My travel stories and best personal development ideas.
We always feel that we can do better. And we want to do better. But somehow circumstances and our lives make us think as if we cannot bring a change, at least not without monstrous efforts.
This is not true.
We all hope to become a better version of ourselves. I want to be a better writer. My partner wants to be a good coder. My friend wishes to be a good mother. You dream of winning a swimming championship. Someone fancy playing the piano as Lady Gaga plays.
One way to achieve these set goals that I mentioned above is to possess the willpower to get up and do the thing, every day. Another way is to form a habit (I will explain what are habits as the article progresses) which you practice regularly to move towards your goal. I should develop a habit of writing daily. My partner can become an efficient coder by developing a habit of focusing on the quality of his code every time he codes. My friend has to create a habit of not losing patience when her child annoys her. You get my point.
But you might ask the difference between having the willpower to do these things regularly and forming a habit to practice them as a routine? Both ways need you to work.
To make this distinction clear, we will understand habits in detail.
I was a science and a mathematics girl. Having seen my interest and capability in the sciences, my brother decided that I should compete to get into the IITs, the MIT of India, and become an engineer.
As I hail from a small town, which doesn’t offer many educational opportunities, my father took me to Kota, a city in the desert of Rajasthan, admitted me in one of the private institutions of the coaching-hub of India, and left me in that unknown town; I was fifteen years old and hadn’t stayed away from my parents for more than a few days.
At my first attempt at the entrance examination, I failed. At the second attempt, for which I dropped a year, I ranked seventy-eight (78) amongst half-a-million students.
It didn’t happen by chance. I was young. Though now it seems weird to think that I understood the importance of goals back then, I knew I had to achieve my goal. And it didn’t seem that hard at that time; I just had to crack the concepts, practice, and give exams.
In the past eight years of my working life, I observed that how you do the task at hand is not the only measure of productivity and satisfaction. Your living style, priorities, patience, and certain keystone habits such as discipline, healthy social behavior, hard work decide how good you perform, how well you live your life, and how stable your relationships are.
All these things — living style, priorities, patience, discipline, hard work — could be practiced as daily habits. As Charles Duhigg said in his book The Power of Habits, “More than 40 percent of the actions people performed each day weren’t actual decisions, but habits.”
Humans live by habits. Dissolving these crucial things into habits and routine — that is what we would focus on in this article to make a schedule that works for us.
I have been working from home for ten months now. I have no boss. I write. I freelance. I blog — these three span my earnings, my passion, my work, and my routine. I design my schedule, discipline, deadlines, meetings and calls, and priorities.
I work hard. I have to. I need a lot of energy to write. To write well. I work long hours with intense concentration as I am still learning and my work involves a lot of thinking.
As a writer, I find the solitude essential — I thread my thoughts into any pattern without being disturbed.
A work-from-home routine sounds dreamy, but it doesn’t come easy.
How to write every day? Many of us — aspiring bloggers, writers, freelancers — ask this question every day.
I am going to share with you my journey as a writer so far, how I developed a daily writing habit, and a few tips that have worked for me to minimize distraction. That is all. I cannot — no one can — tell you what to do precisely to write every day as everyone’s system is different.