Tips & Tricks Tuesday: “Throw your hat over the fence” to adopt a new habit

Learning a new habit and changing an old habit both require the same thing: doing it over and over.

This week’s tip comes from jose.holguin, who shares an illustrative idiom of “throwing your hat over the fence” and a method to start your habit and continue it day by day—with some help from friends.

I want to share this strategy that I use to change my habits, or get used to a new routine or something similar to that. It is based on the idea of “throwing your hat over the fence”. What does this mean? Ill give you an example: I just decided to quit smoking, hard thing to do right!? So what I do is this, I have a task that repeats itself every night, and it just says:

Did you smoke today?

If I didn’t smoke during the day, I just check it off and feel great! Otherwise, it stays there. By the end of the week, RTM sends these tasks that I haven’t completed to my friend who knows about this. I gave him 200 dollars, and the deal is that whenever he gets a total of 5 of those from me, he can spend my money.

It has worked so far very well! I also like to put another task as a reminder of this every morning. This is great way to start changing habits and always remember them. It is important that you have someone you can share your tasks with and will be responsible for spending your money, or any similar measure that would work for you.

Thanks for sharing this tip, jose.holguin! You’re our Tips & Tricks Tuesday winner this week.

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