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Building Habits To Transform Life

Building new habits excite me. I have been writing about my monthly habit experiments throughout this year. This post is a round-up of all my Habit Series posts.

#1 Cycling Long Distances

Technique for habit building: Repetition

Contradictory to my fears of going the long distance on cycle, this challenge went fairly breezy. Literally breezy. Being a long-distance runner for 7 years now, I wanted to explore other endurance sports. Therefore, I started with swimming and was fairly regular with it until lockdown. Cycling for endurance was my next choice. I got hold of a great hybrid cycle in November 2019. Read about how I got from 5km to 50km rides in this challenge here.

Habit Series: Training For Long Distance Cycling

#2 Negative Incentivizing For Punctuality

Technique for habit building: Negative incentives

I partnered up with a friend on this challenge to reach the office on time every day. An accountability partner was helpful as I knew I had to break old bad habits. Penalizing every delay to the office was a masterstroke. It induced fear in us and made us serious about the challenge. I consider this the best habit I built for career growth this year. Details are here in my article.

Habit Series: Reaching Office On Time

#3 Pulling More Traffic To My Blog

Technique for habit building: Join a course

This challenge gave a whole new life to this blogging site. I took up a paid course with ProBlogger to build a better blog in 31 days. This was of great help as the steps were very nuanced. I am still far from completing all the steps. But already, my reward has come in the form of a jump from 200 views to 1000 views a month on my site. The steps I followed to get to this rapid transformation is given here.

Habit Series: 31 Days To A Better Blog

#4 Sketching My Heart Out

Technique for habit building: Follow Motivational work

I started the sketching challenge with an intention to get back in touch with my long-forgotten love for drawing. I thought I will find some closure by filling up my sketchbook. As it turns out, the challenge made me fall in love with drawing again. Nowadays, I look for excuses to draw or paint on fabric or paper more often. To help with inspiration, I made a list of motivation keywords for sketching and looked at various artists. Here is how it went.

Habit Series: Rediscovering My Inner Artist

#5 Doubling My Reading Speed

Technique for habit building: Setting the right environment

I have always been interested in reading. Story books and curriculum books enticed me during college. Novels in my early days of career. Business and self help books during my MBA. I am kind of mixing up all genres currently. Though my favorite genre is self help and inspirational. If the message is given in a story, I dig it even more. I took a skillshare course on speed reading some time back and was eager to apply the techniques. I definitely double my reading speed after this challenge. Here are the details.

Habit Series: How I Doubled My Reading Speed

#6 Working On Upper Body Strength

Technique for habit building: Join a community

In all honesty, push-ups were not on my planned list for habits this year. But the lockdown changed the way I exercise. A lot of indoor workouts have become a part of my routine. This brought my focus to my poor upper body strength. I was working on this in the initial part of the year. So when my Pune runner friends of mine initiated a #100dayspushupchallenge, I could not resist joining in. During this challenge, I went from the knee down push up to regular push up. Here are the details of the push-up challenge.