Go Tiny

Soooo it’s mid-Feb. Have you discovered that you’re not keeping to most, or all of your resolutions? I know I have. My resolutions to leave work by 6.30pm and sleep 7 hours a day have fallen flat on their faces. (It’s sad, but despite all my posts on productivity I inevitably get a couple of days/weeks where the work just surges unbearably.) Yet, there are others, like exercising, personal finance and sending compliments, that I’ve managed to keep surprisingly well so far because of systems I’ve stuck to. I’ll tell you more about one in a bit.

If you’re like 90% of the people in the world, you’re probably not keeping to your resolutions like you said you would, or you’ve given up on making resolutions altogether because they’re impossible to keep. The thing is, if we really want our lives to improve, we’ve got to create something that sticks, that becomes so ingrained in the fabric of our lives that we do it without any effort or without thinking. Sort of like brushing your teeth. (I blogged previously on how personal finance can be exactly like that) There’s no point in making a resolution like “I’m gonna get a six-pack this year” if you’re not going to stick to it and look like a beached whale again once Christmas comes around. (Speaking from personal experience here.. pat pat)

So recently, I’ve been following BJ Fogg’s work on creating habits and sticking to them. He’s a Stanford professor and created quite a following with his program 3 Tiny Habits. He tells you to “forget about motivation. Forget about 21 days. Forget ‘one habit at a time.’ None of that matters as much as going tiny. When you succeed in tiny ways, you unlock power to do more. For this and other reasons, tiny is the key to new habits.”

Essentially, to create a new habit, follow these three steps:

1. Make it tiny: When Fogg was trying to create a habit of flossing, he started by flossing one tooth a day. That’s it. Make the habit tiny, even if it’s ridiculous, and suddenly it’s not so hard to start doing it.

2. Find a spot: just like how brushing your teeth always comes right after you get up and before you go to sleep. Create a spot in your existing routine for it.

3. Train the cycle: Every day, just do your tiny behavior in the spot you’ve chosen. If you’re not committing to it, go back to Step 1 and simplify it. Keep trying, revising and adapting, and trying again until you do something that sticks.

The awesome thing? When you train your body to do certain behaviors at a certain time in your routine, the little victories that come with accomplishing a goal start feeding your mind and your confidence. It then becomes way easier to expand that tiny habit into something a little more ambitious. But don’t be in too much of a hurry to achieve too much. The key is to do small, incremental steps, even if it takes you as long as a couple of months to train it. You’re better off moving slowly and progressively than jumping the gun and not sticking to it.

At a TEDx conference a couple of months back, I listened to my colleague Daniel Wong give an awesome talk about delivering happiness through emails (the summary can be found here). Inspired, I tried to fire off as many happy emails as possible whenever I could, but after a couple of weeks, it just wasn’t sticking as a habit. So I decided to try Fogg’s methods instead. First, I made a goal to send at least one complimentary / positive email per week (okay, I know what you’re thinking – now I sound like a douchey depressing office drone – but first, you’ve gotta make it tiny right?). Next, I found a spot by setting a weekly reminder on my phone to send a compliment at the start of the day every Wednesday, before I got lost in my daily barrage of emails. Finally, I trained the cycle by sticking to it religiously. Wednesday wasn’t just another workday, it became “Compliment Wednesday”. (Yes, you can tell I’m a total genius at coming up with creative names) It was weird at first – you’d be surprised at how hard it is to find someone new to compliment each week – but it started getting easier as time passed. As a result, my Wednesdays and my work week started getting more positive, my mood improved, and it became a lot easier to work with colleagues who were previously impossible to approach.

So give Fogg’s method a shot and go tiny. You’ll be way ahead of the game in creating habits that stick 🙂