When you have a lot of quarterly goals, it can be tricky to keep them prioritized, especially since priorities can shift as you go through the quarter. So it’s good to have a reliable practice to refocus your attention on your top priorities.

One simple practice I’ve been using lately is to create a priority card at the start of each week. It’s just an index card with my top priorities for the week listed on it. I keep it near my desk and normally review it to begin each workday, along with reviewing my other quarterly goals. This helps me see the week’s priorities in the context of bigger goals, which makes me feel more committed to progress.

Here’s what my priority card for this week looks like:

It only takes seconds to fill out one of these cards, so it’s very straightforward. This week my #1 priority is to finish and publish the two remaining bonuses for the Stature course. One bonus is a short text document – basically a character design sheet – which is almost done. I expect to have that one done and published today or tomorrow. The final bonus is a collection of audios (Stature builders) that will likely take me a few days to finish.

My other priorities include making some improvements to the Stature portal and doing a postmortem for the Stature project.

I expect to do these in the order listed. I’ll have the Stature project 100% done when these items are completed, which will be a nice result. It feels good to bring a long project to full completion.

Do I know I can complete these items in a week? I know I can work on them a decent amount this week, but since they involve some creative work that’s tricky to predict time-wise, I may need more than a week to finish. That’s okay. I can continue working on them next week if necessary. But the priority for this week is to move these projects forward towards completion.

These projects have detailed action steps listed in Nozbe, so the priority card items refer to known projects that have already been mapped out. I know what needs to be done, so the main decision is to flow through these particular action steps this week.

There are dozens of other projects that I won’t touch this week – eventually they’ll get their turns as well, but I can only fit so much into a single week. While I could jump around and make progress on lots of different projects in a week, this week I’d like to maintain more of a mono-focus and move this one project forward, especially since it’s so close to the finish line.

I can still maintain habit-based activities such as daily blogging and other pre-scheduled commitments each week. The priority card helps me make good use of my discretionary work time – i.e. those blocks of time that aren’t already spoken for.

Setting priorities also helps to clarify posteriorities. Anything not listed on my priority card for a given week isn’t a priority for that week. I may still be able to work it in, but I’d rather make progress on the priorities first. This doesn’t mean that other items aren’t important, but it does mean that I’ve decided they aren’t as important for me to attend to in the current week.

To make meaningful progress on interesting projects, something else has to wait. If you don’t decide in advance what has to wait, your focus is more likely to become scattered or chaotic throughout the week. You’ll still have to make those prioritization decisions at some point, but your decisions may be ad hoc and inconsistent if you don’t maintain a reliable process for weighing options and deciding.

Filling out a weekly priority card after reviewing my quarterly goals works well for me. I’m basically breaking off a chunk of my quarterly goals to set priorities for the upcoming week.

I encourage you to make your own priority card for this week. Test this idea to see if it helps you focus better and improve your results. Grab and index card and a marker or pen right now, and make it so.

After you fill out your priority card, keep it somewhere convenient, so you’ll review it each day. I recommend that you use one of your devices to set a daily reminder to review it at a certain time, so you’ll have a convenient trigger for the review action.

As I noted earlier, it’s best to set priorities for the week after reviewing your quarterly goals. If you don’t have quarterly goals intelligently defined, you can still apply this idea without them, but it’s best to set weekly priorities based on long-term goals. Also consider joining us in Conscious Growth Club next year, and we’ll walk you through a 5-step process to define and update your goals at the start of every calendar quarter. It does take some practice to get into the rhythm of doing this, but it makes a world of difference in the progress you can make. A delightful benefit of this kind of investment is being able to set and achieve meaningful goals and advancing them week by week and quarter by quarter.

Update (several hours later): As expected I got one of the remaining Stature bonuses completed and published today. So that’s a very nice start to the week!

Some sources used to say that it takes 21 days to form a new habit, which most people are likely to find overly optimistic. Even 30 days is on the optimistic side.

The truth is that the time to install a new habit depends on the person, the habit, the environment, and the motivation.

How much experience do you already have with habit formation? How much have you trained those discipline muscles?

What temptations are present that could draw you away from the habit? How tempting are they?

What’s your purpose for installing the habit? Is it really compelling, or does it barely register?

As a general rule of thumb, I’d say 60 days is a decent average ballpark estimate for getting a new habit reasonably well installed, but some habits could take twice as long to put on autopilot. Furthermore, some habits will never be properly installed no matter how much time passes – they’ll always require a nontrivial amount of conscious willpower to keep executing day by day.

Moreover, even a habit that gets installed for months or years can still be broken eventually.

I’m often surprised at the range of times it takes to install a new habit. There’s a lot of variability.

