Identifying Your Keystone Habit

Lately, I've been reading the book "The Power of Habit" by Charles Duhig and have learned about the importance of building what the book calls a "Keystone Habit." In other words, the one change that is made to your routines that will instantly double your level of productivity once modified. For me, this has been not finding time to go to bed on time at night. Yes, even adults struggle with this issue too. My goal with applying this concept is to see what making one change to my routine can have on the rest of my daily routine for at least 1 week. Here are my methods and results:

My first step to begin applying this was to identify what has been causing me to sleep late and what were some of the detrimental effects that sleeping late has had on my body. Another important area to look at was logging my nightly habits at night, each step so that I would be able to eliminate bad habits ruthlessly. Once I finished this step, next, I had to get clear with the concrete benefits I plan to achieve by making these changes to my life and what mini steps/small rewards I could possibly give myself along the journey.

I started first with my use of distracting social media sites online. I would only reward myself with using these sites after completing a certain amount of school work this can be either by using the timed pomodoro method or once I finished taking notes on at least 1 slide. Another bad habit I found was listening to too much music at night and pacing back and forth. As a dancer, I find myself spending way too much time on music when I needed to spend more of my time focusing on my important tasks for the day. My solution was to replace the music with listening to podcasts where I'm actively learning new things. By hearing voices, instead of music I'll have a greater visualization of my time. The next was spending too much time cramming in journals, weekly reviews, or Habitica tasks. To squeeze these into my time even faster I made sure to keep my time on these activities extremely brief but still in depth.

The most difficult part of incorporating this would be flexibility in terms of making time for nightly social gatherings with friends. Personally, I find that a night out with friends for friendly banter causes me to fall off schedule and get lost in the most enjoyable parts of life. I knew that at these moments I need to do my best to be even more disciplined somehow by still setting up a cue somehow. I decided to set an alarm on my phone for 10:30pm which would trigger me to get back to sleeping on time when I find myself lost in distractions.

My next step was to make the outcome of choosing to take care of my sleep health more favorable by having a nightly routine of shutting down at a certain time of the day where I would completely get off my electronic devices and focus on getting ready for bed. All of these small winding down habits I inserted into my life including meditation made wanting to sleep on time a much more bearable activity even if I found it difficult to fall asleep at night.

Once you establish your main keystone habits you'll notice a dramatic shift in your life as long as you ensure that you do your best each day to remain consistent. That's the most challenging part: consistency. Everything else should come together from there. 

I hope you find something helpful here.