1: You’ve decided to meditate twenty minutes a day.
To implement this new habit, you decide you will sit down and meditate every other day.
Sounds reasonable, right?
Unfortunately, you have likely set yourself up for failure.
“You’ll get the greatest compliance,” Tynan writes in Superhuman by Habit, “by maximizing frequency and minimizing intensity.”
The best strategy? First, make it a daily habit. Second, reduce the time it takes.
“This combination greatly increases your chances of sticking with a habit,” he observes. “Once you have any level of success, it’s easy to build upon it to strengthen the habit.”
2: Committing to doing something every day is “magic,” Tynan explains. “Whether for small or big habits, bias yourself strongly towards habits which require daily execution.
“There are several factors in play that counter-intuitively make daily habits the easiest to maintain,” he writes.
“Let’s say that you’ve decided you’re going to clean your house every Sunday,” he writes. “One Sunday, though, you have a dinner party that extends into the late evening. With more work to do than usual and less energy to do it with, you decide to clean up Monday instead.
“As a busy person, however, you already have a full day booked for Monday. So while it was easy to imagine you cleaning up the night before when you were exhausted, the practical task of finding time to clean during an already packed day is much more difficult.
“The task gets pushed for a few more days,” Tynan notes, “and finally you decide to just skip that week and do it the following Sunday.”
You’ve made a series of rational choices, but this “downward spiral of decisions” makes it much more likely you will abandon the habit altogether.
“Daily habits, on the other hand,” he observes, “are resistant to the reasonable reschedule. If you say that you’re going to clean every single day, you can’t just push the habit by a day.
“Instead, you are skipping a day, something you should be building an extraordinary aversion to [hyperlink to last Sunday’s post]. Even though it leads to failure in the long run, the reasonable reschedule feels like a partial success. Skipping does not.”
When you commit to doing something every day, you elevate its importance in your mind. “It’s hard to juggle complex weekly and irregular schedules,” Tynan explains, “but you know the basic things you must do each day.”
Over time, this new habit becomes part of who you are
“I’ve written every day for the past nine months or so,” he shares. “If I didn’t write today, something would feel wrong, just as if I forgot to brush my teeth.
3: Getting better at getting better is what RiseWithDrew is all about. Monday through Thursday, we explore ideas from authors, thought leaders, and exemplary organizations.
Currently at the end of each week, RiseWithDrew explores ideas from Tynan’s book Superhuman by Habit. We will begin with several weeks on the mechanics of building habits. What I like most about this book, however, are his suggestions for specific habits, which we will eventually cover.
Another benefit of choosing a daily habit is that you can begin small.
“The amount of time required to clean a house that was just cleaned twenty-four hours ago is usually minimal,” Tynan notes. “The urge to push or skip a small task is much smaller than a large one. It’s more likely that the reasons for skipping these smaller tasks will not be physical, but psychological, which we can work on.
“If you need five hours to clean but only have two, you have to skip. If you need thirty minutes but don’t feel like spending that time, you can convince yourself to suck it up and be a champion.”
Rather than meditate for twenty minutes every other day, you decide instead to meditate for just one minute every day.
“This sounds ridiculous,” he reasons, “and probably won’t bring you any tangible benefits on its own, but once it becomes part of your life, doubling it to two minutes is also very easy.
“Then you increase to five minutes, then ten, then fifteen. Once you get there, you’ll be so used to meditating that cutting the frequency to every other day while doubling the duration to half an hour will be manageable.”
Starting small and making regular increases will likely result in achieving the goal at a date far in the future, maybe several months or even a year from now.
“If you’re thinking short-term, you may discard this idea,” he explains. “If you think long-term, though, you realize that just having the habit is the most important part, and that the cumulative benefits of even a reduced intensity meditation habit will be far greater than those from an aborted, intense habit that lasts only a couple weeks.”
Tynan’s recommendation: “Start small, become consistent, and increase at a manageable pace. That’s how you optimize for the finish line, rather than the starting line.”
More next week!
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Reflection: What habit have you abandoned because you started too big instead of starting small?
Action: Choose one habit you want to build, reduce it to something you can complete in one minute, and commit to doing it every day.
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