#Habit February 5

We may earn money or products from the companies mentioned in this post.

When people hear about starting a new HABIT they often get bogged down on how difficult and arduous it will become. Sometimes we convince ourselves a simple task can become very difficult.

Our lives change when our HABITS change. New HABITS bring you life.

The Harvard Business Review recently published a post by Neil Pasricha on a two-minute HABIT they may greatly boost you happiness and productivity. You may have heard Neil on a TED Talk titled “The 3 A’s of Awesome”. The video is below and you can listen about Attitude, Awareness, and Authenticity.

I want to come back to the two minute HABIT that Neil promotes. When you learn his story you realize like many people he encountered his share of problems. He was in a failed marriage, he lost his best friend to suicide, and he began to cope with all of this by becoming a workaholic who could not sleep without the help of pills. He had become a mess.

Like many people overwhelmed he began searching for answers and found it in a book written by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney called Willpower. From that book he decided to attempt to simplify his life with a single 4 by 6 index card each day.

That index card is the essence of the HABIT. What Neil did was to write down a couple things he would focus on each day by completing the sentence “I will focus on…” He had a new card for each day. At the end of the day he flipped the card over and completed two other sentences.

I am grateful for…

I will let go of…

Eventually he did away with the index cards and just went with a journal that requires him to spend two minutes a day on the HABIT of completing three sentences.

I am grateful for…

I will let go of…

“I will focus on…