How to Create Positive Habits, Systems and Routines
- nickogbonna
- Jun 7, 2020
- 4 min read
First and foremost, I hope you are all safe and well. These are difficult times we all find ourselves in, individually and as a collective. I’m going to hazard a guess that you’ve been attempting, either successfully or unsuccessfully to develop some sort of new routine to make the most of this new world order.
This subject matter is something I find quite comfortable and reassuring talking about, systems, habits and routines. I feel like my life, through my own design, is just a series of systems that I have worked on and attempted to refine through trial and error. The aim of this email will be to help you implement positive habits into your daily/weekly routine to keep you moving in the right direction and most importantly to keep you sane.
If you’re part of the lucky group of individuals, who have had the privilege of partaking in a 1:1 PT session with me :), then you probably know about my favourite ; that life is essentially just a room of plates spinning on their individual sticks . Each plate represents an area of your life (work, health, family, etc.). Each one of these plates can have its own system for keeping it spinning. If we look at the room as a whole, it can feel quite overwhelming, which makes it easier for us to be distracted by the less challenging option (scrolling through instagram), but if we focus on a particular plate and say to ourselves that the aim of today is to keep this plate spinning, then suddenly an overwhelming situation becomes a clear and purposeful one.
So how do we keep this singular plate spinning?
If we are feeling sore and achey and not ready to physically exercise, then we would probably warm up/mobilise to get us to a point of physical readiness. The same applies for tasks requiring mental effort. Let me run you through a scenario. You wake up, you’re feeling extremely motivated, you think about all the stuff you’re going to get done today. 2 hours later you’re scrolling through instagram having spent the last hour and a half doing the same. You now feel like you’ve failed yourself, the shame kicks in and you tell yourself you will tackle these tasks tomorrow. This was me last Saturday. In truth, you were climbing a very steep hill requiring boatloads of willpower from the beginning IF all you did was SAY you were going to do all of these things.
Having systems in place to fall back on will allow you to reset quickly and not beat yourself up, when you get distracted or when motivation dwindles (which it always does). Here are some tips for developing your system:
1. Be very clear on your main goal for the day!
- If all else fails today, what is the one thing that would make your day successful if it were to be completed. Write it down, make it clear and specific. For example. I wrote down yesterday that my main goal for today would be to write this email. If I get it done, today is a success, regardless of anything else.
2. Make it easy to start with!
- Sometimes the hardest part of any task is just getting going. Be clear on what the first step is and if you can, make it a simple one. For example, I hate doing introductions to any piece of writing (Miss Hayes always said they were the weakest part of my A-Level essays), therefore I try not to start with the introduction. I come back to it once I’m already getting into the flow of the work.
3. Praise your small wins.
- Recognise everything you achieve in a day, even it is as simple as putting a wash on. It is easier to keep a positive mindset and repeat positive habits from a position of self-admiration, compared to one of self loathing.
4. Be aware of potential distractions!
- Note down any potential road blocks that will stop you from getting your tasks done. You might not even realise that something is a distraction until it happens, so if you get distracted in the course of a day, don’t beat yourself up, just note down the distraction and think of something you can implement to stop that particular distraction. For example I find myself aimlessly scrolling through social media when i get distracted, so I downloaded an app (called Flipd), which hides all forms of social media from my phone when I want to focus deeply on a task.
5. Beware the tyranny of the to-do list/try ‘TIMEBOXING’ instead
- The danger of to-do lists is the inevitable feeling of being a failure, when the long list you said you’d reel off in a day rolls onto the next day…and the day after that…and the day after that. We rarely take into account the time cost of tasks when putting them down on our lists. So an idea I find very effective is, instead of writing down ‘finish presentation’, why not write ‘devote 2 hours of focused work into presentation’. This way you have a clear time frame where you can focus on a task. The objective is to do, not to finish, but the renewed focus might lead to finishing the task anyway.
So try to give those a go and see how you get on. Remember don’t beat yourself up if you lose focus on a task. Just note why, reset and get back to it.
‘We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our systems’
James Clear
Have a great week!
Nick OG Fitness MSc
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