Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Forming routine habits with tasks and reminders
Repeating tasks can keep you productive day in and day out, but darhull’s tip takes things to another level this week—using repeating tasks, reminders, and estimates to build a habitual routine out of your tasks.
I enjoyed Grant’s post here. I’ve also been using RTM for habits. Here’s how I’m doing it.
I like to create certain “flows”. For example, a morning routine, an evening routine, and then some workflows for my day.
Let’s use “Morning Routine” as an example here. Here’s how I set that up.
1. I write out a list of habits/tasks I’d like to have in my morning routine and order them according to how I think they should work. (I use Google Keep for this step.)
2. I test that list out over a couple of weeks, and play with it - adding, deleting, re-ordering it - until it feels like it’s working.
3. Once the routine is feeling good, I time each activity and put a start time at the beginning of each habit (4:00 get up, 4:05 put on water to boil, 4:06 do two minute exercise routine… etc).
4. Once the timing is in place, I add one thing on the list, each week, starting at the top, to my RTM tasks. Once they’re in RTM they’re a fixed task which means I no longer have a choice as to whether I complete it or not. I work to truly turn one item in my flow list to a habit each week. I can negotiate anything that isn’t in RTM, but once it’s in RTM it’s set in stone.
I have a Moto360 watch, and have set up notifications on RTM that signal my watch. Now when I get up I have my watch and RTM keep me on track for my morning routine. This stops me from getting sidetracked on Facebook, or taking too long to get my act together. It creates its own adrenaline. Bonus is I also try to complete each task before the watch buzzes again.
What I also love is RTM’s ability to duplicate tasks. I have four “high powered” work days each week (Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday) where I get up early, and one more relaxed workday each week (Wednesday) where I get up later but still wish to complete everything in my morning/evening routines. Once the habit is in RTM for my high powered days, I simply duplicate the task and set the time to an hour later for the relaxed days.
I’ve been playing with this for quite a while, and now I have a solid morning routine in place, and half an evening routine in place. This makes a huge difference to my productivity and mindset!
Thanks for sharing this tip, darhull! You’re our Tips & Tricks Tuesday winner this week.
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