We all have good and bad habits. Good habits help us to grow and move forward while bad habits hold our progress. Developing good habits can help you be productive without much effort. Routine helps us slowly but surely build a massive wall a brick a time, habits also can move us forwards or backwards. The big difference is that routine is something we can control, and habits aren’t.
Habit has three parts. First part is actual habit like eating popcorn, smoking cigarette, drinking tea or running unit test cases before committing code. Second part is circumstances which trigger habit like watching movie which trigger habit of eating popcorn or meeting breaks which trigger habit of smoking. Third part is reward. Habits gives us some rewards like some kind of mental satisfaction.
Recognize Bad Habits
Whatever activity we do for long time, it becomes habit. We all have hundreds of habits which we are doing from long time. We need to evaluate those consciously and turning bad ones into good ones. It can increase productivity and make us healthy via replacing bad habit to good habit.
To recognize bad habits, just track your daily life for one week and list down all activities which you think they are not good for health, time wasters or unproductive. Once you have list, do not try to change all of them immediately. Believe me, you will fail. Choose small one and identify that what circumstances trigger that habit and what rewards you get when you do that. Now try to alter that habit. Try to change your routine and putting some rules around that.
Earlier, I was habitual of tea and coffee. Once I identified, in place of completely stopping this and setting myself for failure, I reduced quantity. In place of taking full cup of tea, I started half cup. This change helped me immediately because now my body was taking half of quantity with same mental satisfaction. Later I reduced frequency.
I had habit to check social media very frequently and it was becoming my big timewasters. I uninstalled these apps from my phone. Now I know that I can check only when I will be in front of computer at home. Later I set rule, that I will check only once in evening.
Since I altered my habit slowly, it worked. So identify your habit and change them slowly, change the circumstances which trigger that habit, change your routine and set rules around that habit so that frequency can reduce.
Form Good Habit
Apart from changing bad habits, form new good habits as well. To form a new habits, you need determination and consistency. If you will keep following new activity for a long time, it will become habit and will be a part of your daily routine.
I am running daily since several months, I also read daily about my current technology for 30 minutes. Since I am doing it from several months, these have become my habit.
This is time, where you should pick pen and paper and identify your bad habits. Pick one of them and change them slowly. Be consistent, it will be painful but if you will stick with your promise, definitely, you will see a rainbow of success. Later identify new habits and make them part of your daily life.