Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Forming habits with repeating tasks

Building habits involves a fair amount of repetition and motivation. This week, grant shares a tip of using repeating tasks in Remember The Milk alongside a daily task to build your desired habits and to keep them going.

Recently I’ve been using Remember The Milk to build some habits that I’ve had more or less a hard time building (either because of forgetfulness or laziness).

For example, I try to take Omega 3 supplements every evening before dinner, but sometimes I forget.

I also try to meditate every day, but some days I find watching an episode of Friends on Hulu much more appealing. Having a task asking if I meditated gives me the small nudge I need in order to sit down and clear my mind.

So this is my setup:

1. Create a new list named “Habit Building”.
2. In this list, enter all the habits you wish to get into, in the form of a question. For example, “Did you meditate?”, and “You took Omega-3 before eating dinner… right?” (or however you can phrase it as to up the guilt-factor)
3. Set the tasks to repeat daily, with the due date set to 3 months from now; this way, these tasks won’t clutter up your Today and This Week lists.
4. Create a task named “Check habits”. Make it repeat daily and due today, with the time set to about 10 minutes before you usually to go to bed.

And this is the execution:

1. Wait for your “check habits” task to show up at night to remind you to review your habits.
2. Open the task and complete it.
3. Review your lists of habits. Allow yourself the “reward” of completing the items you succeeded in doing.

I find myself more motivated, because if I don’t meditate, I have Bob T. Monkey to answer to later that night!

Happy habit forming!

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

Do you have a suggestion for our weekly Tips & Tricks post? Got an interesting set-up or idea? Head over to the Tips & Tricks forum, add a new topic, and let us know how you use Remember The Milk. Each week we’ll give away a 1 year Pro account to the user whose idea inspires the Tips & Tricks Tuesday blog post for that week.