Habit Forming

Dr Xie used to say it takes, "100 days to develop the habit." Many productivity experts say its 21 days to ingrain new ways and some of us say it can take as long to reinforce a good habit as it took to develop the bad one being replaced!

Given that we are all creatures of habit and it takes tremendous effort to change, I thought I'd see what 2008 provides to help build, track, motivate and trick us into doing what we say is best.

This all started with a Lifehacker article about Jerry Seinfeld and how he manages to keep writing his comedy EVERY DAY. It's called myriad variations of "Don't break the chain" which is a simple method to keep one going. He said that he uses a big year wall calendar.

"...for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. After a few days you'll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain."

"Don't break the chain," he said again for emphasis.

Actually, a lot of people have read about that and created a number of apps to help. Don't Break the Chain, Joe's Goals, 43 Things, Loopdo, Making the Chain, Tools to Life, and others are in my sandbox right now and I'll be posting them here for all to view as I go through the process of choosing the very best for us to use.

Let's start the premise.

1. Pick a goal.
2. Mark off the days (with an X) on which you work toward that goal on a calendar.
3. Use your chain (XXXXXX) of marked off days as a motivator.

Jerry uses a big wall calendar showing a full year. Can you imagine the power of those little X's all linked. The more you have the less likely you are to skip one. We like things all neat and tidy and it should be a good motivator to do something to 'allow' you to X off today. I think really the overall best choice is that manual big wall calendar and just using it for ONE thing. But given my world, having it work on Google Desktop sidebar is key. It's with me no matter where I am and gives me encouragement to not break that chain.

Don't Break the Chain is my first implementation. You should be able to see it off to the right here in the blog with two goals displaying. Guitar & Qi Gong. Every morning I wake up and do my Qi Gong and every evening I play guitar. Now in the past I've been quite erratic with these two even though I SAY they are very important. Using DBTC I've not missed a day and it's easy. I can also say that the pressure to make the X is working, so far. I travel a lot for work (more on that silliness another day) and DBTC made me think hard about the Guitar playing. How can I do this on the road? I'll just have to setup chains that are for at home only. NO. WRONG. STUPID. What good is a broken chain? Is this important or not? My son Ché loaned me his 3/4 Strat and I checked luggage. Yuck, but worth it. My chain is unbroken and I had something to do while waiting an extra hour to board the jet.

I LOVE this tool. It is single function elegance which integrates into iGoogle (and Google Desktop with a trick shown at the end of this post), blogs, etc. It allows multiple chains to be tracked making each a different color and you can view the last 4 weeks, 1 month, 4 months or a year at a time.

So here comes the first problem; I have a little success and I want to add another chain. Let's get the workout in there. How about Deepak Chopra's Perfect Health eye exercises? Don't let me do it! It's time to focus and as CORE requires (another soon to come post) one can't add another project to a shaky CORE. The rule, for now, is to only allow items onto DBTC every 100 days... a salute to Dr. Xie.

It wasn't written to support Google Desktop so it doesn't resize nicely but you can do it. Go to Add Gadgets and add the following to the search box http://dontbreakthechain.com/goods/xml/google-gadget.xml
You'll need to login and accept the cookies and you might get some script debugging to cancel, but it works for me!