Habits

Lately I've been thinking a lot about habits. Since the beginning of the year, I've been trying to understand my behavior patterns better to figure out why I'm not getting more of the things I want to do accomplished, why I feel stressed and rushed much of the time, why I struggle to get out of bed in the morning and generally how I can make my life work better. In the process, I realize I've established some habits that aren't getting me where I want to go. I also don't make a habit of some things that will help me accomplish my goals.

Let's just say I have some morning routine issues at the moment....

I was checking one of the many self-help and development blogs I follow today and learned that it takes 3 weeks of daily repetition to form a habit.  My company has a saying that whatever gets measured usually improves, so I thought the right way to improve my habits would be to make a list and actually track how often I do or don't do these things for three weeks.

For the purposes of this list, I picked some quick fix things. If I made a list of ALL my habits that need adjustment I'd be writing all weekend.

Here's what I'll be working on......

Things I need to stop doing
Hitting the snooze button on the alarm -- several times -- every morning
Scratching my skin when it gets dry
Falling into bed with my makeup on
Chewing a broken nail until it's even instead of filing it off
Ending almost every sentence I write with exclamation points!!!
Eating/drinking things directly from the container (Single people, you KNOW you do this. Non-single people, you STILL do it on the sly when you're alone)

Things I need to start doing
Drinking water every day
Brushing my teeth after every meal
Moisturizing daily

I put my list on a spreadsheet, printed it and put it on the fridge. My little experiment starts tomorrow and will end on Friday, May 11th -- that's exactly 21 days. My blog entry on May 11th will include my results. If you don't see the blog, you'll know I failed miserably and I expect you to berate me using any methods you deem appropriate. We all need a little help forming habits, after all.

Wish me luck!