Real Productivity: How to Build Habits That Last

Perfect is the enemy of good

Perfectionism is the feeling that you have to do a thing at the same time, for example you say to yourself that you MUST finish this particular book or course or whatever today. Doing this will actually demotivate you and you’ll quit eventually so don’t force yourself and remember to take your time.
Doing things gradually is the key to actually learning and growing
Remember whatever your goal is you don’t have to make it perfect and you don’t have to force yourself to do something at a specific time, you just have to make progress

Determining your goals

Make an impossible list which is basically a list where you write all of your goals (doesn’t have to be BIG goals) and sorting them into sections:

Life goals
Fitness and health
Habit goals
Creative goals
Skill goals
Fun goals
Video game goals
Travel goals
Religious goals
Learning goals (for example: Read 100 books) (increase the number after you finish)
School goals
Languages goals
Hobbies goals
Personality goals

When you list your goals ask yourself why does this goal matter to me? What is my motivation for this goal? And is it going to help motivate me for a long term?
Write 25 goals and then circle the top 3 goals, this means you should focus on your top 3 goals RIGHT NOW and the rest put them on the do not do list FOR LATER
DO NOT let the less priority goals distract you from the most important!

Setting your goals

When setting a goal you have to make it specific so instead of saying (be fluent in Spanish) say (learn Spanish every day for 10 mins)
Ask yourself what is the daily amount of practice I can put into my goal and how can you make it easier to do that?
There are two types of goals:

Your environment

The twenty seconds rule: this rule is basically when you want to break a bad habit say for example stop checking your phone when you have to study then go and put your phone somewhere where you have to spend more than 20 seconds to reach it, on the other hand when you want to do a good habit, for example, reading a book then put the book next to you so that you can reach it in less than 20 seconds.
Build an environment that inspires you, so put your books, painting tools, etc.. next to you so that you can see it always and reach it easily

What is a habit?

Cue ( something you see, feeling)
Routine
Reward (feeling of satisfaction when you accomplish something, and that eventually become a craving at an unconscious level)

So when you are exposed to the cue you automatically want to do the thing to earn the reward

External systems

Don’t break the chain: if there’s a habit that you wanna track then print a year calendar and cross the day each time you do the habit this will encourage you to not break the chain.
Habitica (habit tracker app)
Always remember it doesn’t have to be perfect: if you want to do a certain habit, for example, draw every day you can just sketch whatever even if it doesn’t look good even if it’s bad it doesn’t have to be perfect at least you did something
Inspiration doesn’t have to be before you start doing the thing, it can come actually when you start doing it. So just start.
Beeminder (habit tracker app)
Make the habit easier at first: so instead of saying do 50 minutes workout, say go to the gym because it’s easier to go to the gym when you think about it and doing something it’s always better than nothing

Pain points

When you feel tired of doing a certain habit, do not quit. Instead, try to not make it too hard. For example, if your habit is to read 50 pages a day and you’re tired of doing that then reduce the amount to 15 pages per day, and then when you get the motivation back, you can increase the amount, and the cycle goes this way.
Figure out what is causing you the pain or the laziness and try to solve the problem. For instance, if you feel tired of shooting YouTube videos every single week because you have to set your gear up every time, find a place to keep the gear so that you don’t have to set the gear up every time.
An exercise you can do is listing the points that cause you pain and brainstorm ways to solve them

Tracking system

What to do when you fail

When you make a mistake don’t repeat that same mistake again
When you fail at something reset your goal so if you currently draw 1 hour every day but then something happens and you stop for a while RESET your goal to drawing 15 minutes every day and increase the amount of time until you reach to your desired period
Figure out what causes your failure and avoid it in the future
Don’t let failure end your goal, come back smarter

Hope this helps :D

Noor Alyousuf

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