On building a habit and finding your method

-

Flossing was not a habit engrained in me as a child and it's taken many years before I could make it one. 

Originally, I had tried marking my progress every day similar to what's suggested by the X effect. Unfortunately, I couldn't keep steady progress for longer than a month, especially after January when my resolutions faded. 

I was finally able to build a stronger habit by making two changes. 

1) [Make it simple and less of a chore] Placing the floss in my shower so I could save time and effort. Previously, I flossed right before brushing my teeth but often skipped it because it felt like a tedious step. 

2) [Find a method that increases your motivation] Changing up my scorecard to use stamps instead of drawing a pattern or highlighting. The stamps gave me extra motivation as they had a cute design and made me happy to see :)

In the end, after 6 months of the "revised" system, I was able to build up the habit and no longer needed the scorecard to keep track. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Product Ideas: Getting more specific with locations

-
As a user, there are often times when you come up with product improvements based on the pain points you experience. I'll share two of my recent ideas centered around the theme of location.  Product : LinkedIn, Indeed, and other job search sites What : Add detailed job location (neighborhood or exact location) to job postings rather than simply a city/area. For remote jobs, allow for more detailed searches - is this remote worldwide or only remote within a certain country? Why : From a personal perspective, I live in a large city and the job location within the city matters a lot to me. A job might be listed in the same city that I live in, but it could take over an hour to commute to the location.  In general, for job seekers, this feature would allow them to better understand what the commute could look like. Employers would also benefit from a more relevant talent pool. Ie. job seekers can more readily self-select and employers will end up with applicants who are aware of t...
Read more

Tip: Create a radar chart in DS using built-in area charts

-
Image
For this week's Makeover Monday , I made a 4 sided radar chart in Data Studio (DS) with the built in area chart. Note: This method works well for 4 sided radar charts but may not work with more variables due to limitations within Data Studio 1. Data Preparation Date for X values An area chart in DS requires a date for the X axis and a metric for the Y axis. Since I wanted to put Spring/Fall on the Y Axis and Winter/Summer on the X axis, I had to convert the Spring/Fall percentages to dates. I did this by choosing Jan 1 2019 (an arbitrary date) to be "0" and added/subtracted by the percentage point to get the final date values. Use a top and bottom area chart My area chart is actually composed of two area charts - one for the top and bottom. The reason for this is because DS doesn't handle negative Y values well and the background colour gets affected. You'll get something like Figure 1 if you use a negative Y value and it would be a hassle to fix the ba...
Read more