You want active habits in your life, so you need to do that on a daily basis with baby steps. For instance, one thing you can do is try to slowly eliminate the bad habits, the addictions.
A question I get all the time from my audience here is, “What can I do to develop daily habits and become more productive?”
The first thing I would say is, you already have daily habits, and they’re probably not good habits. The human brain operates by patterns or establishes certain neural pathways. When you do something and the pathway is established, you’re inclined to you repeat it over and over again. That’s how the brain operates; through patterns and habits. It’s inevitable.
There’s not a single human being on the planet who does not have habits. It’s ingrained in your behaviour in human nature. But there are two kinds of habits that you must understand: there are active habits and there are passive habits.
Passive habits are bad; generally, active habits are good. You want the active habits.
Passive habits are addictions, like, “I’ve got to check my Instagram feed every five minutes,”… “I’ve got to eat this, I’ve got to drink that.”
These kinds of addictions are habits that are imposed on you. You’re doing them over and over and over again. They’re not leading to anything. They’re a waste of time. They’re draining you emotionally of energy that you need in life.
Negative habits have a drain on you emotionally, and they waste valuable space in your brain. Active habits, we all have engaged in active habits at some point in our lives, and they are learning something.
You learn a foreign language, you learn how to play the piano, you learn how to do a sport, right? In the beginning, it’s difficult, and slowly, as you do step one, step two, step three…
Pathways are established in your brain, and they become automatic. When something becomes automatic, you can go on to the next level, and you know you can become more and more proficient.
You want active habits in your life, so you need to do that on a daily basis with baby steps. For instance, one thing you can do is try to slowly eliminate the bad habits, the addictions.
Disconnect from the internet for several hours a day or longer, if you can. Stop spending so much time, looking at the same sites or app. You’ve already freed up a few hours.
You’ve got to now fill up that time with something productive, with something active. Take up something new that will force your mind to be active. Learn a new skill, learn a new language, try to take on something that you’ve never done before.
Then you’ll discover that, slowly, in this way, you’re developing this discipline inside yourself that will allow you to take on other challenges. You want continual challenges for yourself; that is what develops these active habits.
So, if you’re on a project, give yourself a deadline. Let’s say you have a month to get a project in. The bad habits, the procrastination, the unproductive way, you’d waste several weeks, you’d kind of dawdle here and there… Then maybe a week before, you start getting the energy up, and then like the final few days, you cram, and you get the damn thing in, and maybe it’s not so good.
Challenge yourself; give yourself only a week to finish what they should normally take a month. That’s going to force you to get into a higher gear, to work really hard, day by day.
When you’re in the passive mode of habit, you think that pleasure comes from wasting time, from watching movies, from spending time hours watching sports, from checking on your Instagram feed. That seems kind of relaxing, kind of fun, or socialising, etc. You think discipline, working hard is not fun at all.
You’ve got to change that. You can never develop healthy habits unless you change your notion of pleasure.
Pleasure isn’t getting immediate rewards and immediate gratification. It’s in one month or in one year, I will have finished this project, and it’ll give me a sense of fulfilment and happiness. It’ll be far greater than anything I could have got from that instant kind of gratification that my bad habits gave me
Alter your sense of pleasure. If you give yourself a challenge, “I was gonna start this business in a year,” and you say, “No, I’m going to start it in two months.” Everything will kick into gear, and you will develop these habits because you have to start now.
How do you create deadlines for yourself? That’s a whole other subject. You tell people about it. You announce that you’re going to start this business in a few months. You announce that your book will be finished. You announce that, and to not do that, it will be kind of humiliating; it’ll be shameful. You sort of force yourself into that, but working hard on something has to become a form of pleasure.
You’re never going to be able to develop the requisite discipline to get anything done in life. What will happen is, you can practice this on small levels, you can practice this: in one week, I want to accomplish this. I don’t know if I can do it in a week.
You tell your wife, your husband, your boyfriend, your girlfriend, your dog, or whomever, that you’re going to finish it in one week. In a way, you know it’s going to be different. Test yourself, you try, and you’ll notice that you’re working hard, and if you don’t quite reach it, you did more than you thought you could do.
If you do reach it, you feel the ride. You feel excited about yourself. You learned. You’ve pushed past your limits. You understood that doing this has rewards.
That’s how you’ll gain these other forms of habits and become more productive, by giving yourself these kind of large-scale rewards and seeing the true pleasure in life lies in delaying gratification and working on something longer term.