When I first went from vegetarian to vegan, I started with a 30-day trial. I’d been vegetarian for 3.5 years at that point. The last item I dropped was cheese. I’d say it only took me about a week to feel like I was permanently vegan. I lost seven pounds in that first week as my body finally had a chance to purge years of built-up dairy clog. Seeing what was coming out of me made it easy to decide to never put it back again. That was 23.5 years ago, and it’s been a no-brainer to maintain that habit ever since. I doesn’t require any willpower to stay vegan. I’m never tempted to go back to the old world I left. That would feel like undoing a graduation.

I had figured that going fully vegan would take more practice and adjustment, but it was actually one of the breeziest habit changes ever. The purpose aspect made this habit way easier than most.

Becoming an early riser was more challenging. I struggled with this one for years till I stumbled upon the counter-intuitive technique I shared in How to Become an Early Riser. That led to success. I do occasionally fall out of this habit now and then, usually by choice to experience something different for a while, like having more nighttime hours. But I still love those early morning hours and keep returning to the long-term stability of this habit. I think that in the past 90 days, I’ve stayed in bed past 5am perhaps two or three times to cuddle with Rachelle for an extra hour or two. So this one is very stable.

Whenever I want to reboot this habit, I’d say it takes me less than a week to feel like I’m back in the flow with it. Remembering the benefits surely helps.

Oddly a very simple habit like doing proper hygiene for my teeth took 1-2 months of consistent practice to feel like I’d really installed to the point where I do it automatically without thinking much about it.

For my daily blogging habit this year, it took about 45-60 days before I felt like I’d woven it into the fabric of my days, and it didn’t feel like some external task that I was wedging in. If I had an unusual schedule that disrupted the timing for the habit, then it might feel a little misaligned, but that’s been relatively rare.

Zeroing out my email inbox was another easy habit to install, taking virtually no time at all. I was never the kind of person who’d allow hundreds of emails to pile up in my inbox though. I feel like it’s a lot to have more than 5-10 messages in there at once. I prefer to bring my email inbox back to empty whenever I check it, and leaving even one message in there doesn’t feel right. If I’m not going to reply to a message right away, I move it to a different folder to be processed later. I never use my email inbox as a to-do list.

Frankly I don’t understand people who allow thousands of emails to pile up in their inboxes. They must use very different framings because I could never imagine allowing that to happen. I’d feel like I was priming myself to feel stressed and undisciplined whenever I had to look at such a mess. I wonder how people are able to frame a cluttered inbox without having it lower their confidence and self-image. Do you really feel like you’re on top of your projects when you look at that giant list of messages? Wouldn’t it feel so much nicer to leave it empty each time if you could do that on autopilot without having to think about it?

What made the email habit easy to install was actually a different habit that took way longer to install properly – at least several months to get it going and perhaps a few years to get it down consistently. That habit was to maintain a structured personal management system for my projects and tasks. I use Nozbe for that, and I’m still happy with it.

Another related habit is that I question whether certain emails should even be sent to me in the first place. If I had an inbox piling up with emails that I wasn’t even opening, I’d unsubscribe from them, tell the senders to stop sending those kinds of messages, or add an automated filter to block them. That’s the main reason there’s no pile-up – such emails are nuked before I even see them. That means fewer distractions and no negative priming for clutter. Think of how much time and focus is wasted by looking at the same messages repeatedly.

The habit of daily exercise also took a while to install – about six months to really get it ingrained. I may still fall out of this habit now and then, but it’s easy to reboot. For a proper reboot, at least a six-week commitment is warranted. Exercising for 30 days won’t necessarily make it stick.

Some habits are so worthwhile that even if they take a long time to install, and even if they remain vulnerable afterwards, they’re still worth the investment. Getting my personal organizing systems in order was one of those. I struggled with that for a long time, but it pays off with so much delightful flow and long-term confidence. It’s so great to be able to trust such habits to follow through on bigger commitments. This makes life more rewarding and fun, and it grants more freedom for spontaneity. If you like freedom, fall in love with order.

In my 20s I was way too impatient with many habits. If I couldn’t get something working in a few weeks, I’d often drop it and try something else. Now that I’m in my late 40s, I’ve learned to think more long-term, knowing that even if it takes many months or years to tame a new habit, that habit could be paying dividends for decades. So it doesn’t phase me to think about investing in a new habit for several months, just to get started with it. When you think about a habit enduring for decades, who cares if it took a few weeks or six months to acquire it?

Don’t worry so much about how long it takes to install a habit. Instead, consider which habits could so enrich your life that they’re worth a six-month commitment to get them installed and running on autopilot. When a habit is on autopilot, it feels uncomfortable not to do it, and your day doesn’t feel complete without it.

