It's Habit Forming!

New Year’s resolutions, I’m told, are merely a to-do list for the first week of January. 

I’ve got plans for 2019. For example, I am seriously considering turning sixty years old, just for kicks. In fact, I’ve already booked myself in at a writers’ retreat in Florida as a present to myself and an investment in the next decade. 

I’m also looking forward to retiring from my day job this spring, although I try to look at it not so much like retiring as changing jobs. I want to see what will happen if I devote that time and mental energy to my writing world instead of the municipal world I’ve been part of for the past ten years. This, of course, will require self-discipline by the bucketful, because no one but me will be setting my hours.

And frankly, that’s scary.

I’ve started reading Atomic Habits by James Clear and will probably be harping on it for a while. He says, “Changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound into remarkable results if you’re willing to stick with them for years.”

I know this is true. Ten years ago, I began writing 500 words a day. I’ve missed the mark many, many days. But 455 blog posts and three novels later, the habit has amounted to nearly half a million words—none of which would have happened had I not made it a small, daily habit. Or if I had declared myself a failure and quit the first time I skipped a day.

James Clear knows it’s easy to think those small, everyday habits don’t make a difference. He says, “When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it—but all that had gone before.”

He says to focus on your process, not on goals. Our efforts to develop desirable habits often go sideways because we buy into an all or nothing philosophy. A “go big or go home” way of thinking (which has never worked for me, because going home is my favorite thing.) The end goal is, in many ways, out of your hands. But the daily habit is totally within your grasp. My advice is two-fold.

1.     Go Small.

Start with one tiny, sustainable habit and don’t worry about the rest. Instead of trying to go completely sugar-free, can you learn to drink coffee or tea without sugar? Rather than organizing the whole house and failing, how about one drawer or shelf? If you ever learned to walk, you started with baby steps. And you fell a lot. Which leads to my second point…

2.     Start Again.

Don’t write the whole project off because you missed a day or even a week. Pick it up again tomorrow and don’t overthink it.

More on habits next week. Happy New Year!