How to change yourself and your life with just a few free minutes a day

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Each of us wants to become better, but does little for this, arguing our powerlessness by the lack of free time. You will be surprised, but taking just a few minutes a day can achieve impressive results in the long run.

The value of small efforts towards big goals is proven by the story of Belle Beth Cooper, the main content guru at Buffer and co-founder of the Exist analytics platform. Following the rule "do a little, but regularly" for the year she was able to achieve impressive results:

• devoting only 5 minutes a day to learning French, Belle learned to read, write and speak fluent French;
• reading one page before bed, she read five times more books in a year than usual.

The secret to this success lies in small daily rituals performed over a long period of time, from which those great results are added. This is also proved by the research of a researcher at Stanford University (B. J. Fogg).

Any little good habit will sooner or later change your life for the better, if you follow the four main principles.

1. Start small and repeat one small action daily

The main reason for failure to achieve global goals is too high demands on yourself. There is a chasm between the starting point and the result you want to achieve. Therefore, the right approach is very important in forming habits.

Self-help blogger James Clear calls this approach the Rule of Three Rs: Reminder, Routine and Reward.

The three R's are inextricably linked, and one follows from the other. The first R is a signal that works as a trigger that triggers the second R, the actual necessary action leading to the third R, that is, the desired result. A simple and clear example from life: the green light of a traffic light comes on, we pass an intersection and approach our destination.

In the beginning, it is more important to focus on repeating the habits regularly, rather than their effectiveness. In other words, quantity first, then quality. For example, you want to protect your teeth from cavities and, in addition to the usual brushing with toothpaste and a brush, you are going to train yourself to use dental floss. If you start to floss all your teeth at once, it will take about 10 minutes - you will last a maximum of a week. But if in the first week you start with one tooth, after a week you brush two, then three, and so on, then the result will come by itself.

Starting small is like having superpower.

Here's how Belle Cooper used this superpower to achieve her goals.

Reading: one page before bed

While Belle could have read more, this goal was important, as even one page was already considered a victory. Later, when the habit was well established, Belle set a timer for 15 minutes and read during this time, although the result was about half an hour of reading in the evenings and the same amount on most days in the morning.

Starting with one page, she read 22 books in 2014 and a whopping 33 in 2015. This is almost five times more than the modest seven books read in 2013!

French: one lesson every morning

Belle had tried to learn French before, but her endeavors were unsuccessful. After she was determined to improve her French, a new daily ritual habit appeared in her schedule - taking one lesson in Duolingo over morning coffee.

One lesson takes only 5 minutes. It's a tiny commitment that's easy to fulfill while sitting around at breakfast. Eventually, Belle began to take two, three, and sometimes even four or five lessons, if the process fascinated her.

Do as much as you can, but not less than one.

According to a Duolingo estimate, Belle now knows 41% of French words. An impressive achievement considering the investment of time, isn't it?

2. Focus on one habit

The experience of our heroine has shown that attempts to accustom oneself to several habits at the same time are doomed to failure. Whatever your passion, there is not enough enthusiasm for everything at once. This is the same notorious multitasking: our brain simply cannot physically focus on more than one thing at a time. Belle managed to get into the habit of studying French when bedtime reading became her daily ritual. From all this, the following rule can be deduced:

Accustom yourself to one habit and switch to another only after you have brought the first to automatism.

Sometimes it takes a long time to consolidate the habits. We all know about the 21-day rule, but it does not work for everyone and not always. It took Belle about four months to train herself to get up at six in the morning. There is a new one according to which it takes 66 days to develop a habit. Perhaps it is closer to the truth, but in general, the period of addiction is purely individual and largely depends on how radically you want to change your behavior. Waking up at six in the morning and not at nine will have to study a little longer than getting up at seven instead of eight.

3. Remove barriers and keep everything you need close at hand

Something constantly interferes with the fulfillment of obligations to ourselves, so our task is to remove this “something” and break the vicious circle. If you have everything you need, it is much easier to complete your plan. When you have your smartphone in your hand, you do not need to make any effort to take a French lesson in a mobile application, and when the book is next to the bed, your hand itself reaches for it before going to bed.

Sociology journalist and author Malcolm Gladwell calls this a watershed moment. One small and minor change can make a big difference to the process. Excuses for not doing what you have planned are always found until a certain moment, after which it will be easier to do than not to do.

A prime example of this is the tetanus vaccination at Yale University in the 1970s. No matter how the leadership tried to educate and intimidate students with the danger of illness, the turnout of those wishing to be vaccinated was negligible. Imagine the surprise of the administration when, after adding a vaccination point to the campus map, indicating the hours of work, the turnout of students increased from 3 to 28%!

This trick can also be used to reinforce habits. Belle has already tried it on herself, and it really works. This year, the girl is going to devote more time to playing the piano. Previously, it didn't work very well. But after she moved the tool closer to the kitchen, it became much better, as Belle had the opportunity to exercise while she waited for the food to be cooked. The second goal that Cooper has set for herself is jogging in the morning. She noticed that changing into a tracksuit made it easier to work on herself and go for a run. Therefore, I began to put it next to the bed and put it on in the morning, until the next excuses ripened in my head.

4. Build new habits from existing ones

New habits don't have to be created from scratch. They can be easily developed from existing ones, using the old ones as a trigger for the new ones. We do a lot of repetitive actions without even thinking about it. At the same time, day after day, we brush our teeth before going to bed, wake up in the morning and go to make coffee - this is also a kind of habit.

The point is to add new ones that we need to the existing chain of actions. Belle weaved a French lesson into the morning-coffee chain and was able to devote a little time to her studies every day without any problems. She did the same with bedtime reading, tying the new habit to the bedtime trigger.

Recent research has shown that linked activities are one of the most effective ways to reinforce new habits and can help ensure that they stay true in the future. The key to success is building habits by laying bricks on the existing foundation, rather than building everything from scratch.

Big changes don't just happen. To achieve any goal, you need to go towards it. Even if small and uncertain, but inevitably taking steps closer to the result. Even tiny efforts, if applied constantly, will sooner or later lead to great achievements.