Every year in January, I’d start building new habits with a great deal of zeal and enthusiasm. Then a few weeks in, life would take over. Old ways would not work and as the new year lost its novelty, the enthusiasm bubble would subtly fizzle out and fill up with empty excuses.
But 2020 was a different kind of year. I was able to build six out of seven new habits I planned for in 6 months. What worked for me this time was a simple, repeatable, and measurable model that I built on Google sheets.
So, why is it hard to make habits stick?
There were two reasons that I could see:
- Hard to connect every day's efforts with long term growth:
Making or breaking habits is hard. When you move from one day to another, your will to stick to it reduces at a much faster rate. Seeing progress is rewarding. There’s power when you can see that your efforts are adding up every day. Just like there’s joy in seeing the interest accumulate on your investments. Seeing is believing. Measuring and visualizing progress gives you a strong reason to come back every time. After all, it is only what you can measure that you can improve.
- Hard days make it harder for habits to stick:
Life happens and when the days are dark and dull, the new habits become the newest interruptions - making them easier to skip. For example, - My workout classes were 1 hour long. Some days I don’t have the hour, and as a working mom, there were many days like that. How could I keep going on the most challenging days like these?
“The definition of Insanity is when people do the same things and expect different results.” — Albert Einstein
If you are into self-improvement, chances are you have seen the ‘1% Better Every Day’ graph that the author popularized in “Atomic Habits” by James Clear. It’s a simple yet powerful message of making tiny changes every day that compound over time. I couldn’t help but wonder how this would look with real data?
My curiosity led me to re-create the above visualization with real-data and truly understand how our seemingly tiny efforts every day impact our personal growth over time. I set out on a rewarding path of personal experiment . These findings can hopefully provide you with robust data-driven evidence and encourage you to keep you on the path of making good habits and breaking bad ones.
Building the new habit model
I. The Framework
My goal was pretty straightforward. I wanted to understand what the above graphical visualization would look like in the context of my world and the new habits that I was adopting. The model needed to fulfill the following criteria:
- Be simple, easy, and fast to record. It must take no more than a couple of minutes a day to maintain; else it would create friction to fill the sheet day after day
- Visualize compounding growth without losing sight of everyday effort
- A repeatable process. I should be able to add another habit with ease
The results were fascinating, but it was the journey that blew my mind.
II. Building blocks
Anyone who has tried to build habits knows that to see any kind of result, you must be consistent. Consistency is the key to all great things anyone has ever achieved. For an activity to become a habit, you need to show up a large number of times in a tight time frame until you start to miss it. If you are serious about building lasting habits, you just can’t escape this piece of truth.
Habits = f(Consistent Efforts x time)
The visualization
- X-axis - Time: Consistent efforts over time - Habit Capsules
- Y-axis - Results: Habits deliver Compounding Growth
I built this model in a Google sheet with a simple a data input sheet and a dashboard to show my progress and the correlation between my efforts and the results. No fancy formulae. Simple addition, just as you’d fill your piggy bank.
III. Understanding Compounding Growth
Darren Hardy, the author of ‘The Compound Effect’, defines Compound Effect as:
“It’s the principle of reaping huge rewards from a series of small, smart choices. Success is earned in the moment to moment decisions that in themselves make no visible difference whatsoever, but the accumulated compounding effect is profound.
Our lives are nothing but a sum total of all the choices we make every day. Habits are nothing but choices. You choose to wake up early instead of snoozing the clock. You choose to workout for 10 mins instead of scrolling through your feed and letting it suck you into a black hole and so many of the many choices you are making subconsciously.
To be honest, measuring ‘compounding growth’ for everyday mundane tasks is pretty much impossible. You just know you are there or you’ve made good progress. In this personal experiment, I’ve tried to paint a realistic picture of the most challenging part of the Habit building process - The beginning and how it contributes to becoming a new you.
Along this journey, I’ve successfully been able to bring consistency with a simple concept to measure it - Habit Capsules’.
IV. ‘Habit Capsules’ the best way to build habits
At the heart of this model is a simple concept that I call ‘Habit Capsules’. It’s exactly that — ‘Focussed effort in a small capsule of time’. It encourages you to show up and do more, and often. It’s hard to say, ‘I couldn’t find 10 minutes to do Yoga.’ But if I end up doing 20 mins — it’s a win, and I get rewarded for it. Here’s what my ‘Habit Capsules’ looked like for the seven habits I tracked during my experimentation phase.
Repetition is a way that our brain learns.
“Repeating a habit leads to clear physical changes in the brain. Neuroscientists call this ‘long-term potentiation’, which refers to the strengthening of connections between neurons in the brain based on recent patterns of activity, With each repetition cell-to-cell signaling improves and the neural connections tighten. First described by neuropsychologist Donald Hebb in 1949, the phenomenon is commonly known as Hebb’s Law: “Neurons that fire together wire together.”
- Edited excerpt from the book Atomic Habits, James Clear
V. The results
Out of the seven habits that I tracked, I was able to make 6 of them into consistent habits. Here’s a quick snapshot:
If I have to elaborate on all of them, it would be a rather long post. I decided to elaborate on 3 of the most impactful habits that you can relate to —
- Early starts
- Getting fit — Yoga
- Learning a new language (or anything you want)
IV. A deep-dive on my habits
Let’s start with my hardest of habits.
Habit #1: Learning a new Language — German
To set some context, I’ve been trying to learn German for over three years. With multiple efforts on and off, this time I decided to keep my learning consistent and set some accountability by tracking my growth.
