🔄Mastering Consistency: 5 Habits Behind My Daily Success

25 May

I currently have a 250-day streak on Duolingo, I’ve been practising on the guitar at least every other day for the last month and I’ve been exclusively brushing and eating with my non-dominant hand [left hand; I’m not ambidextrous] for the last 5 years (since 2020). Here’s what I did to develop this level of consistency and how you can be more consistent towards achieving your goals.

5 main points:

Make your environment conducive to the thing you are doing
Building a habit
Permission to fail/suck
Enjoy the boring, mundane tasks
Time-blocking

🏙️Make your environment conducive to the thing you are doing

One thing I’ve done is to change my environment so that I am more likely to do the thing. For example, in my case of learning the guitar, I put guitar at the foot of my bed so that it is always in reach whenever I’m in my room. This reduces the barrier to me playing the guitar. If I put the guitar in another room, like the living room, I’m more likely to be lazy and not practise. This is the same thing with Duolingo. I have Duolingo on my phone’s home screen so that after I unlock my phone, it’s one of the first few apps I see.

Alternatively, if I want to break a bad habit, which for me was spending too much time on YouTube, I put more barriers in place to make it harder for me to access YouTube. For example, it’s not on my home screen and even when I do open it, I have an app (one.sec) that makes me wait about 10 seconds each time I want to open YouTube. I explain it more in this previous post.

Set up your environment to make it easier to do the habit you want to achieve.

🏗️Building a habit

Building habits have helped me maintain consistency. In his book The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg describes The Habit Loop. In order to build a habit, whether good or bad, 3 things need to happen in order:

There needs to be a cue i.e. trigger.
There needs to be a routine: the action (i.e. the thing you are trying to do).
There needs to be a reward.

I’ll use my actual case of practising the guitar. After work is when I usually do my guitar practice for at least 15 minutes. This is what it looks like:

I enter my room, put my bag down and then go take a shower.
Once I finish from my shower, I pick up my guitar, tune it, practise my scales, practise playing open chords and then try play along to some of my favourite songs.
After 15 minutes or until I get tired, I reward myself with a YouTube video while I have my dinner.

My rule is that I’m not allowed to go on YouTube until I have done at least 15 minutes of guitar practice. Following the above 3-point framework, this is what the habit of “practising the guitar“ looks like for me:

Cue: Take a shower
Routine/action: Practise guitar
Reward: Watch YouTube video with dinner

The cue is the trigger to start your task. For me, this means once I take my shower, the next thing to do is pick up the guitar and practise. There must be a reward after an action is done. The reward doesn’t have to be big; for me, it’s simply getting to watch a YouTube video. It can be anything, even as simple as the feeling of accomplishment.

Hence, a habit consists of these 3 things: Cue, action, reward. The most important steps are the cue and the reward. We do more of the things we are rewarded for. That’s why you have to be careful choosing your cues and rewards, since habits can be both good and bad. We have built up our own habits unconsciously. For example, when some people open up their phone to check a message, they also go on Facebook, YouTube or Instagram just because (I’m guilty of doing this for YouTube).

To summarise, I use the cue-action-reward framework to build and maintain my habits. I choose my cues and rewards carefully so that it helps reinforce my habit.

❌Give yourself permission to fail/suck and set realistic goals

When I started playing the guitar, I intentionally set the bar low for myself. I told myself that, for the first month:

I will be making noise, not music.
My fingers will hurt and I’ll feel like I’m wasting my time.
I won’t see any results for several weeks

And that’s okay. I didn’t start by thinking that I’m going to be able to play guitar like my favourite guitarists after only a month. Now, after a month, I’ve gotten better: I can transition between open chords fairly easily, I can play for longer before my fingers start to hurt and I can play simple songs.

Also, I set the minimum amount of time/reps to the habits that I want to build. I set a minimum of 15 minutes for my guitar practice but I consistently end up going for 30-60 minutes each session. I reduce the barrier to action, since I assume that I will be completely exhausted after work and can only manage to play for 15 minutes at most. By setting a low target, it makes it easier for me to hit my daily target and stick with the habit longer. One caveat is not to make your goals too easy or simple. For example, 3 minutes of guitar practise is too short a time.

Expect to suck at first for a long time, like a month, before you start seeing results. I changed my mindset and set low expectations which allows me to practise regularly.

🧱Enjoy the boring, mundane tasks

Training can be boring and tedious, I know, I get it. Practising scales on my guitar is quite boring for me. But it’s the fundamentals of getting good and one of the requirements to becoming a proficient guitarist. Just like repeating verb conjugations when learning a language [I go, you go, he goes etc], doing serving drills for tennis, going through flashcards for studying, each of these fundamentals are necessary to achieving the bigger goal. They are like bricks; Each practice, drill or training session is like laying the brick foundation. You do this over and over again until you end up with a house. As a gamer, I think of the gaming analogy of “grinding“ - defeating the same enemies over and over again to gain experience points, so that my character becomes more powerful and skilled to take on the stronger, more difficult boss. While the training itself isn’t glamorous, it eventually leads to glamorous results. No one enjoys training - you don’t see athletes smiling during their gym workouts. But the training needs be done in order to develop consistency and then proficiency.

What helps me get through some of the boring, tedious practice sessions are:

Separating my feelings from the task at hand. I tell myself, “It doesn’t matter how I’m feeling, I have to do my guitar practice today,” full stop. If we only ever did things when we felt like it, nothing will ever get done.
Having something to look forward to afterwards [a reward] or even during. For me, that means after I practise my scales and chord transitions, I get to play along to my favourite songs. Then afterwards, I get to watch a YouTube video.

⌚Time-blocking

I won’t spend too much time on this since it’s pretty straightforward. Block out times on your calendar for the habit you are trying to create. For me, this looks like:

Everyday (when I’m not oncall) - 5:00-5:30pm: Guitar practice.

I give myself some extra time as a buffer. Then I just follow my calendar. If you have things scheduled on your calendar, all you have to do is follow. You won’t be thinking, “It’s 5pm, what should I do? I guess I can do/practise X“, since that never ends up happening.

Bonus tips for making it this far:

💎Recognise and avoid “shiny object” syndrome: This is when you see something alluring or enticing that distracts your focus. For example, I’m practising guitar and then I watch a TikTok video about some guy playing the piano flawlessly. Now, I think of trying to get into learning the piano as well.
Be aware of what you consume. What works for me is to appreciate the video for what it is, admire the skill and then move on. I’d rather “complete building one bridge“ rather than “building multiple half-finished bridges“ - starting and stopping multiple projects at the same time.
🐖Have some form of accountability: Tell a trusted friend about your habit or pursuit to hold you accountable. Post in public or social media about your goal. If those are too much for you, have a jar where you put money into it for every time you miss your habit.
🏃Enough research, just act: You have already done enough “research“ on whatever goal you are setting. Most people delay action because “they need to do more research“, when really, it’s a problem in execution. For example, if your goal is to lose weight, most people spend too much time researching different diet programs and exercise regimens when all it really comes down to is:
- Eat less junk food
- Eat more fruits and vegetables
- Get moving somehow more often. That’s it!
In most of the things we do, we have some idea on what to do and how to do it. But the most important thing is to actually do the things we already know we should be doing.
Use the weekends: While some of you will be rolling your eyes, it’s true. You generally have more free time on the weekends, which you can use to build your habits and work towards your personal goals. Not the whole weekend, but you can put aside a few hours and still enjoy your weekend. A few hours can go a long way to building consistency and eventually proficiency.

If you want to read more about setting good habits and choosing the right cues, click here.

Some of my related posts:

Mark Moshi