There are a lot of good books out there on habits and psychology, and most of them take 250 pages to give you a handful of gems.
The one that’s work reading in full (in my opinion) is Atomic Habits by James Clear, so if this topic interests you, that’s where I’d recommend going next.
Instead of going into the theory of how habits work, let’s just sum it up like this:
That thing you want right now, whatever it is, is more likely to come about through a series of small tweaks rather than a massive life overhaul.
This is great news, since the massive overhaul is hard to start and impossible to maintain.
If I were you, I’d be on the lookout for what these clever changes are for you and your own mindset and circumstances.
What works for someone else is not guaranteed to suit you, so perhaps you can modify other people’s tricks to fit with your own circumstances.
Here are some that have worked for me, feel free to experiment and adapt as needed.
Again, you don’t need to try all of them, just a few gems and you’ll see improvements.

Naming Three Distinct Food Cravings
I’ve always found diet harder than exercise – attempts to do the massive overhaul to my eating leave me cranky and tired.
What has helped tremendously is a little question that goes through my head several times a day:
“Am I hungry or am I bored?”
A great way to test this question is “Would I be happy with an apple or carrot?”
99% of the time, if I don’t want the carrot, I’m actually bored and my brain is seeking a stimulus, and those chocolate coated Oreos suddenly seem very very interesting.
The second version of this is “Am I hungry or am I stressed?”.
In times of mental stress, we tend to seek out unhealthy foods, even though we’re not actually hungry.
My brain is seeking comfort, my stomach is not seeking more energy.
The third version of the question is “How much of my flat mood can be explained by low blood sugar?”.
Our weeks have highs and lows, but the lows tend to happen more frequently when I haven’t eaten for a while.
And that’s the trick – checking if it’s a blood sugar craving, a boredom craving or a stress craving.

Buy Books That You’re Keen To Read Today
I used to think it was clever to find books that seemed interesting in a store, then order them from Book Depository for a 30% discount.
It’s clever, except that once those parcels arrived, the books always ended up in a stack by my bed, unread for months at a time.
My interest in the subject had strangely decreased, so the book gets de-prioritised.
The myth I told myself was that the aim was to maximise my book-to-dollar ratio.
Instead, I realise that the aim is to read more.
If I spend more because I’m reading more, great!
If I get a cheap deal on books that I never read, something has failed.
The solution for me was to buy books that I wanted to read that very day.
I could save $6 per book if I waited two weeks, but this approach probably leads to me reading an additional 7-10 brilliant books per year, plus I get greater enjoyment from reading them.

Split Your Money Into Buckets
The secret to personal finance isn’t an app or a different bank, but rather the ability to see things clearly.
e.g. $10,000 in the bank looks cool, but it masks the real stories beneath the surface, like if you’re saving enough money or forecasting upcoming expenses.
Scott Pape uses buckets or accounts, Dave Ramsey uses envelopes, modern banks have apps, pick whatever system you like.
The important thing is that you are splitting your pay across ten different categories, matching your priorities.
You get to spot issues in advance, and you get the joy from seeing your goals creep closer each pay cycle – taking all the stress out of budgeting.

Choosing To Not Sell To The Unsellable
Sales and Business Development are topics that make a lot of people uneasy.
They can seem icky – trying to persuade, trick or coerce random people to buy your products and services.
I used to get nervous when designing sales campaigns, which is common but doesn’t need to be.
The lightbulb moment was when I realised that all my nerves centred around selling things to people who were determined to hate the offer.
Literally selling to the unsellable.
If you decide that you won’t sell to the unsellable, sales becomes way less scary – do you ever worry about having conversations with your fans and your happiest customers?
A little change that helped me was the phrase “not your cup of tea”, as in “We probably aren’t your cup of tea”.
This works for me because it doesn’t demonise the customer as being an idiot, nor me as a fraud; it’s just a compatibility issue.
The phrase “We’re not everyone’s cup of tea, but we are some people’s favourite cup of tea” unblocked a lot of the internal fear and resistance I had towards sales and marketing.

Starting A New Project In Secret
At some point I will do a proper description of how and why I started this website, but here’s an initial summary:
It was a great decision, one that was quite out of character for me at the time, and it stemmed from two triggers.
The first trigger was reading Austin Kleon’s book Show Your Work!, which convinced me to start making and displaying things before knowing how they would turn out.
The second trigger was a question that struck me in December 2015, following a bad experience writing some articles for my then employer.
The exact wording of the thought was:
“I liked writing those posts, but I’m not a good writer, so fair enough that they’re not going anywhere.
But I bet that if I wrote 100 bad articles, the 101st article wouldn’t be a disgrace…
What if I publish 100 articles, not tell anybody at first, and see what happens?
What if I make a website, put up two articles a week with no threat of embarrassment, then tell people about the 101st article in a year?”
That thought changed everything – it disarmed my concerns, and revved up my creativity.
Without that gimmick – the number 100, Squarespace, initial secrecy, so much of my favourite work wouldn’t have happened.

Stupid Friendly Competitions Change My Behaviour
I’ve previously mentioned Fitbit and their two clever nudges – buzzing at 10,000 steps, and competing with your friends to see who can do the most steps in a day/weekend/week.
That second one is most interesting to me, because it’s a recurring pattern in my life.
Friendly competitions, particularly when I know some of the people in the challenge, motivate me in a way that formal contests don’t.
I don’t want to go to conventions or tournaments or compete with faceless online accounts, I want my fantasy sports team to beat my friend’s fantasy sports team, or at least lose with dignity.
This approach taught me about investing, when I was 14 all of my school friends competed with each other in the ASX sharemarket game.
You get a hypothetical $50,000 to invest in companies, with the aim being to have your portfolio increase in value.
We were obsessed, checking our picks six times a day, reading about different companies we’d invest in, searching for news and tips on what would go up or down.
If a stupid gimmick works, it isn’t that stupid, and this one happened to have great ongoing benefits for us decades later.
The same approach saw me and another friend see who could do the most burpees (with pushup) in 10 weeks.
The loser had to buy the winner dinner, unless we each hit 5,000 reps.
I won the challenge, and have not been tempted to do any more since it finished.
This is the power of the mechanism – how might we create a new friendly competition that nudges us into better behaviour?

Writing To-Do Lists The Night Before
A lot of people make to-do lists in the morning, and these are generally proven to be helpful.
An idea that has worked for me is to create those lists just before you go to sleep the night before.
There are a few theories as to why this works – some argue that it sets a subconscious challenge for your mind to consider as you sleep, others point out that it lets you create the list while in a different headspace than you get in the morning.
This second one has been true for me – since I set my ambitions a little higher when it’s for the following day, and I tend to get most things on my list done.
Setting better tasks leads to better results, almost by accident.
The other change that helped is to create three clusters of task for each day:

·      Tasks for my day jobs (meetings, emails, calls)

·      Tasks for my freelance work/professional development (writing, calls, study)

·      Tasks for my personal relationships (checking in, coffees, dinners, favours)

I find this helpful because every day should contain some of all three, and so by starting with these natural groupings my brain automatically begins to suggest tasks that might be valuable in each category.

What a lot of these small changes have in common is that they relate to daily tasks and behaviours, which compound over time.
The habit is formed by the decision to do something different (kicking it off), followed by the decision to not do something different (refusing to drop it).
The gimmicks that work for me probably aren’t going to be as magical for you, so my suggestion is to look for your own magic, and then don’t tell anyone about it until it’s worked for at least three months.
Again I highly recommend Atomic Habits for more on how and why these sorts of approaches work, especially if you want to read it today.