wealth and people taken care of, then happiness will follow. These pillars are important
because if you focus too many resources into
just one of those pillars, then the other
pillars will suffer. It's like many people dream
of being a billionaire, but if you dedicate every ounce of your
energy chasing money, then of course, the other areas
of your life will suffer. Back when I was a student, I had one hugely ambitious goal, but now I have three main goals. The first goal is to be
in the best shape of my life by my 30th birthday, which is coming up this year. The second goal is to
become conversational in Vietnamese by January 2024. I'm living in Vietnam now, so it's only right that I learn to speak the language, right? My third goal is to become an expert in the blockchain Web 3.0 space by January
2023. Those are my goals. If I achieved each one, then it will significantly improve the quality of my life. For example, being in the best shape of my life
before my 30th birthday. That goal has forced me to get a personal
trainer, for example, and that alone has been
an absolute game changer. Learning Vietnamese on a conversational
level will open up so many doors in my personal
life and business life, and becoming an expert
in blockchain/Web 3.0 is a necessity because I have another business educating
on those topics, so of course, I need to be well educated myself in that area. Moving to the next
part of the worksheet, do your goals excite
and inspire you? Because they absolutely should, and if they don't, it's important to add detail and refinement so that you are more passionate about
achieving them. I won't fill in this box because I've already been
through this process. These three goals
really do inspire me. I've had these goals for maybe
eight or nine months now, and I'm still as
passionate and motivated in achieving them as I was
on day one of making them. Today's question you need to ask yourself in the next part of the worksheet is do your
goals feel like a challenge? I see this time and time again where naturally we
want to play it safe. Making goals that are
extremely ambitious can be risky because the more
ambitious our goals are, the less likely we are
of achieving them. But, I really want
to encourage you to be as ambitious as you can. I really like Grant
Cardone's 10x rule, and that states that, one, you should set targets
for yourself that are 10x greater than you
believe you can achieve. Two, you should take
actions that are 10x greater than what you believe are necessary
to achieve your goals. He reckons that the biggest
mistake most people make in life is not setting
goals high enough. Is there any way that you can make your goals
more challenging, but at the same time
still achievable? Like I said earlier, I've already been through
this process, so my goals are already
extremely challenging for me. But if I wanted to take
them to the next level, instead of having
a goal to become conversational in
Vietnamese by 2024, I could make it to become conversational in Vietnamese
by 2023, for example, and that really would
push me to really spend a lot more time and resources
directed towards that goal. In the final part
of this exercise, is to make sure that
your goals are smart. This means that your
goals to be effective, needs to be specific,
measurable, actionable, realistic,
and time-bound. When preparing for this
course, I was thinking, "Should I change my
goals to be more SMART, so specific, measurable, achievable, relevant,
and time-bound? Because not all my
goals are smart. For example, how do I know
if I've become an expert in blockchain and Web
3.0 by January 2023? But, I'm not going
to change them. I want to be completely
transparent, because I've had these goals for the last eight or
nine months and they've been ingrained
into my mind, so I don't want to
change them now. Saying that though, I've been an avid goal setter
for years now. If you're new to goal setting, then I absolutely recommend
you follow the SMART system. For example, I'm learning blockchain and Web
3.0 technology, and the one way I could
create a milestone for myself would be to complete
an eight-week course, for example, or to read
an entire textbook, but actually process and retain the information on
every single page. However, I made the
conscious decision not to go that route
for a few reasons. Firstly, because I've been goal setting for
a long time now. Secondly, because this
is a fun goal for me, meaning that I don't really want any restrictions
or time pressures on this particular goal. Thirdly, because
I really like to diversify how I learn about
blockchain and Web 3.0. For example, some days I'll
just watch YouTube all day, and the second day
I'll read textbooks. The third day I'll go for
coffee with friends or acquaintances that are extremely knowledgeable on
blockchain and Web 3.0. But if you're creating your
goals from the beginning, I really do recommend
that you make your goals SMART as they'll be
far more effective. An example of making one
of my goals more SMART, I could change the becoming conversational in Vietnamese
by January 2024 goal, because becoming
conversational Vietnam is very vague and
difficult to measure. It can be interpreted
differently by each individual, so I could change it
to achieve a Grade 3 in a particular Vietnamese
language test by January 2024. By making that small adjustment, it's making the goal more
measurable and more specific. After you filled in the
defining your goals worksheet, go ahead and upload it
to the project gallery. I'm really interested to see what you guys
have come up with, and also we can help
motivate each other and create a community
around our goals. You can also post
any questions in the discussion
section of the class, and I'll try my best
to answer all of you. Now, you have your
goals in place, that's when you can create
your set of habits. The goals are the destination, [MUSIC] if you like, and the habits are how you're going to get there. That's what we're going to go
through in the next lesson.
