Ten minutes a day to changing my life

Change is hard.

I’ve read dozens of self-help books about how to change. And for me personally, I’ve run into two big barriers:

First, it’s extremely difficult to maintain a radical change in habits. To sustain a habit change, it has to be easy.

Second, most methods for change are time-intensive, and between my job, chores, desire to spend time with my wife, friends, and downtime relaxing, there aren’t enough hours in the day to devote to change. I could sacrifice time I spend living my life and instead spend that time changing my life, but is that worth it? And even if it is, I tend to lack the willpower after my energy is drained from long hours at work. See my first point about how habit changes need to be easy.

But I recognize that there are changes I would like to make to my life, which would make me happier if I implemented them. So what to do?

The book The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg talks about the idea of keystone habits. These are habits that you build, which then lead to a cascade of other habit changes that utterly change your life. For many people it’s exercising, or quitting smoking, or getting on a regular sleep schedule.

It’s easy to see how these habits can give you the energy to make other improvements to your life. But it’s also important that in changing them, you’re building the habit of building a habit. 

So I asked myself how I could incorporate what I’ve learned from the various self-help books I’ve read into I what I hope will be a keystone habit, that would take a minimal time commitment, but would hopefully lead to big changes to my life.

I decided to set aside ten minutes a day – five minutes in the morning and five minutes at night – to implementing some of the tactics that I have seen over and over again in the various books I’ve read. Certainly I can spare ten minutes. Here is what I’m doing:

The Ten Minute Routine to Changing My Life

Morning

I do this very shortly after waking up:

1. Spend two minutes a day meditating.*
2. Spend two minutes thinking about my day, and writing down things I can do that day to move me toward my goal, improve myself, improve my life, and be generally happier.
3. Spend one minute looking in a mirror, and repeating an affirmation for the goal I want to achieve. For me, that’s saying, “I, Steven Ray Marks, will succeed as a writer.”
4. I put a red slash over the current date in a full-year calendar that I’ve taped on the inside cover of the notebook.

That’s five minutes in the morning. Then just before bed, I do the following:

Evening

1. Spend one minute looking in a mirror, repeating an affirmation for a habit I want to build that will help me to achieve my goal. For me, it’s “I, Steven Ray Marks, will work on writing** four times a week.”
2. Review the items I wrote down that morning, and draw a star next to each one I did. The important thing is to give myself self-praise for what I achieved, but not guilt myself for what I didn’t do. For the items I didn’t do, I’ll take a brief moment to think about if there’s something I could do differently in order to achieve them next time, other than some variant of “have more willpower.” The goal of this step is for me to learn from things that have gone wrong and be happy about what has gone right – not to beat myself up for failures.
3. Write down three things I am grateful for. Things that went well that day, good things happening in my life, things I’m looking forward to, my friends and family, etc.
4. Meditate for another two minutes.
5. Draw another red slash on the calendar, to complete an X over the current date.

Why this should work

There’s all sorts of science that meditation will improve your happiness, make you more successful, more focused, and better able to handle challenges. I’ve made several efforts to build a habit of meditation. But what has always thrown me off was the time commitment. Inevitably, I’ll look at the clock, and think, “If I meditate for 10 minutes now, I’ll be late for work.” So by keeping it to two minutes right after waking up and two minutes right before bed, I’m making it far more easy to keep the habit. It’s probably not as much of a benefit as meditating for ten minutes, but it’s better than wanting to meditate for ten minutes and then not doing it.

Writing down my goals for the day will help keep me focused, and make sure that every day I’m doing something to move toward my goal. It keeps me from wasting a day aimlessly drifting. And taking stock in the evening with positive reinforcement is helpful to give me a forward push.

The affirmations are to reprogram my brain. To make me think of myself as someone who will achieve my goal, and will do the work that is necessary to do that. And to notice the opportunities to move toward my goal, not slack off, etc.

The gratitude is something that I’ve read over and over again is one of the best things you can do to increase your happiness.

Finally, there’s drawing the X on the calendar. That’s to help me keep up this habit, through the principle of “don’t break the chain.” The idea is that once I have a string of Xs on the calendar, I won’t want to skip a day, because it will ruin the streak. It’s a tangible visual reminder, adding a bit of gamification to this.

Anyway, I’m trying this out, and I’ll see how it works for me.

* If you don’t know how to meditate, I’ll write a separate post on “meditation for dummies.”

** I say “work on writing” rather than “write” because I’m including things like editing, networking, finding people to do cover art, promoting stuff, and all the crappy drudge work surrounding writing that I tend to avoid.