I trust you have been enjoying this series exploring the 7 Keys for Living a Productive Life. I thrive on being able to share what I know with others and am loving being able to share with you what I have unpacked in my book, The Productive Life. In this message, I am going to cover Key #3: Build Your Habits.
If you are like me, you have as many, if not more, negative than positive thoughts that come to mind when you hear the word “habits”. Yet, when it comes to productivity I believe that habits are a massive game changer because they turn goals into reality.
For years I had a Mission statement that was lived through my Roles which had Goals and related Activities (this was the subject of my last message) but until I started building Habits around my goals, the effects were nowhere near where they could have been. As I created habits for each one of my goals the effect on my life was exponential.
For example, I have a Priority in my life to engage with God and a Goal of spending quality time in devotions every day. What helped this goal become a consistent reality in my life was creating the Habit of getting up at 5am every day and spending the next hour in devotions where I mediate, read Scripture, pray and record the spontaneous flow of thoughts that come to mind. No longer am I hoping to do this – it has become a habit and it happens! In fact, adding it to my Morning Habit Stack, that includes a number of other habits that happen one after each other, has ensured that I don’t miss a day! Of course, I can choose to delay the start of the habit but because there is a sequence of events that take place – it happens. This is what I will teach you to do in this chapter of my book!
My wife and I listened to an episode of the Kwik Brain podcast on our bird watching outing on Monday. This is our favourite podcast at the moment and not one that I mentioned in my book. It is by Jim Kwik and is all about understanding your brain and training your memory. It is more of a masterclass than a podcast and you should consider subscribing to it. Anyway, Jim interviewed the author of a new book entitled Wild Habits. In her book, Tara Mackey says that for habits to be successful they need four features (based on the word WILD): (1) Willingness: we must accept that something is not working and be willing to change; (2) Intuition: we must figure out what the next step is, take it and see where it leads us; (3) Love: we need to have the self-love to take the necessary step; and (4) Discipline: we need the discipline to take the step every day until it becomes a new habit.
Be Productive Now:
Here is an exercise you can do right now to help you with habit building:
- What is one goal that you are struggling to achieve at the moment?
- Think of a habit that you can start to help that goal become more attainable – it could be a really small action that take each day (James Clear speaks about Atomic Habits and Dr BJ Fogg speaks about Tiny Habits.)
- Start practicing the habit and use your calendar to help you remember to actually do it.
If you have not downloaded the sample chapter from my book on Building Habits – then you can use this link to get the Free Chapter.
If you have not done so already, grab a copy of my book on Amazon today (http://bit.ly/TPLBOOK) and get printable versions of the Workbook and the Productive Life Planner for free using the link to the Resource Folder available in the book!
In my next message I will explore Key #4: Plan Your Time. I trust you are starting to see how the keys build on each other.
Your productivity coach
Mark Tittley