5. 80/20 Your Habits: [MUSIC] This lesson will be about being extremely strategic with how you form your habits. This is incredibly important because if your habits
have not been optimized, then you'll be wasting a
lot of time and resources. There are two ways
you could have gone, either having one
hugely ambitious goal, or 3-4 smaller goals. The reason for
that is because we all have limited resources. If you have three or
four massive goals, it's likely that you
won't have the time or energy to achieve them
within the allotted time. Because what you'll
notice is when you spend time
working on one goal, it can directly take time away from you working on a
second and a third goal. So if you chose to have
just one huge goal, then you'd match this with
three to four daily habits. If you complete those
habits every day, then you'd achieve your goal within the time you specified. For example my goal
at university was to graduate with a 3.0
GPA in three years, which was an absolutely
massive goal for me. I set three habits in
order to achieve it. Wake up at 04:45 a.m.
every single day, study for eight hours
Monday to Saturday and four hours on Sunday
even on holidays, go to the gym at least
four days a week. All of these three
habits helped me achieve my main goal of
achieving a 4.0 GPA. I realized that
waking up early in the morning was so important for my productivity because I was at my most motivated and productive first
thing in the morning. At 04:45 a.m. most people
were still asleep so no one was messaging me or
email me or distracting me, and I could actually
get a lot of work done. I implemented Robin Sharma is 90/90/1 rule which states
that for the next 90 days, spend the first 90 minutes of your day on the single
biggest tasks that will move you closer to your main goal and doing that every morning
as soon as I woke up, was a game changer. Because often that
1.5-2 hours of mornings studying I'd get more work done than the entire
rest of the day. However, my habit of studying eight hours a
day was probably the most important in terms of
achieving my main goal. I realized that most people
would increase the number of hours they were studying the
closer their exams came. Then about a week
before the exams, they'd be studying for
10 or 12 hours a day just cramming in as much
information as they could. Then the holidays would come and they wouldn't
study at all. My approach was to treat my university degree almost
like a full time job. Just studying consistently
eight hours a day and making it into a habit so I didn't even have
to think about it. I just knew in my
mind that every day I have eight hours
of studying to do and that one habit made my whole university
journey so much easier. The third habit of going to
the gym four days a week. If I'm to be performing
at my most optimal, I need to be healthy both
physically and mentally. Going to the gym that
helped massively. Those were my daily habits about four or five
or six years ago, because I want to illustrate how my habits change over time. These days because I don't
just have one big goal, but I have three smaller goals my habits are quite different. Just to recap, my three
smaller goals are being the best shape of my life
by my 30th birthday, become conversationally
in Vietnamese by January 2024 and become an expert in the
blockchain slash Web 3.0 space by January 2023. Opening up the 80/20
your habits worksheet from the class project, you see the first exercise is to write down your main
goal or your main goal. This is just to make sure that when you are building
your habits, you're making sure that you're centering them
around your goals. I'll write down all three of my goals into the
define your goals box. I have one daily
habit for each goal. The first habit is to drink
two liters of water a day because I really do
struggle to maintain that. It's so easy for me to forget
so I made it into a habit. I'm also going to the gym
at least five times a week. But I have a personal trainer that keeps me
accountable for that, so I won't include it
with this set of habits. My second habit is to learn Vietnamese every night
for at least 20 minutes. This could be reading, writing, talking or even just watching Vietnamese films or TV program. The third habit is to study blockchain technology for at
least two hours every day. This can be watching
YouTube videos, reading books or even just going out for coffee with
a friend who is super into blockchain because that's one of the best
ways that I learned having conversations
with experts in the field if you like. Whichever method I choose, as long as I do it for
at least two hours a day that's the
habit I've built. It would be easy for me
to recommend you to just create a set of habits in line with your goals
and leave it at that. But I really want you
to 80/20 your habits. The 80/20 rule is
honestly one of the most important and
transformative rules that I live by in
my everyday life. It really has saved
me so much time. It saved me hours
every single day. The 80/20 rule also known as
the Pareto principle states that 80% of consequences
