How to Form Life-Changing Habits With Tiny Changes
Last year I became a morning person, learned a new language and read five times more books than before. Looks like I did a lot, right? But it wasn’t frightening or exhausting; rather, all of these results were the result of doing the little things every day for an extended period.
This post originally appeared on the Buffer blog .
I’m a big fan of working smarter, not harder, and finding small ways to make my work more efficient . As the first Content Crafter at Buffer about two years ago, I got the opportunity to do quite a bit of research on these topics.
Now I’m happy to come back to show you how I achieved these victories in 2015.
- Having worked out the habit of practicing French for just 5 minutes a day, I can now read, write and speak basic French.
- Due to the habit of reading one page every night, I’ve managed to grow my reading list fivefold in the last couple of years.
Basically, I used small daily habits to achieve big, long-term results. There are four principles that I try to stick to whenever I develop a new habit. In everything I’ve tried, these principles seem to work every time.
1. Start Small: Repeat The Tiny Habit Every Day
When I first started focusing on building healthier habits a few years ago, one of the biggest mistakes I made was asking too much of myself. I would go from reading almost never to trying to read one book a week. Or from getting up at 9 a.m. most of the time, to trying to get out of bed before 6 a.m. every morning.
The distance between where I started, and the place where I wanted to be, was so great that I often failed. And each failure made it harder to succeed the next day.
At its core, as James Clear explains , habits are tied to daily routines. And what I really needed were small wins and visible progress to help me create a new daily routine that I could stick to every day. Finally, I got the idea to start small . The point is to focus on repeating this habit every day, without worrying about how effective it is . In other words, quantity first; quality later .
Dental floss is a great example . Let’s say you want to floss every night but haven’t flossed in years. If you start flossing out of the blue and wasting 10 minutes every night, you probably won’t last more than a week. This is a very important question. But starting small is so effective that it’s almost like a superpower. Here’s how it will work with dental floss: you take the tiniest part of the habit, which can work – in this case, it will be a Floss only one tooth. This still counts as flossing, but you won’t get much success with your oral hygiene this way.
But here’s where it comes into play: First, you focus on flossing just one tooth every night. And you’ve been doing it for over a week. Then more than two. Then three to four weeks. You can stick to this habit because it is very simple . Flossing a single tooth is virtually effortless, so it’s hard to find an excuse not to. And once flossing one tooth is easy and automatic, you’ll start flossing two.
For a while, you floss two teeth every night. Then you increase to three. And slowly you move upward, never making such big jumps that would turn into routine work. By starting small, you focus on making the behavior automatic, before worrying about making the behavior large enough to produce a useful result.
As Scott H. Young says , we tend to overestimate our capabilities, especially when we enter the unknown. Scott suggests planning as if you could only set aside 20% of the time and energy you would like to be more realistic.
Here’s how I applied the start small process to my habits in 2015:
Reading: one page per night
I started by reading one page of the book every night before bed. I often read more, but if all I had was one page, I would consider it a victory. Later, when this habit had grown stronger, I set the timer and read for 15 minutes, and eventually I read 30 minutes before bed and another 30 minutes in the morning.
I start by adding one page: in 2013 I read 7 books. In 2014 – 22. In 2015 – 33. This is almost five times more than I read in 2013. I’ve been working on this habit for about a year and a half. It probably sounds like a long time, but it only seems so in hindsight.
When I work out of my habit, all I think about is how much I need to read today to count the victory. I always focus on small daily efforts. But when I look back at my progress, I realize what great accomplishments these daily habits have become.
Learning a new language: one lesson every morning
I’ve dabbled in French before, but I wasn’t very good at sticking to it. When I decided that I really wanted to improve my French, I started by developing the habit of taking only one Duolingo lesson each morning while I was drinking coffee. (If you haven’t tried it yet, Duolingo is a free web and mobile app that can help you learn many languages.)
One lesson takes about five minutes, so it’s a tiny undertaking and fairly easy to complete when I’m sitting and drinking coffee anyway. Eventually I started doing more than one lesson – two, three, sometimes even four or five if I liked it. I did as much as I wanted, but I always did at least one .
It took just one lesson to break the habit for the whole day, so it was easy to stick with it even when I didn’t feel like doing more. I am also currently using Babbel (a paid web and mobile language learning app) to better understand the grammar rules and structure of the French language, and I have completed the entire French section in Duolingo.
According to Duo, this means I know about 41% of French! This is a great achievement in just five minutes a day!
