Habits and Goals

"First we make our habits, then our habits make us."- Charles C. Noble

It's such a simple concept, yet it's something we don't always do.
It's not exceedingly difficult to do, and yet I think it's something
that would make a world of difference in anyone's life.

Break your goals into habits, and focus on putting those habits into autopilot.

Last week when I wrote my Ultimate Guide to motivation, there were a
number of questions about my belief that having One Goal to focus on
is much more powerful than having many goals.

There were questions about my personal goals (such as running a
marathon, eliminating debt, and so on) and how I was able to achieve
them while working on different projects, and so forth. How can you
have one goal that takes a long time, and still work on smaller
projects at the same time?

These are excellent questions, and my answer takes a little
explaining: I try to turn my goals into habits, and in doing so, I put
my goals on autopilot. Turning a goal into a habit means really
focusing on it, intensely, for at least a month, to the exclusion of
all else. The more you can focus on it, the more it'll be on
autopilot.

But once you put it on autopilot, once a habit is firmly established,
you don't really have to focus on it much. You'll still do it, but
because it's a habit, you only have to use minimal focus to maintain
that habit. The goal becomes on autopilot, and you can focus on your
next goal or project or habit.

My Marathon Example

Let's look at my marathon goal as an example. I was just starting out
in running, and I had the brilliant idea to run a marathon within a
year. (Btw, that's not the brightest idea — you should run for a
couple years before attempting marathon training, or it'll be much,
much more difficult for you.) So that was my goal, and it was my main
focus for awhile.

But in order to achieve that goal, I broke it down into two habits:

1. I had to make running a daily habit (while following a training
plan I found online).

2. I had to report to people in order to have accountability — I did
this through family, friends and coworkers, through a blog, and
through a column in my local newspaper every two weeks. With this
accountability, there's no way I would stop running.

The daily running habit took about a month to form. I focused on this
exclusively for about a month, and didn't have any other goals,
projects or habits that were my main focuses. I did other work
projects, but they kinda took a backburner to running.

The accountability habit took a couple months, mainly because I didn't
focus on it too much while I was building the running habit. But it
stuck, and for that first year of running, I would report to people I
knew and blog about my running every day (this was in Blogger blog
that has since been deleted), and I would write a column every two
weeks for my local paper.

Once those two habits were firmly entrenched, my marathon goal was
pretty much on autopilot. I could focus on my debt reduction goal (as
an example) without having to worry too much about the marathon. I
still had to do the work, of course, but it didn't require constant
focus.

And eventually, I ran the marathon. I was able to achieve this
because, all year long, I had the daily running habit and daily
accountability habit. I put my marathon goal into autopilot, and that
made it much easier — instead of struggling with it daily for an
entire year, I focused on it for one month (well, actually two) and
was able to accomplish it while focusing on new habits and goals.