come from 20% of causes, or 80 percent of outputs are as a result of 20% of inputs. An example of this in
the 1940s Joseph Jeran, who was well known
at the time in the space of field of
operation management, he demonstrated that 80 percent
of product defects were caused by 20 percent of
problems in production methods. By focusing on reducing the 20 percent of
production problems, a business could significantly increase its overall
product's quality. I want you to use this
same principle and apply it to your own
goals and habits, meaning that your
habits should be designed so that if you
complete that one task every single day is
going to move you closer to your goals faster than if you
did anything else. I think it's important that your strategic when it comes
to building your habits, so that you're not just creating habits for the sake
of creating habits. Also that you're not creating
too many or too few. You're habit should
be relatively easy to complete when you're
feeling motivated. When you're feeling
less motivated, they're still be achievable
but they will push you, and that's by design to keep you productive long term not just experiencing short spurts of productivity when you're
feeling inspired, and then completely slowing down with productivity when your not. Going back to the
worksheets you can write your 3-4 habits
onto the worksheet, but making sure
that you're able to tick off each box
in the checklist. Making sure that each habit will strategically and
effectively help you move towards your goals is achievable to complete
daily but still challenging and is measurable so you know when you
have achieved it. The final part of the worksheet asks you if you
complete these habits consistently for however
long it takes you to achieve your goals in what three
ways will your life change? You might notice that I mentioned this a few times
throughout this class because I can't really emphasize enough how
important this is. That when you are
building and going through your habits
on a daily basis, you keep in mind the end goal. You keep reminding yourself
why you're doing it. You're doing it because
you're achieving your habits every day
in the long term. It's going to significantly improve the quality
of your life. That's why you're
creating habits and completing them
every single day. As if why I'm doing it number 1, I'll be in the healthy
shape I've ever been, which I'll continue
to build on which will benefit me in my business and my personal life in terms of allowing me to have more energy, be more productive, and just overall live a
more fulfilling life. Number 2, I'm learning Vietnamese because
it will open up so many doors again in my
personal and business life. Honestly I just think it
would make life a bit more of an adventure if I could actually speak to the people around
me on a daily basis. Number 3, the second
business that I'm running relating to
blockchain and Web 3.0. I need to be an expert in that field to push the
business forward and really make an impact upscaling something that I'm
super passionate about. To build another
successful business off of a passion will be a genuine dream come true
as cliche as that sound. As you complete the
80/20 habits worksheet, take a picture with
your phone or if have filled the worksheet
in digitally then take a screenshot and upload it to
the project gallery section so we can help each other stay
accountable and on track. But also selfishly
I'm just really curious what habits you
guys have come out with. Again, if you do
have any questions, let me know in the
discussions tab and I'll do my best to
answer you all. The main idea of creating
these habits is to streamline your life and make your productivity easier
and more consistent. Using the right
habit tracking tools is super important too, [MUSIC] because this
can make it even easier to maintain your habits. That's what we're
going to talk about in the next lesson. [MUSIC]
6. Habit Tracking Tools: [MUSIC] This lesson will cover the habit tracking tools that will make following a system of habits even easier
and more efficient. While the main uses
of implementing habits is to automate
certain parts of your life, to make productivity easier, we can take that one step
further by using tools to help us with tracking our
progress throughout the week. This can be done in two ways, either on pen and paper or using a dedicated habit tracking app. These trackers help
with a few things. Firstly, they act as a reminder, which is the single
most important reason why I think habit trackers
are so important. From what I see, forgetting about your daily
habits during the day, consequently
forgetting to do them, is the easiest way to fail
the 21-day habit challenge. Secondly, habit trackers keep you honest and accountable. If you skip a day, then those empty boxes will
be staring back at you, reminding you of the promise that you've made to yourself. Thirdly, they
provide motivation. Because often, the
progress that we see on our path towards
a specific goal, that helps keep us
motivated to stay on track. The first way to
