It can be difficult to maintain a habit, especially one that requires focus for an extended period of time.
Examples:
- Writing
- Reading
- Practicing an instrument
- Doing your workout
- Homework
- Tackling a business project
We tend to procrastinate, especially when these habits seem big or daunting.
One common remedy is to try a “sprint” for a set period of time. 20-minute sprints tend to be popular with writers. The Pomodoro work method suggests 25-minute periods of focus, with 5-minute breaks between.
These are great strategies to get your started, but we are going to see why they tend not to work in the long-term.
Here’s a great example:
You’ve just finished a difficult day at work. You’re exhausted. There’s a new series on Netflix you want to watch. You really need to de-stress.
But you also want to keep making progress on your new story. It’s been great getting in your 20-minute writing sprints every single day.
There’s no way you can imagine putting in 20 minutes today though! Why not take a break?
Now, there’s nothing wrong with taking a day off. However, let’s imagine this example if you had a different outlook:
You’ve just finished a difficult day at work. You’re exhausted. There’s a new series on Netflix you want to watch. You really need to de-stress.
But you also want to keep making progress on your new story. You only need to get 1 minute of writing in to keep up your daily streak. It’s so easy that, even on your worst days, you’ve usually written 7 minutes minimum.
Just 1 minute of writing is all you need to keep this habit going! That’s ridiculously easy to do before you take the night to de-stress. And now you’ll feel extra good about your much-deserved Netflix night, because you also got your writing time in too and kept momentum on your story going.
In the second example, we are using a count-up timer to track our habit. The “sprint” method in the first example involves a count-down timer.
Whatever you choose for your count-down milestone, be it 5-minutes, 10, or 20, the point is, you are fixing the bar at a level higher than might be sustainable on a given day.
On the other hand, if you set an easy goal like “write for 1 minute minimum”, you’ll almost always do more than this. The challenge is overcoming the mental barrier of feeling your task is too difficult, which usually leads to procrastination.
Our Multihabit system uses count-up timers only so that you can approach habit-tracking down to the minute, allowing your goals to scale from this simplest level.
Your writing week might look like:
Monday: 25 minutes
Tuesday: 37 minutes
Wednesday: 8 minutes
Thursday: 45 minutes
Friday: 11 minutes
Whereas with count-down timers, your week might look like:
Monday: 2 x 20 minutes
Tuesday: 1 x 20 minutes
Wednesday: 0
Thursday 0
Friday: 1 x 20 minutes
When you compare progress between these two, the “0” days stand out and cause distress. In the count-up approach, you see consistency. In the count-down, you see difficulty.
Notice also that in the count-up approach, the total time was 126 minutes, whereas in the second, it was 80 minutes.
This illustrates an important point. Though it might seem like you’re setting the bar too low with the 1-minute minimum count-up method, in actual fact, in the long-term you will perform better than the fixed count-down method.
The reason for this: each day, the total minutes you spent on your habit were the exact number of minutes you were able to do without strain. You had permission, at any minute, to decide, “I’m done for today.” As a result, you showed up every day.
This is a much more scalable goal, and actually works as a little trick to get you reconnecting to a habit that, each time you resume, tends to build momentum.
Stay tuned next week, when we will explore more Multihabit principles.