What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while

“What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while.” -Gretchen Rubin

Agreed. To me, this quote is not about being true to yourself, consistently a "good" person, or avoiding the pitfalls of occasional vices. It is about how differently your brain handles behaviors that are habits vs. those that are not. When you do something every day, or virtually every day, you can remove the decision-making element around that activity. For the items below, I don't spend brainpower deciding whether I'm going to do them or not, and therein lies the value of having built them as habits.

• I wear my seatbelt and helmet
• I brush my teeth twice a day and floss once a day
• I write in a journal
• I opt for the bike over the car when possible
• I make my bed
• I wake up before 6am and get to work on something
• I exercise almost every day
• I read books to the kids every time I put them to bed

Not surprisingly, there are a million blog posts and books around habit formation and tips/tricks for how to do or not do certain things better.

• The Power of Habit - A few years old but goes into great depth around how habits are the core to everything we do. Recommended first reading.
• Better Than Before - reading currently. Gets really specific around the techniques to build habits, and acknowledges that the strategies can be very different person to person. Looks into the 4 main tendencies of how people operate, and then targets the advice for each of these tendencies. I am an "obliger", meaning I need lots of external accountability to be able to get anything done.

Signing off. Will continue on this journey of exploring habits and how to form/break them.