Habits: Periodically review your habits
Review your habits periodically to ensure they help you become the type of person you want to be.
Periodically reviewing your habits involves a structured and reflective process that takes relatively little time. This process is critical to ensuring that your habits serve you and help you become the type of person you want to be.
👉 Reviewing can help you align your habits with your life purpose and personal values, and help you become the type of person you want to be.
👉 Reviewing can help you identify habits that are hindering your progress or negatively impacting your life. By becoming aware of these habits, you can make the necessary adjustments or develop new habits to promote personal growth and well-being.
👉 Life is dynamic and circumstances change over time. What worked for you before may no longer be effective or appropriate. Reviewing helps you adapt to changes in your life, such as career changes, personal growth, or changed priorities, so your habits remain relevant.
👉 Reviewing habits helps identify inefficiencies and mistakes. This enables you to streamline your routines and eliminate or change ineffective or time-wasting habits. In this way you can refine your daily habits for better results.
👉 If you feel like you're stagnant or not making the progress you want, reviewing your habits can reveal patterns that are holding you back. Addressing these patterns can help you break through plateaus and make the progress you want.
Review your habits
You can review your habits by taking the following steps.
⚒️ Determine milestones
Determine how often you want to conduct reviews. Depending on your situation and preferences, you can combine a detailed monthly (or weekly/biweekly) review with a more general annual (or biannual) review. Choose specific dates and mark these milestones on your calendar for the coming year.
⚒️ Review monthly
At the end of each month, answer questions for yourself like the ones below. Focus on the habits you are currently trying to build or break. These questions serve as a framework for your self-reflection and review process. By recording the results of these monthly reviews, you can track your progress, see how your habits evolve and record required actions. After each review take effective action based on the review outcomes. Be specific and honest when answering the questions.
🤔 How satisfied am I with my progress toward achieving my desired result and becoming the type of person I want to be? Which habits help me make progress? Which not? What obstacles and challenges are holding back my progress?
🤔 Which habits are no longer in line with how I want to behave (personal values) and what I find important to do (life purpose)?
🤔 How can I build and break habits more efficiently? For example by making new habits smaller, being more consistent, modifying the environment, or using apps to track progress.
🤔 Have I devoted enough time and resources to cultivating my habits this month?
🤔 Use of the four-step habit model: How can I make my desired habits more obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying? How can I make my unwanted habits more invisible, unattractive, difficult, and unsatisfying?
🤔 What mistakes have I made or encountered and what have I learned from them? How can I apply these lessons to avoid similar mistakes in the future?
🤔 What are my priorities for the coming month, based on the results of this review? What are my next steps and action items?
Celebrate your achievements and appreciate your progress. Be kind to yourself if the review results disappoint you, just try to do better next month. If necessary, reduce the impact of unhelpful thoughts and feelings.
⚒️ Review annually
Annually (or biannually if you prefer), take a big step back and look at the bigger picture by reflecting on the past year, redetermining the type of person you want to be, and reassessing the current state of your habits. If necessary, you can do this annual evaluation earlier than planned, for example if you feel that your efforts to change your habits are not helping you achieve the results you want.
1️⃣ Prepare the review
Gather the latest versions of the information you documented during your habit process, such as the life area most in need of improvement, the result you want to achieve in that life area, the type of person you want to be, habits scorecard, data from habit trackers (such as the number of times you went to the gym) and your monthly habit reviews. You may also have documented your life purpose and personal values. Before updating anything, make a copy for future reference.
You can reach out to friends, mentors, or advisors for their input and perspective.
2️⃣ Reflect on your habits
Reflect on the past year and answer questions about your habits, such as:
🤔 What are my most important achievements and successes? This can include building desired habits, breaking unwanted habits, achieving physical and emotional results, aligning with personal values and life purpose, or becoming more like the type of person you want to be.
🤔 What are the major things that didn’t go well? Same subjects as above. What caused this?
🤔 What valuable lessons have I learned about myself and my habits that I can carry forward into the next year?
🤔 What patterns or trends are noticeable? This may include fluctuations in your effort and consistency, gradual improvement or decline in the effectiveness of certain habits over time, recurring obstacles that consistently hinder the success of certain habits, or cues that consistently prompt certain desired or unwanted behaviours.
🤔 What circumstances or priorities have changed that may require adjustments to my habits?
3️⃣ Redetermine the type of person you want to be
As part of your habit process, you have determined the life area that is most in need of improvement, the result you want to achieve in that life area, and the type of person you want to be who can achieve that result.
If you believe any of the above have changed, go through the determination process again and update the changed information.
4️⃣ Update the habits scorecard
Your habits have almost certainly changed since the last annual review. You've probably built some new habits and broken some existing ones. Your assessment of your habits (good, neutral, bad) may have changed depending on changes in your circumstances, life purpose, personal values or the type of person you want to be.
Update your list of daily habits and your assessment of these habits by going through the habits scorecard process again and updating the information on your most recent scorecard or by creating a new scorecard from scratch.
5️⃣ Determine actions
Determine the necessary actions based on the review results. You may decide to continue working on the habits you’re already tackling, or include an action item to redetermine which habits you want to build or break.
Celebrate your achievements and appreciate your progress. Don't be hard on yourself if you haven't managed to live up to your ideals, that's all part of being human. Defuse difficult thoughts, accept challenging feelings and hold your self-stories lightly.
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After each review, take effective action based on the outcomes of the review.
References
Atomic Habits, by James Clear
My blogposts about habits are available here:
https://www.a3lifedesign.com/blog-english/category/Habits
