This is a couple days late, so I apologize … but I’ve started the December Challenge forum in the Zen Habits forums. I encourage anyone looking to form a new habit in December to go there, join the ZH forums, and post your personal December Challenge!

How it works: The Zen Habits monthly challenges are a way to motivate yourself to form a new habit. I’ve personally found it a very effective way to form a new habit: challenge yourself to stick to a new habit every day for 30 days, and be accountable to a group of people in a forum. I’ve done it to quit smoking, start running, eat healthier, wake up earlier, form productive habits and more.

There is no required habit for the monthly challenges — you decide what your challenge will be, and announce it in the “post your challenge here” thread on the forum. Then, report back as often as you can (daily reporting is highly, highly recommended) and see if you can stick to that habit.

The only rules:

1. Do only one habit at a time. Well, you are free to break this rule, but I assure you that if you do multiple habits at once, you will be less likely to succeed. Trust me — I’ve tried both ways many times, and in my experience there is 100% failure for forming multiple habits at once, and a 50-80% success if you do just one habit at a time — depending on whether you follow the next two rules.

2. Make it very, very easily accomplishable. You decide how hard your challenge will be. Some people try to wake up 2 hours earlier than usual. Some people go from being couch potatoes to trying to exercise for 45 minutes a day. Others just try to do 10 minutes of exercise a day. Guess who is more likely to succeed?

While an easy challenge might not seem like enough of a challenge, remember that it is difficult to form a new habit. You should focus, in this first month of your habit, on forming the habit, not on conquering your life in one month. When I decided to run a marathon, do you think I was doing 10-20 mile runs in the first couple months? No. I did 1-3 milers, and slowly built up to the longer runs over the course of months. Start small. Trust me.

3. Report daily. OK, you can report every other day, or once a week. But I can tell you from experience, doing these monthly challenges all year, that daily reporting is by far the best. Hold yourself accountable to the group, even if you slip up, and you’ll be much more likely to succeed.

So go join the Zen Habits forums now (be sure to enter “down” as the authorization code – the opposite of “up”) and post your monthly challenge in the December Challenge forum!

Zen Habits Facebook group
A reader named Karl started a Zen Habits group on Facebook to bring like-minded people together who use Facebook. It looks pretty cool, but I don’t use Facebook much right now, so I can’t say much about the group. I just thought I’d let you guys know about it.