There is recent hype around Personal Habits and their power to improve our busy lives but, as with many other things now, something is not working as it should, and I think it’s because we applied it in a simplistic way. In this post, I go over the current and pasts approach to Personal Habits, explain my ideas on the role of Habits and share the results of my research on useful methods and tools.

These explorations are important to my Sabbatical main topic because I think Habits are one of the most powerful blockers or enablers of alignment of our life and with the system around us.

Our Struggle with Habits is Ancient

This month I have read a small and curious book from 2013 called Daily Rituals that describes what is known of the habits and routines of 150 famous historical characters of the last few centuries. The book is full of quotes of feelings, struggles and joys that routines bring to your life, even, or especially, to these creative geniuses. Below you can see some nice graphs made by others using the data from the book, showing that the categories in which we organize our lives are quite stable, even if with a large diversity of distribution over 24 hours.

One of the best and oldest examples in the book is Benjamin Franklin, who dedicated a section of his autobiography written in 1757 to what he called “the intention to acquire the habitude of all self-prescribed 13 virtues”. His section is so aligned with the topics of this post that I will come to it afterward. Let me just share with you a print of a note of his “ideal day” and his sentence on why he failed to get his routines right “my multifarious occupations, public and private, induced me to continue postponing so that it has been omitted till I have no longer strength or activity left sufficient for such an enterprise; tho’ I am still of opinion that it was a practicable scheme, and might have been very useful, by forming a great number of good citizens;”. I love this ‘alert from the past’ to all those that aim to get their lives organized through habits.

The Lastest Habits Approach

The recent hype started in 2018 with James Clear’s best-seller book “Atomic Habits”, where Habits are presented in a clever mix of scientifical, understandable and personal dimensions to help everyone of us. The approach is divided into four rules to make Habits: Obvious, Attractive, Easy and Satisfying and it’s full of little recipes and tricks that look really easy and logical to apply. The Atomic Habits approach is very hands-on, to the point of including support material by James Clear like courses and a physical notebook to help you change your life (quite close to the three-hundred-year-ago week planned by Benjamin Franklin).

It’s really a successful and well-supported approach and, if you still didn’t read the book, find a friend who has it and read it. On the other hand, I believe the most two impactful concepts of the book are apparently some of the less explored and that that is curbing the wider impact of this approach.

Falling in Love with Goals instead of Systems

If we look at the interest of Google Searches on Atomic Habits is clear that is doubling every year and that there’s a peak in the first weeks of each year, clearly connected with new year goals or resolution setting.

Another important clue is the huge number of Mobile Apps available to control, improve and track your habits without creating a large active community, apart from one niche app I will cover later. It looks like users are downloading and testing but then dropping these apps for some reason.

I believe we are missing the most powerful insight from the Atomic Habits Approach, the idea that you should Fall in Love with Systems instead of Goals. This means it’s much more powerful to focus on having an efficient environment and system around us so that we will naturally achieve many Goals. As James Clear puts “If you’re a musician, your goal might be to play a new piece. Your system is how often you practice, how you break down and tackle difficult measures and your method for receiving feedback from your instructor.” The power of the System Focus is summed in these excerpts from James Clear’s vision:

• Winners and losers have the same goals. Setting a goal is important but we tend to forget that both winners and looser set the goal to win, for example in sports. The goal had always been there. It was only when they implemented a system of continuous small improvements that they achieved a different outcome.
• Achieving a goal is only a momentary change. Imagine you have a messy room and you set a goal to clean it. Achieving a goal only changes your life for the moment. If the room is always getting messy, your energy is getting lost. In order to improve for good, you need to solve problems at the systems level. 
• Goals restrict your happiness to a future thing. The problem with a goals-first mentality is that you’re continually putting happiness off until the next Goal. Furthermore, goals create an “either-or” conflict: either you achieve your goal and are successful or you fail and you are a disappointment. When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you can be satisfied anytime your system is running.
• Goals are at odds with long-term progress. Many runners work hard for months, but as soon as they cross the finish line, they stop training. When all of your hard work is focused on a particular goal, what is left to push you forward after you achieve it? The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game.

