A Keen Eye for Personal Habits Is Your Secret Weapon in Life

The underrated power of habit-auditing

It was 11:30 am. The sun hadn’t come close to touching my face because the curtains were still shut. My eyes were barely open when I checked the time on my phone.

“Not again,” I told myself. Two weeks in a row of staying up till 2 in the morning; three days straight of eating junk food for the sake of celebrating. Yes, it happened… again.

I was hurting myself. There was no one and nothing else to blame.

Some would say I was in a deep rut. Life had become an infinite loop of negative thoughts and feelings.

The last thing I wanted to do was get out of bed. I figured if I laid there long enough, I’d eventually feel like doing something creative. But that’s not how it works.

I was never in a rut. The truth is, I was caught in a cycle of bad habits. And the only way to get out of it was to audit those patterns.

Lack of habit awareness

Habits dictate your end results. If you stay up until 2 am in the morning, don’t be surprised when you don’t feel like doing anything the next day. (Technically, it’s the same day.)

We are often unaware of our habits because we’re too busy looking at everyone else’s. We become experts at analyzing other people’s activities but forget to look carefully at our own.

My twin brother was not the source of my irritability. It was the fact that I wasn’t getting enough sleep. It wasn’t the workload causing my head to pound. It was the junk food I was eating three days in a row.

When you see your issues and address them for what they are, you can do something about them. But if you pretend they don’t exist, you’ll continue to settle with the notion that you’re stuck in a rut.

You’ll constantly need another source to bail you out.

You’re in control of your own habits. But how can you control what you can’t see? That only happens when you become more aware of what’s ruining your drive to succeed.

“I’ll do it tomorrow.”

I can’t tell you how many times I put off tasks that needed to be done right away. I didn’t set out to cram as much as possible in the 16 hours of my day. I simply befriended procrastination without realizing it.

Bad patterns cause a trickle effect. The moment you cave into one, another grows even stronger.

In my case, I put tasks off until they all compiled near or on the due date. That led to a heightened amount of stress and pathetic work to show for it.

Bad procrastination is enhanced when we neglect to see what’s most important. In those moments, nothing really is.

Losing sight of priorities

Good procrastination stems from having a set of priorities for the day. Notate the most important task in your day. Then, write down the next most important task. Do this until you get to five tasks.

I say five because you want to keep things simple. Overworking yourself is a direct result of having too many “priorities” in your face at once. Take it slow.

When you look at your list, you might be tempted to add more. But not so fast. Save those for another day. You’re only focused on what’s meaningful today.

Here’s a secret that lets you know you’re good at prioritizing: you have less than five tasks for the day. By simplifying your day, you differentiate what deserves your attention today and what can wait.

Priorities must be seen. If they aren’t seen, they must be heard. And if they aren’t heard, they must be felt.

There are no excuses.

You either establish what matters to your daily life or everything else will dictate how much peace of mind you experience.

The underrated power of habit-auditing

This is where habit-auditing comes in. And if you don’t want to call it that, give it another name. The point is this: by notating your actions, you become aware of the good, the bad, and the ugly in your day-to-day life.

You get to look back on your days and see how far you’ve come. You don’t have to worry about repeating mistakes because you recognize those potholes now.

I don’t know about you, but that makes me want to work harder and smarter. You have the privilege of doing both when you take note of your daily habits. Think about the power that comes with that.

Most people think of habit-auditing as journaling, and that’s fine. But don’t forget to note key details throughout the day (like what you ate for breakfast, how good your sleep was, or factors that may have contributed to your current mood).

The clearer you are with describing your daily activities, the better your results will be. How is that, you ask? Because now you see the answers to all those questions you keep asking.

Everyone has a daily pattern. Some are good, others are bad. The trick is to focus on your own.

There’s a domino effect in both cases. Either put off your tasks or prioritize the most important ones. It’s the best way to redirect the cycle that drives you crazy.

The answer is in your habits, not the rut you claim to be in.