Practising Small Habits Better than Setting New Year Goals

We have just entered 2024. A new year ahead of us brings many wishes and expectations in daily work and life. We all plan to prepare ourselves for those goals to create a breakthrough in the short term or change our lives in the long term.

We often focus on ambitious goals to better ourselves and achieve our desires by setting SMART goals (specific, measurable, feasible, realistic, and time-bound). Instead, we build small, simple, easy-to-do, easy-to-achieve habits to achieve bigger goals. This is one of the secrets to helping people succeed in work or life. Almost successful people can have such habits.

The problem is developing a new year plan that suits your abilities. That plan can be positive thoughts, effortless control, and appropriate implementation time. This article gives you ideas and some typical habits to achieve your goals.

Identify Habits

To achieve what you want in the long term, you need to be specific and measurable about what you want to achieve. Instead of thinking about overwhelming goals, plan a system of little but positive habits. In this way, you focus on habits and actions, gradually shaping them and leading to long-term results.

Power of Atomic Habits

An example is getting into the habit of doing ten push-ups a day before meals. Keeping small habits makes it easier to associate the habit with memory. It's easy to remember. From here, you gradually adjust small habits to suit your desires. For example, if you want a strong body, practice the habit of doing push-ups and progressively increasing the number of push-ups to help your muscles develop.

• Tips for applying habits

You should specify one or more resolutions within your ability to achieve. Break the habit into smaller parts to make it easier to do. Design your environment for success by eliminating temptations, introducing positive elements, and reminders of new habits.

Make habits clear and engaging

Making your habits clear and engaging will make you more likely to stick with them and more likely to achieve what you want. To do so, you should follow these tips:

• Straightforward and easy to remember

Keep exercise equipment near where you sleep or an unrolled yoga mat near your bed, or use your phone to remind you to exercise. These are effective reminders.

Schedule time for habits like scheduling exercise

• Attractive

Could you combine your habits with your interests? For example, you can listen to music when you do physical exercise. That will help you be more motivated to get into the habit.

Making habits easy, not difficult to do

The important thing is to build from small things into big things gradually. With that in mind, you won't be overwhelmed by change. Focus on consistency, and don't worry too much about achieving perfection. When you choose a habit you want, you will enjoy it and find it meaningful, and it is essential not to give it up "midway".

Habits require time to form, so they also need your patience on the path to conquer. Wanting to create an easy habit may seem challenging. But you can do it if you have the right strategy. Here are a few suggestions you should know:

Tiny habits

• In the work "Atomic Habits" by James Clear, the author mentions small but good habits and eliminating bad habits in daily life or at work. Doing 1% better every day and consistently maintaining it will bring about fundamental changes thanks to the good results of many small actions. For example, read a book one page daily or jog or walk just 5 minutes daily.
• The surrounding environment is importantWhen reading a book, there needs to be a suitable environment for reading, adequate lighting, airy space, and quiet surroundings to concentrate on reading. The environment is like an invisible hand guiding human behaviour. We often think habits are caused by motivation, talent, and effort. Of course, these characteristics are essential. But over a long period, these properties are controlled by the environment.

Specific and simple

• Take, for example, jogging for just 5 minutes a day on your first workout instead of 30 minutes. This simple, continuous practice will make you feel energized. Even slow progress is better than none. Planning, strategizing, and learning are all good jobs, but they must produce better results. Instead of planning to make high-level goals more difficult, think about your work, and you will find it more accessible. Ideas and suggestions will be different from actions. They are beneficial but never bring results. You can't do anything and only prolong your failure.

2-minute Rule

David Allen's "Getting Things Done" addresses time management, offering an effective but often overlooked strategy for increasing productivity. For example, a job that takes less than two minutes to do means it should be done by this time. This rule is aimed against procrastination, against leaving more and more small tasks at work or in everyday life for the future.

Thanks to this rule help us complete work quickly instead of doing it forever. This rule sounds simple, but it is necessary to understand the reasoning behind the rule. Procrastinating or slowing down work will take you longer than the work you get done because you'll spend time storing and tracking it. The same job takes more time to do, which means doing it inefficiently.

In daily life, we have many small tasks. For example, answering emails, answering the phone, cleaning your desk at work or watering the plants and cleaning the house. Those are jobs that we can do in 2 minutes or less. If we procrastinate, these tasks will combine into a long list. From here it will lead to spending a lot of time and energy thinking and worrying about things that haven't been done yet.

Creating habits that will help you a lot in achieving your big goals is something you need to practice in daily life