Fun Habit Change Experiment

I was fucking around in my bullet journal and found a way to make habit training not horrible and exhausting.

Simply put: Gurl.

I don’t always have the time to be energy or disciplined.

I LOVE doing all the things and being #teamwillpower. But when I’m working overtime, trying to stay sane, having one or two social or business engagement and coming home late? If I do one or two good things for myself, that day I consider it a success.

This chill way of playing around with the habits you want to have is a fantastic way of doing the thing for yourself without draining yourself of all your will power and discipline.

A lot of our habits or healthy/productive/mindful/happiness-inducing activities we don’t need to do every day anyway; the main reason we do them every day is that it helps us get the habit into our system.

And a lot of what we have to do waivers in intensity and frequency, based on our priorities of that mount. When we are training for a marathon, our yoga practice falls bend. When we try to get a side project up and running, we see our friends less. We have a deadline at work, we forget what our siblings looks like. We can’t do everything all at once, all the time.

Instead of beating ourselves up over that, why won’t we embrace that a bit more?

What if we go with the flow of our life, have fun with what we do, take care of ourselves by cherishing and appreciating what we ARE able to do, and let go of what we weren’t?

Here’s how that could work, if you wanna give it a try.

First, you make a list of the habits you are trying to maintain/incorporate in your routines. You can use habits you have been working on, old ones you’d like to pick back up, even add just the nice treat-yo-self moments in there that make you feel good.

You can add ‘working out’ (or even split this into different categories of working out), ‘creative stuff’, ‘unfucking your habitat’, ‘spiritual stuff’ like meditation.

If you’re a bullet journal nerd like me, you can create icons for the different habits.

For the example I decided the channel all the superheroes.

Next, you make a calendar for the upcoming period. I like working with months, works easiest.

Now what you do, is that every day you try to do get some of the good habits into your day. When you do, you add the icon (or write it down, works too).

As you can see, I smashed the patriarchy on the daily. Woot woot.

This way, nothing is rigid or stiff. No “I have to’s” but “I was able to”. It’s more playful, which can be just what you need from time to time.

You should give it a try!

This is the one I am actually using in my own bullet journal. I find it very relaxing and fun to work with habits this way.

For example, first week of May I had planned to go to yoga 4 times, but I wasn’t able to. I was bummed about that, but when I looked back in the habit change calendar I realised I hadn’t done four yoga classes, but I had done two and had run twice. Exercising 4 times a week ain’t bad at all, and that made me kind of happy!

The second week I was very productive at work by using the Pomodoro technique, and last week (not pictured, because I made these pictures two weeks back and I have better things to do than reshoot) I was able to go to yoga class 5 times.

This fun habit change experiment really helps me focus on what I’m already doing, instead of always trying to get more out of myself.

Focus on your successes and the things you are able to do…and you’ll be able to do more. I’m sure of that.

Have a great Monday, guys!