6 Rules for Dealing With Habits vs. Tasks

Every Monday is Productivity & Organization Day at Zen Habits.

If you’ve been working on a simplified to-do list, you may have your tasks whittled down to the essential. But what about the daily and weekly things you need to do every day: exercise, cleaning, errands, making a to-do list … as those are things you need to do, do they go on your to-do list?

How do you deal with habits on your to-do list?

Recently reader William Mize asked:

I’m working on implementing ZTD into my life, and I’m having a hard time building my trusted system due to the fact that so many systems don’t make a distinction between “habits” and “tasks”.

My brain sometimes confuses the two, and it hurts. Ow!

I see habits as something we want to do/perform on a daily basis, whereas tasks are something that are one time only, or perhaps once a week, once a month, etc.

I’d love to hear your take on this distinction, if it indeed exists, or what.

After a few seconds’ thought, I was about to refer them to the Productivity 501 blog’s excellent Habit List post. In that post, Mark Shead suggested making a lists of habits that you’d like to practice, and checking them off each day that you do them.

This is an excellent suggestion, and I recommend it. However, I took a couple of minutes to think about how I deal with my own habits. They certainly don’t go on my to-do list, and yet I still do them. And then I realized that there’s more to this than a list, and that I should go into a little more detail.

The Anatomy of Remembering Habits
So, how do I deal with my own habits? The same way most people do, I suspect. I do them without thinking. That’s what makes them habits. Of course, in order for them to become habits, I have to concentrate on them and be reminded of them.

Let’s take my habit of putting things away when I’m done with them. I don’t have that on a to-do list. When I finish with something, I pause and look at my mess, and clean it up, mostly without thinking.

However, I wasn’t born with that habit. I learned it, and had to focus on it for at least a month before it became something I didn’t have to think about.

That’s the same with any of our habits: brushing our teeth, getting dressed, taking a shower, eating, smoking … we don’t think about them. It took awhile for them to become ingrained habits, though.

The key to not having to remember habits: a trigger. Habits are triggered by an external event. That event could be a habit list (although you’d first have to develop the habit of checking the list), but more often it’s something we do every day. For example, I wake up at 4 a.m., after being triggered by an alarm clock. My getting up triggers my habit of starting my coffee and drinking water. Now, I’m using the drinking water as a trigger to exercise. Each thing triggers something after it. The same is true of any ingrained habit: there’s an external trigger.

The 6 Rules of Remembering Habits
So, after examining the above reflections, here are the rules for remembering habits each day (or each week):

1. Identify a trigger. In order for a habit to be a habit, you need to have a trigger. For example, you might brush your teeth after showering — the shower is the trigger for the brushing. And you know you’re going to shower each day, so you know you will brush your teeth.

When do you want to do your habit? What do you do at that time of day, every day? If you want to do something weekly, is there a weekly trigger that could precede it?

2. Focus on developing the habit. Once you’ve identified the trigger, you have to do the habit every single time you do the trigger, without exception, in order for it to become deeply ingrained. Focus on developing that habit for one month. Make it something easy, as you are more likely to not do the habit if it is difficult.

3. Only focus on that one habit. I’ve said this many times before, but if you are trying to establish more than one habit at a time, your focus will be diluted. It’s much harder. If you’re good at developing habits, you can get away with 2 or 3 at a time. But most of us aren’t good at it, so focus on that one habit, for a month. After the month, you can work on a new habit. This may seem difficult, as you probably have a bunch of habits you’d like to adopt, but think long term: after a year, you’ll have 12 great new habits.

4. Log it. If the habit is important, you should log it. Make the logging easy, and do it immediately after the activity. Don’t put it off. This will make the habit more deeply ingrained. Read more on the logging habit.

5. Report it to others. Tell others you are going to do this habit for a month, and then report to them daily. If others are expecting your report, you will be more likely to stick to it. The more public pressure you put on yourself, the better. Put it on your blog, or join an online forum or some other group, have a coach, or email all your friends and family each day.

6. Once it’s ingrained, you don’t need a list. If a habit is firmly ingrained, and strongly attached to its trigger, you won’t need to put it on your task list or any other list. You will just do it once the trigger goes off. And that’s the payoff: good habits, without any of the thinking.

If you liked this article, please bookmark it on del.icio.us or vote for it on Digg. I’d appreciate it. :)

See also:

6 Rules for Dealing With Habits vs. Tasks

Photo by paulworthington

Every Monday is Productivity & Organization Day at Zen Habits.

How do you deal with habits on your to-do list?

Recently reader William Mize asked:

I’m working on implementing ZTD into my life, and I’m having a hard time building my trusted system due to the fact that so many systems don’t make a distinction between “habits” and “tasks”.

My brain sometimes confuses the two, and it hurts. Ow!