track your habits is the good old-fashioned
pen and paper. I've added a habit tracker
to the class project part of this course so you can
print it off and use it. You can see, it really
is very simple to use. You can customize it how
you want and have it on your desk or somewhere
where you're constantly seeing it
throughout the day. I think it's really
important that you don't have your
habit tracker hidden away somewhere
because then you're more likely to forget to use it. That's the biggest drawback to using a pen and
paper habit tracker. I found at least that habit
tracker apps on my phone do a much better job because I always have my phone
with me everywhere I go. Whereas, when I leave the house, I might forget to bring my
pen and paper habit tracker. It's just another thing
that I need to remember. Over the last few years, I've used countless
habit trackers, but my favorite by far
for Android is Habit Hub. Habit Hub is based on Seinfeld's productivity
secret, don't break the chain. Every time you complete a habit, your chain grows longer. Eventually, you will
build a very long train, and your only job now is
to keep the chain growing. It gamifies tracking your habits because once you've
built a long chain, then you really don't
want to break it, which gives you
additional motivation. With this app, you can organize your habits accordingly to different aspects
of your life by assigning them to
your categories, and you can visualize
your data with drafts to get an overview of
how well you've been doing. The single two most
important features for me though are the reminder
and widget features. As I mentioned earlier, the biggest reason for
failing to complete a set of habits during the day
is simply forgetting. Eventually, you remember
just before you go to bed, but it's already too late. What the reminder
feature on Habit Hub does is that you
can set it so that if you haven't completed your habits by
let's say 7:00 PM, then it will give
you a reminder on your phone to make
sure that you do them. This feature alone has saved
me so many times on days, where I'm just super busy, and I just simply forget. But then the app sends me a notification that
night to remind me. The second feature
is the widget. I like having all my
productivity apps as visible on my
phone as possible. Meaning, that as soon
as I open my phone, I have my task list
there, my calendar, and my habits that I need
to complete that day. Throughout the day,
I'm constantly seeing my uncompleted habits, essentially making it
almost impossible to just forget that I have to do them because I'm
always seeing them. Habit Hub is my favorite
habit tracker on Android. However, about four months ago, I moved from Android to iPhone. As I was moving all my apps over from my Android
to my iPhone, I was really surprised to
see that Habit Hub wasn't actually available on
the Apple App Store. It took me an hour or so of
downloading and testing, maybe seven or eight of the
most popular habit trackers. I basically had three criteria. [NOISE] First, it must have a simple, minimalist
user interface. Two, [NOISE] it must
have a reminder feature to give notifications. Three, [NOISE] it should have a widget feature so that it can be very easily accessed as
soon as I unlock my phone. The two that I found are
Streaks and Habitify. I'm actually using Streaks and have been since
getting the iPhone. It's an amazing app. Super simple and easy to use. It does everything
I need it to do, and then some, but there's
just one disadvantage. It's $5. Now, I don't want paying that
because it's an app that I use literally
every single day. For me, it's worth
it just for not having ads pop up
whenever I'm using it, and it's a one-time payment. It's not a monthly or
yearly subscription, but I know a lot of you would
much prefer a free app, so I also recommend Habitify. Habitify is one of the most
downloaded habit trackers on the Apple App Store
for good reason as well. It's a really
well-designed app with a simple yet
attractive interface. There are a few additional
bonus features like the Pomodoro mode and
the countdown alarm. There's a paid
version of this app too that gives you a
few more features, but for 99 percent of you, I think that the free version
will absolutely be enough. Those are the apps
that I recommend, whether you're using Android or whether you using iPhone, or if you want to
use pen and paper. There's the paper tracker app in the class project section
that you can print off too. Ultimately, tracking
your habits in any form will help keep
you on the right path, whether you're using one
of the apps I recommended, or maybe your own app, or a system that you
create yourself. It's important not to
get bogged down in the details of choosing
the perfect habit tracker. Instead, focus on
what really matters, building and maintaining
good habits. In the next lesson, we'll use the tracking tools
that we established in this lesson to actually
implement the habits themselves. [MUSIC] Maybe the next lesson will be the most important lesson
in the whole class, in my opinion. I'll
see you over there.
