Habit updates
So when I started my attempt to blog regularly a little over a month and a half ago, I had an overly ambitious goal of adding one meaningful entry per day. Obviously that requires a significant time investment and whilst I managed it for a week, I've fallen off. This wasn't unexpected however, as with all habit building/breaking it's unlikely to change the first time you try. I reaslied it follows the trend of dieting or the gym that most people have. They are pretty vigilant for the first week or two, then they miss a day because of a work function, or they are sick. Then they miss another for a different reason. The routine is then broken and they stop going, they might have spurts of activity where they regain or rediscover their original motivation but the routine always gets interrupted or broken.
What I've realised is that isn't a bad thing, it'd be ideal if we could robotically acquire and discard habits at will. I'd program myself to wake at 6, go running, work efficiently, not eat crap and so on. It's not a bad thing to have routines broken because then the feeling of achievement and progress towards self improvement is much greater for all the obstacles we face. My goal of not having any soft drink has failed fairly miserably, but that's always going to be one of the hardest things to break, but at least I'm noting every day I do or don't have it. There's a few days a month where I don't have any, if I can slowly build on that, that's progress.
So back to this blog, I wanted to update every day, but that hasn't happened, but I have been updating about once every 9 days or so, which is a lot more than I used to do. So I may have failed at my original stated goal, but I set that knowing that I'd likely not be able to keep it up, but if it gets me in the habit of thinking about making blog posts more often, then it's working. So all up, it's been relatively successful. In 90 days or so I've transformed from making one blog post a year maybe to probably an average of 30 or 40 a year at this current rate.
Tags: habit, improvement, self