Around one year ago I read the book “The
power of habit” from Charles Duhigg and since that moment I decided I would
work to create a new habit every month.
Working only in one habit per month might
seem not very ambitious, however, when you think about it at the end of the year
I have 12 new habits. Each habit I see it as a tool, this means I have now 12 new tools in my tool box! That’s quite a lot!!
Habits that I
introduced are quite varied from something so trivial as ensuring I brush my
teeth twice per day, being every week day at 7:30am at the gym or create a
routine to go to sleep (no smartphone in the bed was really difficult to
achieve for me)
The good thing with the habits is that you
do them without thinking about it, this is great as you don’t lose energy. I
remember at the beginning how difficult was for me to wake up 7am and go to the
gym... always procrastinating. It’s said to build a habit you need to repeat it
at least during 21 days until you interiorize it. This particular one took me
longer. However now it’s totally integrated in my morning routing, and I love
it!
Today I want to share with you the latest 2
habits I built.
·
New habit 1
o
Minimize the physical books I
read and get more e-books. One of the main reasons why I read traditional book
it’s because I like taking notes, use highlighters and grab ideas. However
finally I found a way to do this with my Kindle. I knew how to highlight and
add notes in my e-books. But I did not know what to do with those segments with
notes. Not anymore! I learned how to transfer all my notes to my second brain
(Evernote). I love using Evernote, it’s a very handy app that I use every day
for numerous actions. I thought that it might be a good idea if I could find a
way to transfer my notes of the e-book I read to my Evernote app. I didn’t know
this was possible but finally I managed to do it! The key is in your Kindle
book account! Yes, there’s a Kindle account, I didn’t know that, I thought I
just have my Amazon account, but no, there’s also a Kindle account and all your
notes, highlights, books and basically every task related with your reading
activity is stored there. You just need to login https://kindle.amazon.com
·
New habit 2
o
It seems the whole human race
is fighting against unproductive meetings and unproductive emails. At least in
the IT companies I worked during my last 2 decades this was a common
complaint..... long meetings (often not useful) and too many emails. Last month I started
an experiment. What would happen if I do emails twice per day? What would
happen if a work offline in my Outlook client? What would happen if I turn
off push up notifications in my iPhone? You know what happened? Nothing! The
world is not expecting that I reply an email 5 minutes after I received it.
Sometimes we create this fake illusion that we need to reply emails ASAP.
However this is not productive. Being focus in email in real time is a
productivity killer. Now what I do is that I check/reply my email for an hour
before lunch and another hour before going home. And just before going home I
prepare the list of the tasks that I want to do when I arrive to the office.
This works for me, I arrive to
my desk and I
start working in productive stuff, not in emails. Of course we need to read
emails and answer emails, but during this month of my experiment I have not
noticed that someone is upset because I don’t reply immediately. 99% of the
emails can wait to be answered in my email window, either before lunch or
before going home. And the rest of the day I have a bunch of hours to work on
important tasks!
Today is already June. This means I have started to build a new
habit, stay tuned to know if I’m able to create it J
Have fun!
@yolocalizo
