In this post I shall share my experience in trying to inculcate good habits while dropping the avoidable habits.

A known thumb rule is that – when you perform an action for 21 consecutive days it becomes a habit; for an element of safety I extent that time limit to 30 days. I don’t know how this rule can be applied to weekly and monthly habits like “working out thrice a week”, “calling mom every Sunday”, etc; let me know if you have any ideas.

Obviously the first step is identifying a desirable habit. Next I need to convince myself that this is beneficial habit; because I have experienced that I give up mid way because I failed to see the benefits in it. For example, I am still struggling to become a vegetarian because I’m not convinced of its benefits.

Then I need to announce to myself that I need to cultivate this habit; by adding it to my system, it could be my HPDA or some visual reminders. Next comes the most critical period – doing the activity for 30 consecutive days. Now there could be days that I absolutely can’t do it; these are the days when I must do it. Once I completely to it for 30 days – then I can consider that I have converted a behavior to a habit.

Now I no longer need to monitor this behavior, my subconscious mind would raise an alarm every time I come close to skipping it.

I will reorient the objective of this blog to “productivity for IT workers”. Compared to other fields in IT it is difficult to measure productivity; but it is not impossible. There are a plethora of tools, techniques available to improve productivity and I constantly scour the net for productivity related content.

I don’t consider myself to be a productive person, but I’m committed to making myself more productive. Over the last year I have tried various approaches like, HPDA, time boxing, GTD, etc; and I believe that I have just started my journey.

I keep trying various approaches and tools to improve and measure my productivity. Expectantly most of them fail, but I learn something from these failed attempts; and what doesn’t suit me may suit someone else.