If you want to create, change, or eliminate a habit, do this:
Identify your goal. What do you want to do differently each day? Make this a simple yes or no question. Did I eat junk food today? Did I write 500 words today? Did I go for a walk today?
Now get a monthly calendar that you can mark X’s on. Hang it up where you can see it regularly each day.
Each day you accomplish your goal, mark a big fat X on that day. If you don’t do what you’ve set out to do, you leave that day blank. Eventually, those X’s create a chain, and it makes you feel good. You want to keep the chain growing. When you can’t write an X and the chain is broken, you feel bad, and motivated not to slip again.
This is one tool I used to cut out bad habits and create new ones. This is what my friend used to quit smoking cigarettes. This is what Jerry Seinfeld used to make sure he was working on new jokes every day. He’s the one who ‘created’ this system. This simple advice has been recommended on probably thousands of blogs by now, by writers such as Warren Ellis, Austin Kleon, and Ryan Holiday.
So I thought I’d pass it along here. Because it works.