Habit Stacking

 Reading my book, Atomic Habits, and yesterday he covered this thing called Habit Stacking. His premise was that if you stack a habit you want to have onto a habit you already have, it will stick easier. I thought about that for a bit and realized that is exactly what I have done without knowing it. 

When we moved to Arizona one thing we had that we never had in Hawaii, was a dishwasher. Well, that requires a whole new set of habits to deal with a dishwasher. You have to get into the habit of loading it - that's not too hard since I clean up the kitchen after dinner every night. You have to have the habit of starting it - this is something that I still forget every once in a while. So I've been working on switching things up a little. Instead of cleaning up right after dinner and then having to remember to start it a couple of hours later before I go to bed, I've waited to clean up until just before I go to bed. This way I clean up and start the dishwasher right away. Boom, done. I stacked a habit. 

So I was just going to explain how I have made blogging a habit again. I started this blog in 2004 and was really consistent for a long, long time. I found something that really worked for me and so I kept at it. Then, as will happen, life got in the way. Blogging became sporadic and farther and farther between posts. Every time I would write a post I would remember how much I enjoyed blogging and promise to get back to it. Yeah, that didn't really happen. Then a couple of weeks ago, the self-care group I'm in had an assignment to write gratitude every day. I decided to do it for just a few minutes in the morning right after my meditation. Habit stacking. I've been blogging relatively consistently ever since. So based on my very anecdotal evidence, it would seem that habit stacking does work. 

So my goal now is to figure out how to stack some more good habits like dog training and walking and gym workouts. Clearly just writing them in my planner doesn't seem to work really well. I will need to find a way to habit stack them. 

One thing he also suggests is to stack it with something you enjoy. So if I want to play with my Oculus, I can't do that until after I've trained Mavy for 10 minutes. Something like that would definitely work for me because I get the urge to play with it at random times and then I would train Mavy at random times. So that's my goal over the next few days, figure out how to stack habits so that I do them regularly. 

I am still sick and will probably try to find a rapid test today to take. I don't really care if I have Covid or not, but it's probably the responsible thing to do to find out. 

Okay, I've spent a lot of time here this morning. I'm going to go read and drink my 2nd cup of coffee.