Identity and Purpose are the End Game, so They Must Come First

The second powerful and similar concept that is easily missed when we are in a Goal setting mentality is the end game of why you are doing this: your purpose or the deeper improvement you want in your identity. In a sense, what can matter and motivate you more is a self-awareness and self-growth journey, not just the accomplishment of a Goal.

Is important to examine changes in your life driven by identity-based habits that focus on what you want to become and not on outcome-based habits, that focus on what you want to achieve. Imagine two persons that have decided to quit smoking, the one who decide based on outcomes would answer, when offered a smoke, “No thanks, I am trying to quit” while the person that decided based on identity would answer “No thanks, I am not a smoker”, showing a deeper change also to others.

If you came this far in the post, you would like this 28-minute animated video that resumes the book , is visual nice and goes much deeper than me in this post up to now.

Goals are Past, System is Persistency, Habits are Sprints and Purpose is a Story.

After many years of setting Goals with different methods and timeframes, my current idea is that the key point with Goals, as achievements or milestones, is to keep note of the ones you accomplished, looking back, not forward. This retrospective analysis is valuable and doesn’t has the Goal-first blocks listed before.

By making a list of the best milestones or goals you did, for example, last year, you are doing both a valuation of what was really important and difficult and you are also getting better at understanding what you can accomplish in one year. You are also keeping a written record of the key achievements along your life, that helps build your own story through the different phases of your have lived in. To me, my story and the awareness of the different phases in life are what I relate to Purpose. My Purpose is my story. And, as with any story, it helps connect and share with others.

The System here is the sum of all the dependencies I have built on my life and the strategic choice I did. Time, Work, Family, etc. This is where I should focus my struggle, not on the Goals or the Habits. It’s the continuous persistence of making hard important choices to have an easy life, for me and others around me. It’s at this level that we should reason and dream more. “What If I could turn the constraints into enablers”? “Is still not working perfectly but some extra push and maybe…”. Here I find and share happiness, in the challenge of the struggle, as James Clear and Benjamin Franklin imply in their notes.

Habits to me are like Sprints, applied in short times compare to Systems and Purpose, where one mechanically self-engineers its own automatic tasks. Once you integrated good or killed bad Habits, that is the magic, you don’t need to Sprint again. You actually shouldn’t need to think about it again. If you fail, it’s ok. You can try again later when the System is more favorable or alignment with Purpose is clearer.

Looking back after writing this post I think maybe if the title of James Clear’s best-selling book should have been, instead of Atomic Habits, “Solid Choices. Easy Habits.” or “Your are More than Your of Habits”, it would be truer to its content and to the right place of Habits in our lifes….but maybe not so popular.

Habit Mobile Apps and Notebooks

At this stage, you are probably thinking that I don’t believe in Habits. I do if integrated into a bigger scheme that includes Life Alignment, Self-Awareness and System-Awareness like I am pushing in my Sabbatical.

This is why I have invested, again, half a day to test tens of Mobile Apps that would help me regain control of the habits. Since this time I want to have a better system around them I looked for Apps that could be shared with others with Android or Apple phones, that I could also add tasks and that I could export data for further analysis.

The table below resumes the result of my research and test and the justification for why I will try this time to use TickTick, included in the Sabbatical Life Alignment effort… let’s see if I finally close Benjamin Franklin’s quest 🙂

1. TickTick App. It’s a task orient app that recently included habits in its features. This way I can use all the collaboration methodologies with my habits. Besides, it may be the only one to have a combination of a wide user base, many recent improvements, and all the sharing features I wanted.
2. Habitica. A Gamification App around tasks, goals and habits. Is really nice and aligned with the System-First approach, in this case, a Game. I will continue to follow but I didn’t choose it because is too much based on Fantasy, like monsters and wizards, which I like but would alienate some of the people I want to share my habits with.

For the ones that don’t want one more Mobile App or are more engaged into physical writing, I suggest James Clear Notebook (I have it and it’s nice) or a variety of notebooks and wallpaper on “Align my Life”, or “Goal Setting” that are available now almost all year round in physical stores or online.