7. Implementing Your Habits: In this lesson, I'm going to go through an average day to show you how I implement my
own habits into the day. A quick recap of the free
hobbies I currently have, drink two liters of water a day, learn 20 minutes of
Vietnamese every day, and study blockchain technology
for two hours a day. Now I do want to mention
that I do have other habits such as waking up at 6:00
AM seven days a week, going to sleep at the same time, going to the gym in the
morning, those things. But those are habits
that I've literally been implementing daily for
years at this point. I don't really measure
or keep track of them anymore because I do
them every day anyway, and they're already automated. My first habit of
drinking two liters of water a day starts as
soon as I wake up. I drink at least half a liter as soon as I get out of bed. Essentially, that's 25 percent of that daily habit complete. Throughout the day,
I'll bring with me a two liter bottle of water
so I don't forget it. Obviously, if I can't
see my bottle of water, then it's going to
keep reminding me that I still haven't
hit my goal yet. With the drinking was a habit, that spread out
throughout the whole day. However, the second
goal of learning 20 minutes of
Vietnamese every day, obviously that only
takes 20 minutes. I tend to do that
as soon as I get home from work in an evening. I'll then move on to my
third daily habit of studying blockchain
technology for two hours. Now, I've played around
with these habits. I've tried learning
Vietnamese in the morning. It didn't really work for me
because I needed to wake up, go to the gym, and then
go to work straight away. There really wasn't
that much time. I've also tried studying Vietnamese for 30-40
minutes a day, but honestly, it was just too much to maintain long-term. I think that brings us to a
really important point that these daily habits shouldn't be super difficult to
implement every day. They're designed to
promote consistency. If you are finding them
difficult to complete to the point where
you're struggling to maintain a seven day streak, then it could be a
good idea to make that particular habit just
slightly more achievable, just like I did
with my Vietnamese. I brought it down
from 30 minutes to 20 minutes because that was far more manageable with everything else
going on in my life. Also, what happens
with me sometimes is that I'll have a
super busy day at work, sometimes 12 hour a day, and I'll get home, and honestly, I'm just too exhausted to spend two hours
studying blockchain. I can do 20 minutes
learning Vietnamese, but two hours studying
blockchain is honestly just too much and
instead I go straight to bed. It very rarely happens
where I miss a habit, but the extra mental
and physical stress I would have had to put
myself through to study for two hours after an exhausting 12-hour workday probably wouldn't
make it worthwhile. I think that it is
okay if you are genuinely exhausted to just
skip your habit for that day. However, don't use
that as an excuse. There's a difference
between being lazy or being tired and being genuinely
exhausted and burnt out. What I find a really
good motivator is that if I skip a day, it means that I have to do
the habit twice the next day. Let's say I miss learning Vietnamese for 20 minutes today, then tomorrow I have to learn
Vietnamese for 40 minutes. That in of itself is a
really good motivator to not skip a day because then you have to work twice as
hard the next day. I also took a week off for my daily habits recently
because I contracted COVID-19. My symptoms went too bad, but I was feeling a bit ill, so I took a week off, and I think that's completely
okay as long as you make sure that you jump back on
as soon as you feel better. I think the biggest
problem I see is when people are super motivated, so they set their habits, but after a week or two, the motivation starts
to drop, therefore, the motivation to
follow through with their daily habits
also starts to drop. This is why it's so important
that when number 1, your habits are not
too arduous or boring. Two, they're genuinely
habits that will help significantly improve your life in the not too distant future. James Clear in his book, Atomic Habits derives a concept called the four laws
of behavior change, meaning that there are
four key components to build a successful
structure of habits. We have an example of someone wanting to
build a habit of, let's say, eating at least
three pieces of fruit a day, there will be four components. One, make it obvious, don't hide your fruits
in your fridge, put them on display on
your kitchen counter or dining room table so you keep seeing them
