Organizing Your Day: Banishing Bad Habits
How much time do you waste in a day doing things that just waste precious time? Do your bad habits interfere with other, more important things? If so, it’s time to banish those bad habits once and for all. Let’s get started organizing your day.
What Is A Bad Habit?
A habit is something you find yourself doing without having to put too much effort into it.
A lot of us have bad habits. Some of us eat without thinking, are messy without thinking, spend money without thinking, drink without thinking, and a whole lot more. These are all bad habits.
If you want to organize your day for success you need to rid yourself of a couple of these bad habits and replace them with good ones.
The bad news? Bad habits are tough and annoying to kick.
The good news? It only takes 21 days to form a new habit.
If you can take these actions and apply them to your life for just 21 days, you will have successfully formed a new habit. You will have formed good habits that will resonate in your daily life.
The daily goals you set will become your new habits!
Identify Your Bad Habits
The first step to implementing these new habits is to identify your bad habits. There are a ton of bad habits that we all have. Bad habits take up time, money, and energy. The habits we want to focus on today are the ones that take up your time.
Look over the following and think about what some of your bad habits may be:
Is there anything that you do on a day to day basis that doesn’t add value to your life?
What do you find yourself doing automatically whenever you have free time?
Is this something productive?
What do you find yourself doing whenever you’re about to do a tough task?
What habits do I notice have kept me from organizing my life in the past?
Here’s a list of common bad habits that I’ve seen amongst myself as well as others in my life:
Television/Netflix
Cigarettes
Drinking
Video Games
Browsing the Web
Binge Eating
Drugs
What To Expect When Changing Habits
Expect acute feelings of discomfort when quitting your habits. It is natural for your body to tell you that something is wrong when you stop doing an activity that you’ve been doing every day for 10 years.
Embrace this feeling and understand that soon it will be replaced. As long as you replace your bad habit with a new good habit you will start feeling better. All the extra energy and time that was invested into your old habit will be reborn in your new habit.
When I quit watching television I remember days where I felt off. Soon enough those feelings went away. So don’t be concerned too much over the uncomfortable feelings that come along with kicking a habit!
Organizing Your Day: Setting Your Own Limitations
Bad habits are not necessarily always bad. It is still ok to do some of these things occasionally. But you will have to dramatically cut down the amount that you do per day.
For example: Browsing the Web isn’t necessarily a bad habit. You can learn a lot about the world and current events. However it becomes an issue when you’re browsing the web more than you’re working. I think we can both agree on that.
Organizing Your Day: Action Step 2
On a piece of paper, list out your bad habits. Next to each habit write a paragraph about why this habit is harmful to your life and goals.
Here is an example of what my paper used to say:
Bad Habits
Surfing The Web
I waste close to 4 hours every day surfing the web and accomplishing nothing. This time could be spent towards achieving my long term goal (to build a business online). What positive things can surfing the web aimlessly bring? Nothing…
Lack Of Exercise
I barely exercise. This makes me feel tired and weak. I also don’t feel confident in my own body around others. I wish I was in more shape, and one of my long term goals is to get under 10% body fat. Feeling tired, sluggish, and fat all the time is horrible.
It’s important to be very honest with yourself. You want to point out exactly how each one of these habits is detrimental to your long term goals. By doing so, you will program your brain to look at these habits from a different perspective.
You want to be tough on yourself too, make these habits sound detrimental to your success on every level.
Organizing Your Day: Action Step 2.1
The last part of Action Step 2 is to announce to yourself that you will quit these bad habits in order to get your day more organized.
Every time you notice urges to fall back into bad habits, look over your list and determine why that habit was bad to begin with.
Make sure you go over all of your action goals twice a day, once in the morning and once before you go to sleep. By repeating them you will drill your new-found fundamentals into your brain.
Keep going towards getting your day more organized. The system I’m giving you in this series will help get your life out of the state of chaos you’re used to. See you next week!
And if you missed it last week, the first post in this series Organizing Your Day: Setting Goals is available here.