I see habits as something we want to do/perform on a daily basis, whereas tasks are something that are one time only, or perhaps once a week, once a month, etc.

I’d love to hear your take on this distinction, if it indeed exists, or what.

However, I wasn’t born with that habit. I learned it, and had to focus on it for at least a month before it became something I didn’t have to think about.

The 6 Rules of Remembering Habits
So, after examining the above reflections, here are the rules for remembering habits each day (or each week):

When do you want to do your habit? What do you do at that time of day, every day? If you want to do something weekly, is there a weekly trigger that could precede it?

If you liked this article, please bookmark it on del.icio.us or vote for it on Digg. I’d appreciate it. :)

See also:

Posted on 1 October 2007 in Habits, Productivity & Organization |
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Comments (14)

Gerhi Janse van Vuuren Says:

October 1st, 2007, 5:38 am

Would the same rules work for unlearning a habit? In other word if you identify the trigger of a bad habit can you consistently not do it? Or would it be easier to work on a replacement habit rather than just an elimination?

rafael apocalypse Says:

October 1st, 2007, 8:15 am

Hello Leo, I’m reading ZenHabits for a while, a bunch of things that you write here serves me a lot, thank you…

Gerhi, unlearning ah habit could be much more difficult than learning something…

To unlearn some habits I focus on that, every time that I do something that I don’t want to do anymore, I close my eyes and for one or two minutes I think in not to do that anymore… This started when I saw me broking things when I was anger with something or someone… So every time I get anger know I just relax, count until 100, and repeat o myself: I’ll not broke anything…

I can tell that’s working…

mjh Says:

October 1st, 2007, 8:26 am

http://www.joesgoals.com is perfect for keeping an eye on those “habit tasks” that don’t really work in the average GTD or todo system.

Spike Says:

October 1st, 2007, 9:39 am

This is a very appropriate article, it’s something I regularly struggle with. I’m very reliant on my weekly planner sheet I designed and I am loath to go back to having multiple systems and sheets all over the place for different elements. I’m constantly juggling how best to fit my habit tracking onto the sheet. I tried something similar to Mark Shead’s habit list, I’ve tried having a weekly theme. Right now I just mix any habits in with my next actions. Yes, it’s a sloppy practice, but I don’t have that many tasks to track so it’s not caused any problems.

I think the mistake with this approach is that it means you end up planning ahead how you are going to work on your habits. For instance, I’m always trying to get into the habit of going to the gym so I would write “go to gym” on every day of my weekly planner. If I missed a day I had to put a demoralizing cross to signify an incomplete task and as I have written before on my blog about laying habit foundations, it’s much more important to focus on individual days. Maybe I need to plan a day planner instead of a weekly planner :)

Barry Says:

October 1st, 2007, 11:05 am

I personally have two different daysheets: one for workdays, and one for weekend days. Things I want to do get “batched”, or go into a routine, like the morning and evening routines Leo speaks of. I break my day into segments: 5am - 3pm is work time, and includes getting up, showering, and getting to work and back. 3pm - 5pm is different every day, but at the beginning of the period, I check on the pets and my son, and make sure all is good. 5pm - 8pm is family time, and the routine is pretty much the same: help my wife with dinner, laundry, and household stuff, while interacting with everyone and helping with anything that is important to them, such as homework. 8pm - 10pm is evening routine, which includes some personal grooming and writing time. I find that batching the little stuff at the first of each segment of the day helps move things along.

laure Says:

October 1st, 2007, 14:00 pm

I just discovered this (absolutely fantastic!) website last week, and it’s already become a part of my morning routine to check in. Great thoughts on how not to clutter your to-do lists with recurring habits (something I’ve struggled with in the past, too), but how to actually make the habits part of your life without needing to track them.

One question, for Leo or whoever . . . in the past I’ve constructed spreadsheets to hold all the habits and daily/periodic recurring tasks I want to accomplish, just to give myself the satisfaction of being able to check them off. I’ve previewed some of the online spreadsheets linked to here (Joe’s Goals, etc.), but they would lead to the same issue that mine did–namely, those psychologically demoralizing unchecked spaces for things you only do once or twice or five times a week.

It sounds like a niggly little detail, but I don’t like seeing them there. Any thoughts on how to construct a simple, implementable “habit tracker” that won’t make it look like there are things you failed to check off?

Leo Says:

October 1st, 2007, 16:01 pm

@Gerhi: Great question! Maybe I should do a follow-up post on this. But basically:

Bad habits also have triggers, and if you want to unlearn the habit, it’s important that you identify the triggers first. For example, when I quit smoking, I identified at least half a dozen triggers for my smoking (including when I first woke up, after eating, after a meeting, stress, going out drinking, driving) … the key is to first identify them.