throughout the day. Two, make it attractive. Start with a fruit
you like the most, so you'll actually want to
eat one when you see it. Three, make it easy. Don't create
needless friction by focusing on fruits
that are hard to peel. Bananas and apples are super
easy to eat, for example. Four, make it satisfying. If you like the
fruit you picked, you'll love eating it and
feel healthier as a result. Your habit should be
streamlined themselves. They shouldn't be incredibly difficult to achieve everyday. That's completely
not the point here. Another approach, if you are struggling to
stay consistent with your habits is what
is called habit stacking, is where you take
a habit that is already an automated behavior. For example, having breakfast at the same time every morning, and then attaching a second
habit to that first habit. That might look
something like learning a language for 20 minutes
during breakfast. That way, you're more likely to follow through
with your habit. I think that's really powerful. Another strategy you can use
to stay more consistent with your habits is to have an
accountability partner. Maybe you and a
friend can go through these 21-day challenge together and hold each other accountable. I used to have an
accountability partner at the gym and it
really does work. I never missed a single
day at the gym when I had an accountability
partner because he was holding me accountable and I
didn't want to let him down. I encourage you to
return to this lesson after seven days to remind yourself of
the tracking system, but also to post your progress in the project gallery section because that in of itself will
help hold you accountable. I'm curious to see, and I'm sure many of
the students are too, how many people can actually complete the 21-day challenge? The main takeaway from this
lesson is that it's really important that if you do
miss a habit one day, then don't beat
yourself up over it, but just reset and restart
again the next day. It's also absolutely
imperative that you self-reflect regularly on this whole
habit-forming process. That's what we're going to
talk about in the next lesson.
8. Evaluation of the Week: In this lesson, we're going to cover the evaluation process that I go through when
creating a new set of habits. Because it's usually
not just as easy as implementing a set of habits and then just completing
them everyday. There's usually an
adjustment period in the first few days where you'll need to
either make the habits easier or more
difficult to achieve. The evaluation stage is an incredibly important part of the habit forming process. I've included a worksheet in the class projects section
to guide you through that. If you haven't already, you can pause the
lesson here and print off that worksheet so we
can go through it together. The single most
important question to ask yourself throughout this
entire process and also the first exercise of this
worksheet is do you feel like your daily habits are directly helping you move
towards your goals? Because if they're not, then you need to do
something about it. How can you adjust your daily habits to make them more efficient
and effective? Let me give you an example. One mistake that I
made a few years ago is that I had too many habits. As soon as I'd wake up, I'd have a habit of
drinking a glass of water. Then I'd meditate
for 15 minutes, then I'd do yoga for 30 minutes, then I'd learn a language
for 15 minutes and I had these six or seven habits
that I do in the morning. Honestly, it was just far
too much and complicated. They weren't really helping me move me towards my main goals. Now I keep things super simple. I just have three main habits
and each habit has been created to achieve an
ambitious long-term goal. The second part of the
worksheet asks the question were there any habits
that you failed to complete in the
first seven days? Don't worry if there were. Often when I go through
the habit forming process, there will be habits that
when I'm creating them, I was maybe slightly
overenthusiastic maybe and realistically they're just not achievable every day
over the long term. For example, one of
my habits is to be learning Vietnamese for
20 minutes every day. But originally it
started off with learning Vietnamese for
30 minutes every day. But I quickly realized
that 30 minutes was just a bit too
much to carry out every single day in the
long term so I reduced that habit down to 20 minutes and now it's far
more manageable. There's no point in
making your habits so ambitious and so challenging that eventually
you just give up. It defeats the point of making
