Track your habits - Mohammed Bentaleb

I’m going to keep this one super concise and practical – your habits largely determine who you are and the likelihood of reaching your goals.

These are my favourite points from Atomic Habits (Clear, 2018):

Habits are a vote for who you want to be – they determine who you currently are, regardless of how you view yourself.
You rarely achieve goals without a system in place – this system is a set of habits that get you closer to your goal e.g. you have a goal of getting fit, but unless you have a habit of exercising X amount of times per week you won’t reach this goal.
Small habits don’t just add up – they compound. This is about consistency. You can get great results in all aspects of your life if you have good habits which amount to small and regular actions.
The laws of behaviour change and forming good habits—make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy and make it satisfying.
Get the environment right – everything has a place and purpose in an environment where habits can easily form i.e. don’t have chocolate on show if you’re on a diet!
You will go off track – habits are easy to keep when you’re motivated, but the ability to keep going on your worst day is what makes the difference. The habit tracker below will help with this.

What you need to do:

Sign up to this simple but effective daily habit tracker https://app.dailyhabits.xyz/ (or any other that you want) and create shortcuts on your phone, laptop and any other device so you can easily access it wherever you are.
List the top 5 – 10 good habits you want in your life and some bad habits at the end that you want to avoid.
Set a goal for the amount of times you want to do them on a monthly basis
Spend one minute at the end of each day updating it, then review at the end of every week to see which ones you need to be more consistent with.

You will struggle to do some good habits consistently, which is fine. The habit tracker is the way of holding you to account through transparency. The following techniques are ways to build effective habits and help you to stay on track for those you are finding it hard to be consistent with:

Making the daily things you want to do visible and frictionless e.g. if you want to read more – think about where youy read and always a book within reach e.g. on the sofa, if you want to eat healthy – have healthy food within sight etc.
Schedule activities in your calendar to make them more visible and to ensure you’ve blocked out the time e.g. going to the gym
Use your phone alarm to remind you to do a habit e.g. both going to bed and waking up early
Forced habits e.g. a socket that switches off the Wifi at 10pm everyday to force you to go to bed.
Stack new habits onto long-standing ones e.g. if you brush your teeth twice a day, you could add 20 push ups once you’re finished as a health habit.
Have an accountability partner to keep each other motivated for certain habits such as going to the gym.
You also need to make bad habits difficult to do e.g. use a website blocker on your phone or uninstalling apps you’re spending too much time on. For me it is twitter and retail websites!

Here’s to positive habits and the improvements they can have on our lives!