4 Keystone Habits Your Future Self Will Thank You For Starting Today

Short-term fixes to make your life easy in the long term

When you think about habits that benefit you in the long term, what do you think about?

Do you think about exercise?

Do you think about quality sleep?

Meditation?

If you thought of all that, then great. You’re on the right track. However, I won’t talk about these habits in this article. Instead, I want to talk about 4 lesser-known short-term ones that will make your life immeasurably stress-free in the long term.

These apply to all facets of your life — work, health, side hustles, academics, etc. These are not habits in the most strict sense of the word. These are more regular thought patterns that you can make into daily habits.

Without further ado, let’s go to number 1.

Plan for tomorrow every night.

This has got to be the best thing I learned this year.

Completing all you had scheduled is the happiest feeling in the world. It gives you intense satisfaction and motivates you to repeat this behavior.

However, you cannot expect to complete everything on your list every single day, and that’s okay. Life is unpredictable, and it gets in the way.

Barring these unpredictable days, you can tick everything off your list by taking a moment every night to set up your tomorrow.

The goal of doing is threefold;

Mentally preparing yourself for the tasks of tomorrow.
Eradicating friction between you and the work you wish to complete
Easily prioritize your work

Do you need to get to the gym in the morning?

Pack your shoes and socks in the bag the night before.

Do you have a function to attend in the evening?

Plan when you’ll complete the work you had scheduled for that time.

If you have an important errand to run before noon, prioritize it, add it to the calendar, and set a reminder.

Beyond all this, waking up in the morning knowing what you’re going to do during the day and when you’re going to do it reduces the number of decisions you make. When your mind is free from stressing about your tasks, you can focus better on all your work during the day.

You don’t have to plan your day to the dot. It’s enough to have a rough plan.

Once you get into the groove of doing this daily, you’ll be able to look back after a few months and observe the amount of stress you were able to alleviate by taking a few moments out of your day to plan the next day.

Look beyond the peak.

Goals are great.

They help orient your focus to something you want to accomplish. You’re willing to stick with a challenging process to achieve something.

Have you ever wondered what would happen once you achieved your goal?

Usually, when you reach this point, you think it’ll bring you happiness and that the difficult part is over. You can go back to living your “normal life” again.

The process of reaching your goals is a difficult one, but what’s more difficult is retaining at that level. When you’re solely focused on a single endpoint, you’re blind to what comes after it.

An example is when you’re trying to shed a few pounds of fat. You count your calories, hit the gym regularly, and stay in a disciplined routine.

What happens once you shed those few pounds?

You tell yourself, “I’ve worked hard enough to reduce weight. I can afford to take your legs off the pedal now”. Soon, you’ve put the weight back on, and you should go through the process of losing it again.

How many cycles of this do you think you can sustain before saying, “Screw this, I just don’t care anymore.”?

This is why you should develop “beyond the peak” thinking. Think about how you’re going to maintain something after you achieve it.

There should be a shift from goal-focused processes to sustainability-focused processes. Ask yourself, “Will I be able to keep up with this process for at least 5 years?”

If the answer to that question is no, then take a moment to rethink your strategy to make it doable for years to come.

Pick the harder one in the short term.

We, as humans, have this tendency.

We will take the path that reduces pain and discomfort in the short term 10/10 times. You can observe this everywhere.

You will see people opting to do patchwork over finding and fixing the root cause of problems. This will make the issue go away in the short term, but it will keep coming back again and again if you don’t address the underlying cause of the problem.

It’s like taking sleep tablets instead of finding the root cause of your sleeping problem.

Continuously postponing issues to another time will result in a truckload of problems waiting to pounce on you in the long term.

This is why you should change from “an easier in the short term” to a “harder in the short term” mindset. This will almost always result in better and long-lasting fixes in the long term.

However, there are exceptions to this rule. Sometimes, you might have a problem that requires a lot of immediate effort to solve in an ideal way, but keeping it unsolved might not result in any substantial damage in the long term.

For example, your laptop’s battery has gone bust and needs to be replaced. If your laptop will only ever be in your workstation for the foreseeable future and you’ve planned on buying a new one next year.

It doesn’t make sense to go and replace your batteries, right? You’ll use your laptop on A/C mode for a year and buy a new one after.

So, it’s not only about blindly choosing short-term pain. It’s also about prioritizing.

Space out your learning

I’ve always been the “last-minute cram with no sleep” guy.

Every time, I’d take an oath to start studying earlier next time so that I would not face the same fate again. Every time, I would fail.

It wasn’t for the lack of trying. I did try to start studying earlier, but before the exams, I would forget whatever I read a few weeks back.

Do you know what’s more annoying than having to study new material for the first time before exams? Forgetting whatever you’ve studied before and having to start from scratch.

I thought I sucked at retaining stuff and used to curse myself for the shit memory I supposedly had. Later on, after reading the book “Make it Stick,” I realized that what was happening to me happens to everyone in the world.

To make sure you retain stuff for longer, study or learn something for the first time, and then when you feel like you’re forgetting what you learned, keep the book or material open in front of you and try to recall in your own words what the material is.

It should be difficult for you to recall. However, if you succeed, you will retain it for far longer. If you get it wrong, that’s fine. Read whatever you forgot again, and try recalling it after a few days. This is called spaced repetition.

When you do this regularly, you’ll be much better off when you’re closer to examinations or in places where you need to remember stuff.

Learn. Space out. Recall your learning. Make it stick.

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