So I’ve been using the gift of time and space the current situation offers me to focus on my habits. What they are, how they affect my life and how I can maybe stop some and develop some new, better ones. I’m using a personal focus on this and I don’t take myself too seriously but I take what I do seriously and the business outcome I’m looking for is to enhance my effectiveness, focus and bottom line.
I’m using James Clear’s ‘Atomic Habits’ book as my guide and some other books are going to come and play as well. There are a series simple and powerful of concepts and themes in ‘Atomic Habits’ that I’ve taken to guide me.
The first is simply to recognise the impact our habits have on us-
Habits are funny things, they drive us, often on autopilot, so to some degree they are our masters but we set them up and develop them to this point of them being subconscious so really, we should be in control of them. I don’t think I am though.
I’m very aware of some of my habits but I suspect others live in my less easy to reach, back of the cupboard, under the carpet type psychological places – I’m not really that conscious of them and don’t have any real awareness of why and how they started.
The opportunity the current situation allows to me is to step back and identify what I do on a daily basis – which habits help me and which ones don’t – bring them all into conscious awareness so I have a choice to make about them. Choice is good. We like choice.
I’m going to organise my habits into a line up so I can identify which ones need to be kicked out for bad behaviour and which ones I will keep. Like picking the best players for your team (I’m going to gloss over the scars though from those particular playground memories).
So I’m going to notice what I do on a typical morning and identify each behaviour. I’m just going to be a curious observer of my own actions and list them. Then I’m going to rate each habit as ‘Effective’, ‘Ineffective’ or ‘Neutral’. This is known as creating a ‘Habit Scorecard’.
So, here we go –
- Wake up – Effective
- Check my phone – Ineffective
- Go to bathroom – Neutral
- Make cup of tea – Neutral
- Watch news on TV – Neutral
- Take breakfast to children – Neutral
- Watch more news on TV – Ineffective
- Check phone – Ineffective
- Fitness workout – Effective
- Have shower- Neutral
- Get dressed- Neutral
- Go to (home) office – Effective
- Look at emails – Effective
- Open first email – Effective
- Look at news website – Ineffective
- Go back to first email again – Effective
- Make note of any actions it needs – Effective
- Go and make cup of tea – Ineffective
- Look at next email – get distracted by its content and look at a website to investigate something related (loosely) to it – Ineffective
- Ok, so this email/distraction dance continues for some time.
What have I learned-
First of all, how interesting it is to just notice what I do without judgement.
Secondly, I have some clear habits that don’t help me.
Thirdly and possibly most interesting, even reviewing my morning activity objectively brings out my negative inner voice quite strongly. I battle with this voice quite frequently so I’m going to bring it into the blog – I may need to revise my blog title – ‘The Challenge of developing new habits when my inner voice prefers to focus on my rubbish current ones’. Not very catchy but pretty accurate.
So next blog is going to be about how I’m going to change some of my habit patterns and how my inner voice impacts my success.