3 Habits in 300 Days
A different take on New Year’s resolutions
New Year's resolutions are broken every year to the frustration of many. Resolutions occupy a tic-tok of hope to disappointment. The hope to work toward bettering your life, seeing your future as something different than it is now, but then inevitable disappointment as the goal becomes unreachable and the vision of a better future gets blurred when viewed through the lens of reality. Resolutions are made by people wanting to make their lives better, but the classic New Years Resolution almost always fails.
They fail because they are too big in scope - often lasting for the whole year and with a grand, sweeping goal and no understanding of how to actually get there.
Instead, let's turn the New Year's Resolution around. Instead of seeing where you want to be at the end of a year, why not see where you can be tomorrow?
Let's ditch the resolution and instead focus on drilling in 3 habits that will form the foundation for the life that you want to have.
A Habit in 100 Days
Forming a habit takes repeating a task daily - random googling says that it takes anywhere from a month to 3 months to really drill one in1. Just to make sure you have enough time to really form a habit lets take a 100 day window.
In this 100 day window you must do your habit daily. This is where choosing what habit to form becomes important - you have to be able to do your daily task no matter the weather, if you’re a little sick, or if you’re traveling.
Again the word here is habit not goal. If your goal is to lose weight, make the habit of daily exercise. If your goal is to read more, make a habit of reading daily.
Notice that the habit here is really open ended. It’s not “run 5mi daily” or “read 100 pages daily” - adding in the specific numerical target takes away from your ability to be flexible of what you’re doing here: changing your life one day at a time.
3 Habits in 300 Days
With 100 days to form a habit you’ll be able to form 3 habits in a year2 with about 2 months left over. These extra days are so you have a break between forming habits, for scheduling (100 days does not line up evenly in weeks), and to have time off over the winter holidays. Trying to form a habit as you’re traveling with family ends up being a tricky thing, so why try and force it?
At the end of the year, after 300 days of focusing on changing your life, you should find yourself far away from where you were at the start of the year without ever having to a grand goal to reach for.
It’s the grand goal, the “I will read 50 books this year”, that ends up being the folly of the New Year’s Resolution - it’s a place that you want to be without a realistic expectation of how to get there or even if it is attainable. If you set out to read daily you may find that you read 50 books, or maybe you’re closer to 20. If your goal is to read more then both of these outcomes are a success!
Choosing the Right Habit
Habits should be reasonable enough to be done daily, but in the variety of situations that you may find yourself in over the course of the next 100 days. For example, the 3 habits I formed this year, and the one I’m starting off the next year with are:
Daily Exercise: Close the rings on the apple watch every day.
Something Interesting: Do something you’re curious about every day.
Read Daily: Read a few pages every day, always have a book with you.
Stretch Daily: Spend a few minutes stretching out (probably while the coffee brews).
The key is to choose a habit aligned with your goals without being overly prescriptive about its execution. For instance, 'doing something active' can take various forms, from a rigorous workout to a leisurely stroll. Similarly, 'reading daily' can be tailored to fit into your schedule, whether in the morning or as a nighttime ritual.
Keeping track
The final bit is to hold yourself accountable for keeping in the habit. I used a google sheet to track what I did on a specific day and used it to make sure I was keeping myself honest. Here’s a template sheet that you can duplicate if you’re curious about trying this for yourself.
What if you mess up?
What happens if the habit fails to come together? You either decided on doing something too difficult or something got in the way.
This is one of the reasons for the extra 65 days of slop. Mess up a habit in the first two weeks? Just start over - there’s no reason why you have to commit to something that turns out to be unrealistic once you get into it.
But what if you can’t force the daily habit? This happened on my third habit of this year, reading. I had originally hoped to be able to read in the mornings during my morning coffee for a few minutes, but some changes in work ended up sucking up whatever time I had in the mornings. The evenings ended up not working either because I was too mentally exhausted from the day to really engage with a book by the time I was winding down.
Still, it’s not like I didn’t read during this chunk of time; I still got through 6 books. I was thinking daily about wanting to read when I did have the mental space to read I was able to enjoy the book. Even the failed attempt at forcing the habit kept “it’s time to read” at the front of my mind when looking for something to do with downtime.
The results?
After a year of forming 3 habits (exercise, interesting things, reading) I can definitely say that I’m in better shape, having more fun in life, and reading more books than I did in the previous year.
Working out every day really cemented itself as a habit - I continued the workout streak for 150 days and only broke it because I knew I was going to have to eventually. The apple fitness app says that I’m at 325 days of working out this year - there is no way that declaring “I will lose 25lbs” would have caused me to end up here.
Doing something interesting every day has caused me to keep up with various concerts and art shows that are happening around me, and to get in the habit of checking out coffee shops and restaurants with friends.
Even if the specific habit of reading didn’t become a daily activity I was always carrying around a book in the case of a few minutes of downtime.
This process worked well for me, and maybe it’ll work for you. I’m going to try this again in 2024, starting with stretching daily and figuring out the other habits as the year moves on.
Another year to make a difference
Find the life you want to live and figure out what you’d be doing daily to support that life. Each day you must walk into the future but you have a choice in your footsteps.
Happy New Years 🎉
Take the the exact number of days with a grain of salt, but it is possible to force a habit
I think my math is right