Here’s what 200+ days of learning German looked like:
Reading the graphs:
- X-axis = Time in days; Y-axis = Results (Compound growth)
- Red line measures consistency at a daily level
- Sharp blue line indicates compound growth over time
- Light blue straight line is the trend line to identify the trajectory
My journey to learn German started in April,
I had initially planned classes for three months but ended up learning for most of the year all the way to December. I must say within the first month itself, I could see the correlation of my efforts to the results. That provided some good encouragement to keep me pushing forward.
Over time I noticed that a meaningful learning session was 20 mins long so I could retain information and interest.
I used this information to define 1 Atomic Unit as 20 minutes of learning. The first few weeks are the hardest as you are getting used to new schedules and routines apart from battling the many doubts in your mind.
While your doubts and fears are hard to keep track of, from a purely data-driven perspective, here's a zoomed-in view of what the more measurable side of my first 20 days of learning German looked like.
The red waves tell you my daily schedule. I had signed up for German classes for 4 weeks in May 2020, right after the pandemic hit. Monday to Thursday for 3 hours. No class on weekends. The elevated flat red line reflects the points I earned between Monday to Thursday i.e. class hours + homework. Then it dropped over the weekend when I wasn’t actively learning, and it repeated again.
This is a perfect example to see the correlation between your everyday efforts and cumulative growth. For something to become a habit, you don’t need to do it every day but in short intervals of time. Eventually, it all comes together over time.
Habit #2: Early starts — 6 am
Early mornings are quiet times. You get more done in less time. To me, those are the hours I borrow to get a headstart for my day. That said, it’s also one of the steepest uphill climbs and chances of you slipping are high every time.
Before I decided to commit to it as a habit to track, I dabbled a lot waking up some days and other days cuddling with my little one and sometimes snoozing to push the early start to tomorrow. As you will see in the visuals, I hadn’t quite committed to doing it until Day-16.
There are quite a few preparatory dimensions for it to work. For example - sleeping early, keeping the first tasks in the morning prepped the day before, keeping your workout clothes ready if that’s what you do the first thing and so on. Setting up for success is a huge part for all habits to stick, especially this one. But that’s for another essay.
I defined an Atomic Capsule with the Yes and No rule. If I am up and out of my bed before 6:15 am I score one point else zero. My data input sheet looked like this:
As you can see, after about two weeks, my wake-up times started stabilizing at 5:45 am, which is better than I aimed for. I started waking up without alarms and feeling energetic and stopped tracking by Day 175.
Habit #3: Getting Fit — Yoga
Consistently working out was a struggle. Missing a day of workout and then another and so on. Soon it would be a week and another. It wasn’t helping me stay fit. This was one of my biggest challenges I wanted to overcome.
In Atomic Habits, James Clear talks about an accountability partner. I teamed up with a friend, and we decided to meet every day on Zoom for a Yoga session.
To reduce friction, we organized a curated list of 10–30 mins of Yoga workout videos online. Same time every day scheduled in our calendars. The early 25 days of staying consistent looked like this on the google sheet:
1 Atomic Capsule = 10 mins of Yoga. I earned 3 points on an average every day.
I worked out 10 mins on a busy day or sometimes even 70 minutes, but we did it every day. Over time consistency paid off. You see how much growth compounds over time.
The wavy blue line above the trend-line were the days when I did 80 minutes of yoga. But over time, I figured that 30-40 mins was my sweet spot to stay committed. It was just right.
As the weeks went by, I looked forward to my workouts and started missing them when my schedule just couldn’t accommodate it. That’s when I knew this had now it’s become my habit — Your first signs of a win!
Here are my top 5 learnings on the most impactful ways to build habits
1. Quantity over quality
If you are serious about building habits, focus on doing a little bit every day. Define your Habit Capsules. Keep it small, yet meaningful blocks of time. It’s about being unable to refuse these Habit Capsules on your busiest days. Eg. Just 5 mins of writing, quick 10 mins of Yoga? It’s hard to say no to that.
Make it sound easy, so you find it hard to skip it each day. For example — ‘Just 10 minutes of Yoga, 15 minutes of reading, just 10 push-ups. Whatever works for you.
2. Accountability Partners almost guarantee success
The ones that worked for me, were the ones that I either teamed up with a friend or signed up for a class. It worked every time. It gave me a solid reason to come back.
3. Visualize progress
When you can see your progress, you are more energized to do better. This tracker helped me to stay on track, know when I was slipping and for how long. As I saw the results flatline, I looked forward to coming back to pick it up.
4. Long term view
Success or failure is seen over time and not on what you did or not do today. You missed a day, no problem, come back tomorrow. But do come back. That’s what makes you succeed.
5. Finally, no effort is lost
In the long run, every bit of effort you put in pays off because you learn something every time you show up. After 200+ days, I’m only still in the very early part of this 1% curve. Knowing and believing that no effort is lost is a lot of encouragement in itself. Focus on adding an atomic unit each day rather than focusing on what you did not do.
Final thoughts
So did I get 1% better every day? While my habits did not show a hockey stick growth over 6 months, I am only getting started as I sit in the early part of the curve. What I learnt was consistency brought linear growth. It is the consistency that you need to achieve before you can take off, and that’s the toughest part. The ‘Habit Capsules’ that you define will eventually build your habits. And for the hockey stick growth - I’m on my way there.
As the new year kicks in, I hope my experiment gives you data-driven evidence that there’ great reason to show up for your habits more often. Whether you want to pick up reading, or a new hobby or give up a bad habit, it’s you who defines what your Habit Capsule will look like and how many you will make time for in a week? When you stay consistent it works and as you have seen, it pays off over time.