I was watching a fantastic video from Veritasium‘s YouTube channel “Why Most Resolutions Fail & How To Succeed.” In the video, Derek talks about the book “Atomic Habits” by James Clear.
One of the ideas in the book is that you should try to achieve a 1% improvement in what you're doing. It's a small change, which makes it more reachable.
Another suggestion was to use very specific goals. Instead of saying I want to run 10K per day, start much smaller. I want to run two minutes per day.
If you wanted to start writing in a journal, instead of a goal of writing a page or two every day, start with writing one word. This gets you in the habit of opening up the journal, getting a pen and physically writing.
As time passes, you're new habits will become easier and you'll naturally extend how long you do the activity.
To help Derek visually remind him to do the things he wants to turn into a habit each day, Derek uses The Every Day Calendar by Simone Giertz.
The Every Day Calendar by Simone Giertz is a physical calendar with LEDs that you can hang on a wall. You push on the LED to turn them off or on. This gives are a great visual representation of how you're doing overall with your goal.
The Every Day Calendar is a kick starter product. While it is beautiful it is also not cheap at $300. It is only for one habit and if you aren't at home, you won't see it.
I wanted to be able to develop multiple habits and I'm a web developer so I came up with an online version of Simon's Every Day Calendar.
The version I built let's me add notes to each day's task and it in the Aeromir member's web site at the very top of the content area after you login. You can't miss it.
This is the kind of prompting that works well for me. Here's what it looks like:
The tool should help me get to my goal of a daily walk which will also help my health improve.
The tool is free for any one with an Aeromir account (which is free). https://aeromir.com/join
I recorded a short video explaining how to use the tool:
Let me know if you're using something like this to help you achieve your goals, or if you're using the tool I built. I'm open to suggestions too.
Enjoy it!
