These days, anyone with an email address gets flooded with messages. How do you manage your inbox, to make sure you keep track of the mail you care about?
Share why if you wish.
Category: Planning
How Do You Make Something A Habit?
The more we understand how a habit works, the more likely it is that we will be able to make — or break — habits in our everyday lives.
Everyone is familiar with habits of some kind.
Perhaps you have a bad habit you would like to break. Or you aspire to create one that you hope will improve your life. Alternately, you may already have a routine that you follow every day.
But how do these habits originate?
Most of us are likely familiar with the desire for improvement. For instance, suppose you get a gym membership in January, as part of a New Year’s resolution to lose weight and get in better shape.
Many people in this scenario have every intention to work out regularly, perhaps even several times a week. There is no guarantee, however, that the desire will turn into an actual habit. Wanting to go to the gym and actually going are two different things.
So how does something go from an aspiration to an actual, consistent routine?
Sometimes willpower is sufficient. If you just want something badly enough, you can power your way through to making it happen. However, willpower is not consistent from person to person. For the same person, it can even vary from situation to situation or from day to day.
When willpower is not enough, what can we do to turn our hopes into concrete actions? What steps can we take in order to create a habit?
Related questions: What unusual habit do you have? What is one thing you feel the need to do every day? Are routines boring? How do you stick to your resolutions? How do you reward yourself?
What Keeps You Motivated?
It is one thing to get motivated to take a risk or to start something new. It is another to maintain that motivation.
It is an all too common story: you are excited to start something new. That excitement wanes, however, as you get into mundane — but necessary — tasks. It might even ebb so low that you forego the project altogether.
As it turns out, there are two different, yet equally important, steps. One is to work up the motivation necessary to begin. The other is to remain motivated, through all the ups and downs that may follow.
Building the initial excitement is not a trivial task. But let’s assume for a moment that you can work up the necessary enthusiasm. How do you keep motivated, or at the very least, keep working despite fading energy?
Do you continually remind yourself of the end goal you are trying to achieve? Or do you enlist the help of others that you hope will motivate you? Do you try and structure the project so there are a number of accomplishments along the way that you can use as little boosts of momentum? Or perhaps you announce things publicly and hope that outside expectations will provide the necessary motivation?
What keeps you motivated, particularly when that motivation starts to wane?
Related questions: What motivates you? How do other people motivate you? Where do you get your energy? When is it useful to fail?
How Do You See The Future?
It can be difficult to see months into the future, let alone years or decades. How do you see what lies ahead?
Reality serves us a constant reminder that we don’t know what is going to happen. At the start of the football season, we don’t know who is going to win the Super Bowl. We can’t predict the weather more than a week in advance. People who invest in the stock market can only hope a particular stock will go up in price.
And yet, despite all the evidence that shows we cannot accurately predict the future, some people seem awfully sure about what will happen next. News pundits, op-ed columnists, and politicians all seem certain they know exactly what will happen. Not to mention psychics and tarot card readers.
With that in mind, how do you think about what tomorrow will bring?
Perhaps you view the future with optimism. Tomorrow, you might expect, will be better than today. But, of course, there is no guarantee that this is true.
Or you might think that instead, we can expect the future to be very much like the present (or the past). After all, the sun rose yesterday, it rose this morning, and it will rise tomorrow. But we know that sometimes there are changes, including big ones. The COVID-19 pandemic caught nearly everyone by surprise, and that was an obvious case where the future (say, April 2020) didn’t resemble the past (February 2020).
When you think about the future, how do you make predictions, and how do you react to those predictions? What does that mean for your present?
Related questions: Should we try to predict the future? How much does your past determine your future? Will the future be better than the present? How do you plan for the future?
How Do You Manage Your Weight?
It is a sad fact that most Americans are overweight. Of the many available methods, how do you manage your weight?
Share why if you wish.