2. Focus on one habit at a time
When it comes to developing new habits, the hardest thing for me is not to take on too much at once. I always have such ambitious plans for things that I want to be better at and so much enthusiasm when I first start that I want to develop multiple habits at once.
Every time I tried this approach I was failing. Usually some habits don’t persist, but sometimes none of them persist. It’s too much to focus on at the same time – it’s a bit like multitasking , where your brain has to constantly switch contexts because you really can’t focus on multiple things at the same time.
So my new rule is to only work on one habit at a time. It is only when this habit becomes so automatic that I can easily do it every day and I start a new habit. In the example above, I read every night before focusing on French. And I easily took French lessons every day before I got up early.
Sometimes it can take a long time to form a habit. Getting up early was something that I constantly had to do with all my might. I spent about four months focusing on this same habit: trying different approaches, tracking my progress, and communicating with friends who helped keep me updated. I was determined to make it a permanent habit, but that meant I didn’t develop any other habits for months.
Now I’m glad that I stuck with this habit for so long because I get up early almost every day without even trying. It was not easy, but it was worth the effort.
The time it takes to develop a habit varies, so four months may be longer or shorter than you need to. We often hear the idea that it takes 21 days to develop a habit, but research has shown that we all take different times to develop new habits. In one study, the average time it took to develop a new habit was 66 days – about two months.
The lesson I’ve learned is to treat each habit differently, depending on how difficult it is for you to stick to it all the time, but you also need to focus on just one habit at a time for it to fully grab your attention and energy. …
3. Removing obstacles: everything you need is always at hand.
I find it much easier to complete my habits when I have the right equipment at hand. For example, holding my phone in my hand while drinking coffee made it easier for me to develop the habit of doing quick French lessons at the time. Reading a book every night became much easier when I kept the book by my bed.
Malcolm Gladwell calls this a tipping point . This is the small change that forces you to act instead of making excuses. One notable example of the power of a tipping point is the study of tetanus education at university . The study examined whether an attempt to induce a higher level of fear of tetanus could induce more students to get vaccinated against tetanus. The level of fear of the educational program did not seem to matter, but one surprising change did matter: the addition of a campus map showing the clinic and vaccination time raised the vaccination rate from 3% to 28%.
The tipping point is that tiny change that makes it easy enough to take action that you actually do. I like to think of it as removing any obstacles that make it easy to kick your habits.
One habit I want to develop in 2016 is playing the piano more often. Right now, I play whenever the mood hits me, which is not enough to get better. But I’ve noticed that I try to play more often when the piano is easy to get to. It’s in the corner of our living / dining / kitchen right now, so I can easily sit down and play a little while waiting for something to be cooked or when I walk into the kitchen for a bite to eat.
Another habit I want to focus on this year is more regular exercise. I have noticed that once I put on my gym clothes, I’m pretty sure I’ll go out for a run, but as long as those clothes are not on, it’s much easier to come up with excuses not to go out. I take off my exercise clothes the night before and put them on quickly in the morning before I come up with excuses, which tend to get me out the door quicker. I plan to do this more often as I focus on developing this habit.
4. A set of habits: create new routines instead of existing ones.
One of my favorite ways to develop new habits is to connect them with existing ones. This turns several habits into a routine, and each habit kicks off the next.
The interesting thing about this is that you already have a lot of habits that you probably don’t know about. Brushing your teeth before bed, getting out of bed in the morning, making coffee every day at the same time – all these are existing habits. As long as you do something at the same time every day without thinking about it, this is a habit that you can tie others to .
If you adopt a new habit after you’ve finished an existing one, you can rely on the strength of the existing habit to help keep the new habit on track. For example, when I get out of bed, the first thing I do is go downstairs to make coffee. When the coffee is ready, I start my French lesson. My existing coffee habit is the trigger for completing my French lesson. And when I go to bed at night, I open the book, sitting by the bed. I go to bed and look at the book as a trigger that encourages reading in the evenings.
Research has shown that prompting you to work on your new habit may be the most effective way to ensure that you stick with the habit over the long term. When you add habits, you use existing ones as cues for each new habit you want to develop.
Over time, you can add new habits to existing ones to take advantage of the automatic behaviors you’re already doing.
Acquiring new habits has become something of a hobby for me. It’s nice to think of all the skills I can learn and improve over time, just by developing tiny habits that I repeat every day. This makes huge gains seem much more attainable.
If you would like to learn more about how I develop habits that help me work smarter, not harder, you can enroll in my Productive Habits course.
How I became a morning person, learned a new language and read 5 times more books in 2015 | Buffer