Photo by AlphaTradeZone
Following my Introduction to Habit Builders, this guide explains how to use our Habit Builder to make better progress towards work and life goals. Handily the guide is also applicable to most Habit Trackers, as always the key is to find something that you like, get started and learn what works for you.
Set Direction
Inspired by Solution Focused Coaching we start by writing what is wanted in the Goal section. Your goal is your direction, after all, knowing where you are going is pretty important if you want to get anywhere. It’s highly motivating to have an overall theme or purpose for habits, helping keep momentum, provide inspiration, guide decisions and encourage noticing of things that will help.
As an example, a common theme in leadership coaching is balancing work and other aspects of life, the direction might therefore be “Focus at work, present at home”. The direction must be meaningful to you, but can be meaningless to others , this is quite likely if you wrap a number of development areas into one phase.
Now think about what you’ll do More of to go in the desired direction, you’re looking for things that will contribute directly and in-directly. It could be anything from courage, energy, practice or thinking time.
So, to achieve “Better work and personal life blend” we may need more of “Being present, discipline, drawing boundaries, enjoying moments“
If you are trying to stop a habit it’s generally more motivating and likely to succeed if couched in terms of what is wanted, or a replacement habit. For instance ‘Drink less coffee’ becomes ‘Maximum two coffees per day’. ‘Stop being late for work’ becomes ‘Be there at 8:55am’.
There are however some behaviours which don't have a convenient 'More Of' equivalent. That's where the 'Less Of' section comes in, it's used to remind us what to move away from. For example, 'Less Of: Time browsing news sites' or 'Less of: Taking on work that my team should do'
Get Specific
Now you’ve set the scene, list the things you want to do, your target habits. Simply write habits in the left hand column. Habits can be anything you like, you own it and it's not designed to be shared. We're looking for an accumulation of small changes and gains which build up to something much bigger. Aim for items that you can observe and have a high degree of control over. They should blend value, challenge level and achievability.
In our example the habits that will take us towards “Better work and personal life blend” could be: Leave desk for forty five minutes at lunch, Strict end to work day, Socialise on Fridays.
If you’d like to keep your initiatives private, use codes, symbols or acronyms, should anyone see your Habit Builder all they’ll know is that you are working hard towards something good.
Returning to the chart, the numbers along the top typically represent days in a month, but can be used however you like, including smaller periods of time such as morning, afternoon, evening. Don’t wait for the next month though, get started now.
Rate Yourself
The next step is to think about how to rate your progress for each habit. The clearer and more repeatable the rating is the easier it is to gauge progress and hold yourself to account.
For my own builder I use a range of symbols:
Tick - did it, achieved
Cross - not achieved
Line - Not applicable that day, especially useful for cheat days.
Rating or scale - An assessment of how it went; a number, emoticon, traffic light, High, Low, Medium.
Number - The actual quantity of something, minutes of an activity, coffees’ drunk, blocks of time spent on an activity.
Thinking beyond binary pass/fail ratings adds new perspectives and insight, as does looking for trends, trying to beat a previous streak or personal best is highly motivating. The rating is a way to visualise progress, but the real goal is to discover what works and do more of it
For example, consider the goal of finding more time to think and make progress on important topics, a pretty common theme in professional coaching. Let’s say the idea is to think strategically for forty five minutes each day.
Logging time dedicated to this across a month should indicate when it is most likely to happen, for instance Mondays and Fridays might frequently show 0 minutes and failed sessions, curiously though the Thursday session always works. Now we can explore what circumstances lead to that, and what can be learned to make other sessions better.
Closing Thoughts
Working with a Habit Builder is a great way to support progress towards goals. All that’s needed is the discipline to use the builder and honesty to reflect and learn from what it shows you. If you don't use the builder as often as you'd like and changes aren't happening then perhaps regular use of the builder, essential development of a training mindset, is actually the habit to focus on first.
There are more tips for successful habit building in the next post.