Remember that the months ahead are going to pass anyway. Depending on the investments you initiate today, you could find yourself with a really awesome long-term habit on autopilot by the end of the year – or your autopilot could be about the same as it is now. If you expect that there will be some challenges, and you conquer those hills anyway, you’ll get to enjoy some nice results. Think of this as a gift for your future self.

I’m more than half done with my 374-day blogging challenge, which started on Dec 24, 2019. I’ve done 191 days and have 183 days to go. My blog currently has 1517 published posts, so there will be an even 1700 at the end of the year.

These types of daily challenges are mentally won or lost before Day 1 begins. It’s best to remove the doubt first. This includes anticipating the objections that various parts of your mind will come up with and how you’ll deal with them as they arise. If you’re unprepared for those objections, they may surprise you along the way and make you want to quit, which you’ll likely regret.

One simple internal defense against quitting is to see your daily commitment as an issue of honor. I tell the whiny parts of myself that we can’t quit because that would be dishonorable, so we’re not going to go there. They have no good counter-argument for the honor issue, so they surrender to it. Many of those parts care about honor as well.

Another defense mechanism is that I tell myself that when it gets difficult, it’s a growth experience. It’s easy to write when I feel inspired. It’s harder to write when I’d rather not write, but in those writing sessions, I build more self-discipline, confidence, and the ability to surrender to what I’ve already decided to do. I also stretch my creativity to work with whatever level of energy and motivation I have, which makes it more efficient and reliable.

Here’s an especially powerful skill to add to this collection. Acknowledge the tremendous negative memory that would be created by quitting partway through. Going six months and then stopping isn’t half a win. It’s a loss, one that will still be remembered decades from now. That would be a terrible curse to bestow upon my future self. I’d rather gift him with a lifetime memory of success. While some may look back on 2020 as a cursed year, I want to remember this as the year I wrote and published more than I ever have in any other year. For me it’s a year of stretching my self-discipline and building more creative confidence.

You can let circumstances write the story of this year for you, or you can choose to write your own story. This year is only half written so far. What will you write for the second half? Have you already made that second half a win or a loss in your mind? Are you already regretting tomorrow?

When I’ve quit on certain challenges in the past, many years before I started blogging, I still hold those memories today. I’d have preferred to look back upon memories of pushing through to meaningful successes and accomplishments instead of stopping before crossing the finish line. The enduring sting of those memories motivates me not to create more of them.

Remember that whenever you quit on yourself, you curse your future self with the lifelong memory of quitting, and your confidence takes a hit. That’s a big price to pay. It’s easier to just do one more day of discipline, again and again, till you achieve your goal. That’s always the basic decision, isn’t it? One more day of discipline or a lifetime of regret – which do you want?

Quitting on a personal commitment isn’t neutral. It doesn’t just drop you back down to even, as if you never started in the first place. It’s a genuine setback, especially for your long-term self-trust and self-confidence. It gives you a negative result, and it can take a while to recover from that.

One reason I chose to do this blogging challenge is so that I’ll always have the memory of 2020 being the year I published to my blog every single day. I want to add that to my life as a cherished reference experience, just like I cherish the memory of exercising every single day some years, the first one being 1997.

This daily blogging goal isn’t 100% under my control. Something could happen to me along the way that physically prevents me from completing it. If such an event were to occur, I could forgive myself if there wasn’t a realistic option to do otherwise. But I’m not going to quit on myself since that would create a lifelong disappointment.

When you do 30-day, 90-day, or 365-day challenge, what’s your defense against quitting partway through? Figure that out before you begin. It’s part of the early game of success. Create the victory in your mind before you step up to the starting line; otherwise you’ve already defeated yourself.

In Conscious Growth Club, we do fresh 30-day challenges at the beginning of every month, so 12 times per year. Members who choose to participate chart their progress, either by adding a checkmark or an X for each day of the month, like this:

I like to tell people: Decide before you begin that there will be no ❌’s. An ❌ is not an option.

Really I think we shouldn’t even have ❌’s as part of the challenges. We should use a skull and crossbones ☠️ emoji instead to drive home the point that if you miss a day, you failed the challenge, and now you’re wallowing in freakish misery forever.

That kind of framing may sound harsh, and I’ll agree that it is, but it really helps to prevent ❌’s.

Ideally the only progress logs we should see for these challenges ought to look like this:

I’d love to see this become the standard for every member who does them. And this is why we train on these challenges again and again – to kill the ❌’s for good.

No ❌ days – ever! It’s all ✅’s – or the lifelong misery of ☠️.

With this post that’s 192 days in a row… 182 to go. 🙂