How to Start 34 New Good Habits This Year

“Failure is only postponed success…The habit of persistence is the habit of victory.” -Herbert Kaufman

Habit is habit and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.” -Mark Twain

We’ve often heard it takes about 21 days to form a habit. Bad habits seem to form on their own, in no time at all. We all have our share of those.

Good habits usually require more effort.  I’ve found that just remembering I’m trying to form a new habit is the tricky part.  The doing part is often easy, once I remember to do it.

Building systems for your business takes discipline and persistence. If you are weak in these qualities then you need to strengthen them. By making systemization a habit you’ll build discipline and persistence. But since these are good habits they won’t be easy.

Here’s a handy free tool you can use to help you form good habits.

It’s called Habitforge at http://habitforge.com

You describe to Habitforge the habit you want to form as a goal or desire.Then each day Habitforge will send you a customized e-mail asking if you worked on your habit the previous day. You answer yes or no and Habitforge tracks your success or failures in a nifty 21 day progress clock.

After 21 days of success you should find you have a new habit. If you miss a day you start over.  That’s motivating right there.  You really don’t want to have to start over at day one just because you forgot to work your habit on day 19 or day 20 or day 21.

I’ve been using it for a month and find it helpful and even motivating.Here’s couple of my own tips for using Habitforge.

Tip 1: Dealing with Weekends

Habitforge tracks your performance every day of the week, including weekends. For personal habits this is fine. But, for business related habits the weekends and holidays interrupt your efforts.

Habitforge lets you put habits on hold and then reactivate them later, without losing track of your progress. The way I use this for my business related habits is to create 2 recurring appointments in Outlook.

The first appointment is for Saturdays to remind me to deactivate my habits for the weekend.This allows the Habitforge email for Friday to be sent to me. On Saturday after answering the email I log into my Habitforge account and deactivate my business related habits. That way I don’t get reminder from Habitforge and my progress to date is maintained.

The second Outlook appointment is for Mondays and it reminds me reactivate my habits.You want to do this Monday so Habitforge will send you emails again starting for Mondays efforts.

Tip 2: Habit Overload

Habitforge lets you work on multiple habits at once. I’d recommend a small number. No more than 3 or 4 new habits at once.

I can manage 3 at one time. When I recently added a fourth habit I found it difficult to work on it. This might just be a factor of the difficulty of the habits you are working. Or it might be trying to do too much at once.

Don’t be in a rush. By working on just one habit at a time in one year you could form 17 new habits. Working on two habits at a time you could form 34 new habits. So don’t be in a rush.

“Time, patience, and perseverance will accomplish all things.” -Unknown

What new habits would you want to develop? How about working on systemizing your business an hour each day?

Leave a comment in the reply box and let me know what new habits you are going to work on.

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