Make Small Changes To Your Daily Routine

Remember New Resolutions? I do. I remember making them. I remember not keeping them too! That’s when I moved to the Word of The Year ritual and I’m happy to say that it works for me. But that does not mean that I’m not trying to change myself and incorporate better habits and rituals. In recent times, I’ve realised that drastic changes don’t work. Instead you’ll find more success if you make small changes to your daily routine.

Make Small Changes To Your Daily Routine

If you want to add a new habit or routine one of the main hinderances to this is friction – distance, time and effort. Reducing friction means removing an obstacle or coming up with a strategy to that will make achieving your goal easier.

“Ask yourself, ‘What would make it easier for me to do this?’ You want to reduce the effort. The thing about friction is we often don’t focus on it when we’re changing our behavior. We focus on ourselves and keeping ourselves motivated and exerting willpower. But you have to recognize that you’re also going to be influenced by the things going on around you.”

Dr Wendy Wood, author Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

My experience with Social Media

As a blogger, it’s hard to stay off social media because that’s how we get our work seen. But as I’m sure many of you have experienced, it’s easy to fall down the rabbit hole that Facebook and Instagram offer. I realized I was spending far too much time there. I’d rather be spending that time writing or reading.

In order to cut back, I created friction by removing the Facebook app from my phone. That left me with Instagram, which is nearly impossible to use from a desktop. Often, I’d stay up quite late looking at images and watching videos on Insta. That’s when I decided to leave my phone downstairs at night. We live in a duplex type house and sleep in the upstairs bedroom. Even if I felt the need to look at Instagram or respond to WhatsApp messages, I was too lazy to follow through!

More recently, I’ve got off WhatsApp on my main phone and have switched to Signal. I’ve got off a lot of groups and unnecessary conversations this way.

So it’s possible to make these small changes to our routines that can help us reach our goals.

It’s never too late to change your life for the better. You don’t have to take huge steps to change your life. Making even the smallest changes to your daily routine can make a big difference to your life.

Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart