Productivity Arata! Have you ever tried to create a new habit? Did you find it difficult to make your new habit an integral part of your day-to-day routine? Perhaps you managed to implement a new routine for a few days but then eventually returned to your old ways.
If you are curious to know what is the most difficult aspect of instilling a new habit, grab your notebook and pen to write down the answer. The psychological and emotional explanation behind changing habits is the relative EASE or DIFFICULTY of performing the activities.
I say this from experience: in Arata Academy we have tens of thousands of students. We’ve worked with everybody and noticed that the people who had the most difficulty were the ones who did not follow our recommendations and decided to complicate things. If you follow our recommendation to keep it simple, we guarantee that you will create the new habit.
1. Understand the weakness of most habit-changing systems.
People with a lot of experience and great intentions have created many different productivity methods. There are also organizations fully dedicated to helping their customers and communities to change habits. A very famous example is Alcoholics Anonymous, which has a 12-step program so that members can finally change their habits. The 12-step program works very well for a lot of people.
Keep in mind that every method out there has its merits and will be suitable for a specific group of people. If you identify with the proposal and are able to integrate it with other aspects of your life in a balanced, harmonious way, congratulations! You will be able to change your habit.
But what about people who cannot seem to find a good fit with any method? Why do some people try everything and still see no results? Why do some people fail to change their habits?
2. Know thyself.
The root of the problem is that methods are created for a specific profile of person. Imagine a method created to increase focus for children at school—it will not work for adults trying to increase focus at work!
There was a time when I was very overworked, very stressed and needed urgently to become more productive. I read everything I could find about many different methods. Some worked very well for me, but others hindered me more than helped. During this research phase, I was interested to see that some things that work well for some people may not necessarily work for others.
After learning a lot, I managed to develop the Productivity Ninja course, and I’m very happy to say that we have satisfied students all around the world.
What is the secret to this? In Productivity Ninja I did not put fixed rules that everyone must follow. This is the most important element of all. If you are trying to implement any kind of habit-changing method, and the material is not flexible, saying that you must always meditate in the first five minutes of the day, or you must eat organic spinach with Himalayan coconut oil, or something very strange to you, your needs, your reality or your context, guess what? You will NOT implement it. This is obvious!
So it’s important that you have self-knowledge. You want to look at any recommendation critically, rationally, so you can judge for yourself if it’s something that makes sense to you. And then you can use your creativity and adapt the ideas to your context.
This is why the Productivity Ninja course works so well: we will explain to you all the principles of productivity and give you exercises that invite you to think by yourself and understand what you can do according to your specific needs.
When you choose the first habits you will create, you must have smart criteria and understand your long-term vision. Only then will you truly understand which projects deserve priority. Without this clarity, you will be paralysed. You need to understand the opportunity cost and select the projects that will bring you greater quality of life.
3. Use your willpower to simplify.
As you saw in the previous two episodes of the Productivity Arata series, the essence of creating a habit is simple. Do not break the chain! Review the video here in this link.
You need to focus to make sure that you mark the X on your calendar every day until that beautiful day when things happen naturally, automatically. This is the time when you do not have to try; you do not need to use your willpower, because the habit will have been formed.
As willpower is limited, instead of wasting it trying to carry out the activity that you want to perform, you will use your willpower to prepare the terrain, to remove the difficulties ahead.
Think of the habit you want to create. Take your notebook and pen and write down the obstacles that hinder you the most. What are the foreseeable circumstances that you will face as you try to instil this habit? What changes do you need to make in your environment and the relationships with people around you for this habit to become inevitable?
What time in your schedule you have set aside in advance to devote to practicing your habit?
If you are watching this video, it is because at some time you found it difficult to implement a new habit. You may have come across some other specific methodology that did not meet your needs. Always remember to adjust the method according to your context.
Start simple. If you complicate it, it will not work. To start, the plan has to be simple and automatic. It has to be something that does not require much effort on your side.
Do not try to embrace the world, especially if you are having trouble executing the simple things. Be humble and moderate your excitement. You’ll be better off to take the first steps calmly and then accelerate.
So if you are already a Productivity Ninja student, then login at the students’ area, and you will find new bonus material that we published for you today. And if you have difficulty when logging in, you can get in touch with our team here —that is the link to our official communication channel. Please never write questions on YouTube, because the team can only provide support and replies to messages sent via our official channel.
If you are not yet a Productivity Ninja student, then you quite likely using your time ineffectively and wasting some of your potential. Think with me: if you can start to create new habits NOW, your quality of life will increase a lot, so visit the link to register today.