What I've Been Thinking About
🧪 Minimum viable habits and routines
When it comes to maintaining habits and routines, the most important thing you can ensure is consistency. This might seem obvious, but a lot of people over-emphasize the impact of an individual execution of a habit or routine, instead of taking the long view and thinking about the habit or routine over the time frame of months.
The problem with focusing on the quality or impact of a single instance of a habit or routine is that we can set ourselves lofty goals that will inevitably need to be broken when we experience the messiness of real life. Instead of building up our identity as someone who is consistent, we build up the identity of someone who occasionally fulfills their habits and routines, when life is accommodating.
This is why having a minimum viable routine or minimum viable habit can be tremendously helpful in building and maintaining habits over the long run. A minimum viable habit is the smallest yet still useful version of a habit you can think of. By adding minimum viable versions of your habits and routines, you have the ultimate tool in your toolbox to ensure consistency.
Habits have a compounding effect, so small habits done consistently will ultimately give you a greater return than the perfect habit done intermittently or one that quickly falls off after a couple of months.
What does a minimum viable habit look like? If you want to meditate 15 minutes every morning, the minimum viable might just be 5 deep breaths (4 seconds inhale, 7 seconds hold, 8 seconds exhale) with your eyes closed. Or if you like stretching each morning for 10 minutes, maybe it's just doing a single stretch from your routine. If you're writing morning pages for 5-10 min, the minimum might be something as simple as a single sentence.
The key is that the minimum viable version is so minimal, that you never have an excuse to not do it. No matter how busy or hectic your morning may be, you can always do 5 deep breaths, one stretch, and write one sentence.
Your minimal routine is not only useful when the unexpected happens, but is great for maintaining consistency over certain days, in which you would normally NOT do your routine. For me, this used to be during weekends, travel, and vacations. My morning routine normally took 30-45m and sometimes required specific tools or devices, making it impractical and easy to convince myself that I would pick things back up once I returned to my original environment. However, whenever I stopped my routine, even if it was just for a week while on vacation, it was very difficult to pick it back up when the vacation was over.
I no longer strive for perfection in my routines, I strive for consistency. Like the rest of life, the things capable of standing the test of time are adaptable and dynamic. So I suggest you take 10 minutes to define a minimal version of your habits and whenever you would otherwise skip your habits, you now have an excuse-proof fallback.