Habits don't count!
Whenever you go to write a document, you save as often as possible. Whenever you lock the door, you double check that it is locked. And whenever you get up out of a seat, you might check to see if your fly has came undone. Many people have habits that they consistantly do that you can almost count on. Yet the funny thing is that most of these things don’t matter. Take for example, locking the door in my garage. The door is always closed anyway, and if someone is going to pry my big automatic metal garage door open, it is going to be fairly easy for them to bust through my flimsy wooden door, but why do I do it? If it really isn’t going to matter in the end, why don’t I just leave the door unlocked, save myself some trouble, and simply close the garage door? Why have I formed this habit of always locking the door on my way out?
It really gets into why we make habits. I think people make habits for a single underlying reason, and I’ll get to that in a second. First I’m going to look at the average person looking to get fit. This person, Tom, lets call him, wants to get fit. Like many other people in America, Tom has stuffed himself on fast food for too long and now he wants to get in shape. So, he decides to go to the Gym. Now Tom has very good willpower and doesn’t really care about the fact that it is hard work. Eveytime he goes to the gym, he puts his keys for his car on his wrist. Pretend that Tom lives in an ideal world, and there is no worrying about theft, and he could just as easily put his keys in his locker. What would be his incentive for putting his keys on his wrist instead of in his locker?
It really is simple. By Tom making it a habit that he is going to put his keys on his wrist, he knows that there is no possibility of him forgetting them in his locker. Now sure he could jsut remember everytime to get the keys out of his locker, but what happens when he is in a rush and forgets? This is why we make habits in general:
We make habits so that we constantly do them, no matter what type of situation.
If Tom was in a hurry and forgot his keys in the bottom of his locker while getting changed, he would be really annoyed when he went out to his car, only to find that he had to walk all the way back to get them. If something else in Tom’s routine changed suddenly, he wouldn’t be thrown off because he would be used to always putting his keys on his wrist while working out.
But how does this apply to people blogging? You might have a certain aspect of posting a blog post that you have to get into a habit of doing. If you forget to type tags into your posts, maybe that is a habit you need to start. That way when you are rushed and need to get out a blog post as fast as possible, you are used to putting in the tags and categories. Maybe you have a blog post that you want to put ‘more’ tags in? In my last blog layout, I needed to put the tag in so that the home page didn’t look messed up. Blogging, in itself, is a habit. In order for me to get posts out to you guys, I have to form a habit to write the ideas for the posts, write the posts, and then edit them.
What habits should you create today?
