Next action for building a habit

[LordCope]

I have a project (well a few probably) where the intended outcome is to establish a habit. For the sake of argument let's say it's writing a weekly blog entry, or any other daily or weekly activity that one might like to introduce.

So in my review, I might think about what the successful outcome was - pretty easy. The next action, however, seems to be: Do the thing - go to the computer and write the blog article.

I thought about whether this should be an item in my daily calendar - it's something I want to do regularly. But nothing will go horribly wrong if I don't do it - maybe it's not really a time specific task?

I remember something David once said about habits being about how long you can live without the benefit. So the motivating factor is what life is like without the habit. I have an unshaven annoyance factor of about two days - after that it really annoys me and I go and shave. Usually I shave daily, but it'd be rare for me to go for three days without shaving - my threshold is about two days. Perhaps the secret in establishing habits is to focus on the benefit and the loss if the habit isn't secured?

Also significant is the driving purpose: why do I want to establish this habit? If that isn't clear or compelling, I won't want to do it.

In the end I just added an action to @anywhere called: Brainstorm ways to establish habit.

Any ideas? Am I missing something obvious here?

 

[lizwithhat]

If it's something I want to do daily, I add it to one of my daily checklists. For something less frequent, I'd probably use a recurring Outlook calendar appointment or a recurring task - so if I wanted to do it every three days, I might use a task with a recurrence interval of "3 days after completed".