I've been focusing on building new habits for the past couple of years and have written about it a lot. Here are some of the things that have made the biggest difference for me:
- Start small. Focus on making the behaviour automatic (the definition of a habit) in its smallest form. It's easier to increase the time and effort spent once doing the behaviour is automatic.
- Schedule the habit. My habits almost always fail if I don't figure out in advance when and where I'll do them.
- Stack your habits. Using an existing habit (it can be something you didn't build on purpose like brushing your teeth, putting on your pyjamas, putting on your shoes before leaving the house, etc.) as a trigger to remind you to do another habit. This makes it easier to remember and build into a routine you already have.
- Make it easy to do the habit and hard not to. If you need equipment, get it ready before you'll need it. Set up your environment to encourage you to do the habit. Keep things out of sight if they encourage you not to do the habit. Context makes a big difference in the early stages.
- Build one habit at a time. Only when a habit is truly habitual (you do it without thinking) start focusing on a new one. I've failed at building habits every time I've tried to do more than one new habit at a time.
I've written a lot about habits. I'll link to some articles below that might be helpful. Many of them expand on the suggestions I mentioned above.
I also wrote a four-week email course and a book to help people build habits—specifically habits that will help you be more productive by saving you time and helping you work more efficiently. But the course can be applied to any kind of habits. You can find the course and book here: http://habits.bellebethcooper.com/
I created an email course (also available in book form) about this exact thing! [0]
But a few things I've found really useful are:
The Momentum app, which lets you quickly check off habits in the iOS notification centre widget. [1]
Starting small until the behaviour of a habit is ingrained, then increasing the time and effort. Eg. start with a 15 minute run until you're used to running 3x/week, then increase your time gradually until you're running 45 minutes every time, rather than jumping in the deep end. It's easier to keep up a habit that's small and easy, and to increase the activity once you've made it habitual. [2]
Only work on one new habit at a time, because it will take focus and discipline at first. [3]
Once your habit is solid, develop others by stacking them together. [4]
The index is really only for things you want to find again later, like important meeting notes. For your every day task lists you can leave those out of the index.
If the process of indexing doesn't appeal, however, you might prefer the Strikethru system I mentioned in my other comment.
Hello, I'm the author of this article, and just wanted to add something here: for anyone who finds the Bullet Journal method overwhelming, there's another system called Strikethru that might appeal more. It's still based on pen and paper, but is designed to be a bit less complex and doesn't use an index at all.
And here are a couple of blog posts I've written about my own process that might be useful. I generally use a mixture of ideas from Bullet Journal and Strikethru.
Those metrics would be great to have. We already have a huge to do list of services to integrate, and I'd love to have some easily available ones like heart rate and blood pressure in there soon.
Hmm I would hope it doesn't look that way. The screenshots are certainly not mockups—we actually have a tiny group of close friends using it already to help us test it out.
Good point. We didn't plan on making the campaign public quite yet as we've been focused on giving people on our waiting list first dibs. Since everyone knows what's going on now, we've adjusted the home page to make the process of backing Exist more simple.
Exist co-founder here. The Narrative Clip is on our radar, but seems to be more of a lifelogging/journalling use case. For now we're focused on making your data useful but we have had a few people ask about the possibility of a lifelogging/journal angle so that could be where we end up down the track, who knows...
Have you tried the app Reporter? It's going down a similar path. I think it uses 5 iPhone sensors and questions that you pre-set and just asks you to report at random times during the day. I've really enjoyed using it so far.