Next, you need to find a positive habit to replace the negative habit at each of those triggers. If you don’t, the negative habit will be difficult to break. For example, what was I going to do when I first woke up, instead of smoking? I chose exercise. You might choose eating breakfast or something else, but you need to focus on doing the positive habit at each of the triggers — and you will probably need different positive habits for each trigger if there are more than one.

Leo Says:

October 1st, 2007, 16:08 pm

@laure: you could use a simple spreadsheet that only has the days of the week you plan to do the habit. For example, if you plan to exercise on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, only show those three days on the spreadsheet.

I would recommend that you choose certain days for your habit, if you aren’t going to do them every day. Daily is actually best for building a habit, because of consistency, but in any case, you need a trigger on the days you want to do the habit. And you need to be consistent about doing it after the trigger. If not, and you just do the activity several times a week on the days you feel like it … that’s not really a habit. :)

That said, if your trigger is on irregular days (in other words, you don’t know when the trigger will come up), I can’t think of a good method of tracking it other than adding the dates to the spreadsheet on a day-to-day basis.

However, if your question is how to have your habit-tracker not show the days when you should have done the habit but didn’t, I’m not sure that’s beneficial. :) The point is to see whether you’re successful or not … hiding the days you didn’t do it is not being honest with yourself. If you have too many days when you’re missing the habit, you should take a step back to see what the obstacle is, and start with a new plan that includes a solution to that obstacle, with a clean slate — don’t get discouraged and give up, but start with a new energy and focus.

mathew johnson Says:

October 1st, 2007, 16:15 pm

how’s this for z.t.d. - if you make a conscious effort to remember and cultivate a habit, but you still can’t remember to do it regularly, maybe it is a habit that is too extraneous and you should let it fall by the wayside to focus on more important things.

laure Says:

October 1st, 2007, 17:25 pm

@leo: Thanks for your reply. After several days of browsing here, I have no idea how you manage to do everything you do AND be so responsive to individual posters here. :-)

(also @mathew, assuming his reply was intended for me) . . .

I really appreciate the feedback, and now that I think about it, it would be pretty simple to just blacken out the cells on a spreadsheet for days when I’m not doing something and don’t intend to. I guess that would work even if I don’t have designated days–for instance, if I have the goal of exercising 5x/week, I could just make sure I *DO* that (using Leo’s triggering ideas), and scratch out the cells on the days when I don’t so they don’t look glaringly empty.

Perhaps my question wasn’t entirely clear. It wasn’t meant to be about hiding days from myself when I don’t do what I intended. I’m just an organizational geek, and I like my tracking tools to be all clean and pretty. This perfectionistic streak is, of course, one of the biggest obstacles in my way of accomplishing things. ;-)

-laure

Steve Says:

October 1st, 2007, 22:30 pm

For #4 “Log It”, I use the Seinfeldian Chain method (http://lifehacker.com/software/motivation/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-secret-281626.php)

I bought a 30 day erasable calendar from Office Depot, and mark a big red X each day I do the activity I’m trying to form as a habit. If I miss a day, you have to erase them all and start over fresh. There is very positive reinforcement in marking off a day and viewing how long the “chain” gets. As Seinfeld says “don’t break the chain”.

Adrian (www.couplehood.net) Says:

October 2nd, 2007, 1:18 am

Hi Leo,

I’m wondering if you’re inclined to look into neuroscience for a different perspective on forming habits. I’m no expert, but I was pretty intrigued by an article I read on leadership from a neuroscience angle.

So, just applying it here, I found that to form habits, it’s pretty effective to apply positive reinforcement once a “habit act” is completed (it’s something to do with connections among the dendrites and dopamine, or something).

While it doesn’t change anything in practice, it’s useful to know why it’s working as well as it does.

Just a thought :)

Rae Says:

October 2nd, 2007, 9:22 am

Steve: Thanks for the Seinfeld method. I think it could work for me. My problem with developing an exercise habit is there is no immediate feedback. I dramatically improved my money management because I made a point of putting a certain amount of money saved in one place and watched it grow. (I called it my “fritter fund” because before I had been frittering it away.) With exercise, all you have to show immediately is. . .sweat? But I am pretty competitive and I think the chain method could work. I’m going to give it a try. That and signing up for the October challenge.

Nolan Says:

October 2nd, 2007, 13:59 pm

This topic is close to….but not exactly like….a conundrum that I face with my task list. Namely, what to do with repeating workflow items as opposed to singular, one-time project-associated actions. I’ve considered creating workflows for all my repeating projects (e.g., lawn aeration or vehicle maintenance) and mapping the underlying tasks to specific days on the calendar, depending on the frequency of repetition. This is distinct from one-time projects, which systems like GTD seem to be centered around. Has anyone successfully and simply dealt with this?