the habit forming process. That's why the final part of the exercise is to ask
yourself whether you feel like you need to
adjust your habits and make them more
achievable long-term. Really, this is a question
you should be asking yourself very regularly
because for me, my habits do change slightly
every six months to a year. For example, my life might get super busy even more
than it is right now and studying blockchain
for two hours a day might just not
be achievable, in which case, I can decrease
it to one hour a day. The main point here is that you keep your habits consistent. It's not necessarily
about pushing yourself to the limit
every single day. Consistency and gradual
progress is far more important. Maybe your habit of waking
up at, I don't know, 4:00 AM every morning
was just too extreme or going to the gym seven days a week was too taxing
on your body, in which case it is okay to make them slightly
more achievable. However, do remember that
if you can make it through the initial conditioning phase of the first three
or four weeks, then your habit should become
much easier to sustain. It's also important to notice
any trends or tendencies you may be having in terms of successfully completing
your daily habits. If you're regularly
failing to carry them out, so for example, maybe
you're forgetting to complete them by
the end of the night, even with your habit
tracker reminders on your phone, in which case, it could be a good
idea to complete all your habits in the morning when you're less likely
to be distracted with the other things
going on in your life. I encourage you to come
back every seven days for 21 days to show your
progress and to post screenshots of
your habit tracker app on your phone or your completed worksheet into the projects and resources
tab of this course. Or if you are recording habits using the habit
tracker provided, using pen and paper
to take a picture of it with your phone
and upload it here. Because there have
been numerous studies that show that you're more likely to achieve your goals
if you write them down. For example, psychology
professor Dr. Gail Matthews at the Dominican
Republic in California, lead a study on
goal setting with nearly 270 participants
and she found that the participants were 42
percent more likely to reach their goals if they physically wrote them
down beforehand. The more interactive and engaging you are
posting your progress, the more likely you are to follow through with
your habits and complete the 21-day
challenge successfully. Finally, if you are having any problems or you've come
into any kind of obstacles, you can reach out to me in either discussions tab
or the projects and resources tab and I'll try my best to answer all
your questions.
9. Final Thoughts: Throughout this class,
I've shown you how you can increase your productivity and streamline your life by building a structure of habits to help automate parts of your life. You now have a system
you can use to maintain a life of good habits. Once again, I really do
encourage you to post your final projects in the
project gallery of the class. I'm wondering actually
how many of you will be able to complete
the 21-day challenge. I'm confident that most of
you will be able to and the beauty of the challenge
is that after 21 days, your habits should start to become automated so they'll need far less self-discipline to actually complete
them every day. It's worth mentioning
that all the time, your goals and therefore
your habits, will change. My habits when I was studying at university a few
years ago are very, very different to
what they are now. Likewise, in a few years time, they'll probably change again
and as we go through life, our goals will be
changing constantly. It's a really good idea to, every now and then, say, every, I don't know,
six months or so, to come back to them to make
sure that you are still on track with achieving
the happiness and success that you deserve. I want to say thank you so much for sticking to the
end of this class. If you want to leave
me a review as well, I'd love to hear from you
and know what you think. I'm going to be making more lifestyle classes on
topics such as productivity, study advice, morning
and evening routines, daily habits, that
kind of thing, so do stay tuned. If you're a student
studying in your exams, I already have two classes
that I made recently. One on how to combat
procrastination and the other on how to boost productivity
specifically for students. You can check out my
profile and watch those. With that, I hope you
all have an amazing day. I wish you all the best of luck and I'll see you
in the next class.
