Habit-Building 101: 10-Minutes a Day

Every January 1, millions of us decide to make a change. Lose weight! Exercise! Eat better! Drink more water! Save money! Tidy the house! Declutter the house!

We make an exhaustive list. Then, despite our best intentions, we typically don’t wind up making those changes. Until the next January 1 comes around, and we try again.

Studies show that we set ourselves up for failure from the start. We start with too many changes. Our expectations are too unrealistic. It’s okay to have high expectations, but the speed at which we expect those changes to happen is totally unsustainable.

The Annoying Benefit of Starting Small

Usually when we want something to change, it’s because we’re fed up with the status quo. This is a good thing. You WANT to change! If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be reading this right now.

The problem is, change often equals smaller changes + time.

On average, it takes more than 2 months before a new behavior becomes automatic — 66 days to be exact. - James Clear (jamesclear.com/new-habit)

Bummer.

Break Down the Steps

When we want something to change, usually we want an end result. To get there, we need to list all the steps between now and then.

If you want to eat healthier, you’ll need to decide what that looks like: Are you cutting out sugar? Carbs? Meat? Are you adding in more water? More olive oil? More fruits? Whatever “eat healthier” means to you, you’d need to map it out. Then, slowly cut out one thing from your diet, or maybe substitute something, and start eating that way until it becomes normal. That is, before you cut something else out.

I imagine that’s how you could make a new way of eating stick. At least, according to habit-building studies.

So, I’m going to apply the same thing to tidying.

30 Days: 10-Minutes-a-Day

How does one get to a tidy house? My roadmap is:

• A decluttered home

• A regularly cleaned home

Broken down even further:

• A decluttered home is one where I’ve decluttered using Marie Kondo’s method for all the categories.

• A regularly cleaned home is one where I do:

  • Some basic daily cleaning (like dishes, etc)

  • Some regular weekly things (like laundry, clean the bathroom, etc)

  • Some monthly things (like deep clean the fridge)

As you can see, there are a lot of changes that need to take place. So I’m going to start with the very small but foundational step of cleaning 10-minutes a day.

This is not a lot of time. I don’t expect that with 10 minutes I will always see any drastic changes. But, when it comes to habit-building, the key is consistency. I’m going to commit to cleaning 10-minutes a day, and report in daily.

Follow along in the Tidy by Habit Facebook group.