Elevate Your Day with the Habit Switcher
A worksheet to support you in replacing bad habits with good or better ones
We all have parts of our day that we know we’re not using as well as we could. We can understand and be frustrated about this without going to the extremes of obsessive optimization thinking or trying to make every minute of the day the most productive, joyful, or flowful that it can be.
While we could make how we use those not-the-best blocks of the day about our character, willpower, or grit, I think it’s simpler and healthier to call it as it truly is: we each have some bad or neutral habits that kick in during those blocks of the day.
I said in 2015 in Are Your Habits Working For You, we can break habits down into three categories:
Constructive habits propel us toward our goals and priorities.
Neutral habits neither move us forward nor hold us back.
Destructive habits prevent, slow, or reverse our progress toward our goals and priorities.
Using this framework, that “I’m-not-using-my-day-as-well-as-I-can” feeling is our wanting to shift from destructive or neutral habits to constructive ones.
Before we move on, though, I want to remind you that life goals and priorities matter just as much (okay, more) than economic goals. Too often, thinking about productivity devolves into thinking about economic goals and priorities rather than, say, being the type of parent you want to be, cultivating friendships, or being involved in non-profit work in your community.
I want to call attention to this for two reasons:
People often are attending to their life priorities and goals during those periods they’re wanting to be more “productive”
Some people need to switch from behaviors that advance economic goals (career, job, business, etc) to behaviors that advance their life goals
The Habit Switcher is a resource that will help with this switching. It’s a sibling to the Daily Habit Tracker, but instead of helping you track all of your habits, it has one more focused job: it’s designed to help you upgrade from some of your existing habits to better habits and activities.
A Quick Overview of the Habit Switcher
The pic below shows some of what’s on the worksheet:
Let’s break this down…