Installing the Habit

Free Worksheet

For many months I was struggling to practice guitar every day. I would fall into the same trap in which I would have a lesson, and then avoid playing what we worked on until the 72 hours before the next one was scheduled.

Pressure helps motivate, but trying to memorize things and train your body to behave a certain way doesn’t work when you rush it like this.

Similarly for other projects you won’t be able to do your Most Creative Work when you’re panicking and operating like a hiker running from a bear.

The habit is built with slow and steady progress over longer stretches of time.

There are a lot of habit trackers out there using your phone, but I needed to see something on paper with the ability to put a nice big X on it in marker. So I designed this simple page that anyone can print off:

There are some extra tools on this sheet, like pre-planning out the length of your work bursts or logging a few notes about how things are going.

An example of this would be I could practice guitar for 10 minutes and then force myself to take a 2 minute break. If I did that three times, then that would warrant a nice check box. Or I could do 20 minute bursts with 5 minute breaks.