Life’s “DMZ” for habits
From 43 Folders, Merlin Mann talks of the “email DMZ” concept to quick start your good habits by giving you a clean workspace with little initial effort.
If you ignore for a moment the puzzle of reforming bad habits so that the same bad state isn’t reached again, this same concept can be applied to other habits that you want to break.
- eating of foods you want to stop, such as sugary, fatty, blended caffeine drinks
- spending of time in ways that you don’t want to such as web surfing
- keeping your office and workspace clean
Putting my own spin on it, you reframe the problem of changing your mind gradually to effect the new habit to the problem of avoiding discomfort/guilt/shame due to breaking your currently perfect streak of new behavior. If you’re able to act in a zero tolerant, self-disciplined way with little or no slippage back to old routines then this can work great. It may be some effort, so choose your battles.
So in the examples,
keeping your office and workspace clean
put all crap into boxes in the corner or closet until you have a clean office. Then along with keeping office from ever getting dirty again by not letting one paper or thing start to rest on the desk overnight, also start the task of periodically emptying out boxes into the trash, into a file, into your notes, etc.
In cleaning my office, i still have boxes and big manila envelopes of “organized stuff” stacked, and a couple of isolated piles out of eyeshot which I still need to process, but it doesn’t get in the way any more.
spending of time in ways that you don’t want to such as web surfing
just stop reading your favorite sites with intention of never going back there unless you’re searching for something specific. If you start to click towards that old area, call it to your attention and ask, “am i going to do that again?” as if you had broken that habit for so long and now you’re about to fall off the wagon.
eating of foods you want to stop, such as sugary, fatty, blended caffeine drinks
stop cold turkey. As you walk by the store in the morning, if your feet fail and turn into the door, you can try to game your mind to make yourself feel guilty.
Then again, I might not want to fight this particular battle.
The Life’s “DMZ” for habits by Daily Movement, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.