How to create daily habits that last

These days it seems like our world works in a way that enforces us to constantly strive for more. More attention, more experiences, more money and the list goes on... Now we are not saying that more is bad, in fact in many areas of life it can help to aim high and develop a mindset of abundance. However, when it comes to creating daily habits, this mindset can sometimes get ahead of us. After working in 'the business of daily habits' for some years now, we want to share some of our learnings that also became the foundation of our products and approach to creating daily habits that last.

Let's be honest, who of you has been in the situation of writing some sort of to-do list that you've not managed to get through at the end of the day, week or month. Speaking from my perspective I've been in this situation too many times. Whether it is about daily to-do's, weekly plans, yearly goals, or new habits, the amount of things I needed to pack on those lists, steadily outgrew my capacity to achieve them.

Especially when it came to trying to implement new daily habits, I would notice how this approach of always aiming high would more often than not, lead to a vicious cycle, looking somewhat like this:  

We often start off getting ahead of ourselves, writing down all the things we want to improve about ourselves at once. Like if it would be most important to improve as many things at the same time. After the first rush of excitement fades however, we often find ourselves discouraged when we can't manage to keep up with our overly ambitious plans. Mostly life just gets in the way sooner or later and we keep loosing touch with our goals. After a few weeks we end up keeping little to nothing of what we wanted to implement. Then maybe, with the next rush of motivation we try it all over again - mostly with the same approach. 

This pattern is based not only on experiences of many of our customers, friends and our families, I've also gone through this cycle myself countless times. All that lead us to looking for and ultimately creating a more simplistic approach, that later also became the foundation for our products. Our approach looks like this: 

Instead of thinking of all the habits we want to change, we want to start off by aiming for the opposite - just ONE. Only this way we ask ourselves the question; which one matters the most to us. Having only one thing to focus on makes it also way easier to keep up with it on a daily basis. And for the best chances of success we, of course, we recommend using some sort of habit tracker :)

Whether you do that or not, the small daily successes towards your ONE daily habit you'd like to build, will make you feel better about yourself. This newly gained confidence can now be used as a foundation to build on. So whenever you feel ready for it you can go and start the cycle again and stack another ONE habit on top of it. Step by step, steady but slowly, one habit at the time. 

If you feel like you are having trouble finding the ONE habit to start with, we've created some questions that will make it easier for you. This shouldn't be to put you under pressure but just to make sure you're picking the one that is most beneficial for you.