The Tri-Weekly Habit: Looking Forward

So if you’ve made it two weeks into your three for your tri-weekly habit, very good news: The hard bit is over and the last week should feel like a breeze. You’ll be wondering what took you so long to acquire this habit and you’ll be imagining your future life, even better now that you’ve required this habit that you’re going to keep forever. Either that, are you’ll be dying to finish with it already.

I happen to be in the first boat with my 20 minutes of exercise and writing a day. I haven’t particularly liked the exercise bit. I don’t necessarily feel better physically — I am after all pregnant. But emotionally it’s really nice to know that I probably won’t die of a heart attack while trying to push out this kid. Also, prenatal yoga is super-gentle and relaxing and it’s helping me stretch all sorts of muscles I’ll supposedly want to be loose and limber which it comes time to push, so yea, for less pain. I’ll definitely hang on to the exercise for now.

But the habit I really want to keep is the writing everyday. My 2009 goal is to get another novel fully written — this time in one year as opposed to three, so writing every day will be a huge part of that.

A good way to seal in your habit after the initial 21 days is to run the habit again — but for double the time. For example, next week, I’ll start a new Tri-Weekly habit of writing for 40 minutes everyday as opposed to 20. As for my lifestyle-habit, for once in my life I don’t have a big project scheduled in the coming weeks, so I’m thinking about trying not to spend money on anything, save necessities. However, I’m not sure my pregnancy hormones will allow me to embark on such a monkish project, so we’ll see how I’m feeling about the venture next week.

So if you wanted to try 21 days of habit with me but missed the last cycle, start thinking about a habit you want to keep now. One should be career or goal-oriented habit (like writing or applying for jobs or exercising to lose a certain amount of weight) the other should be a meta or lifestyle habit (like meditating or flossing or exercising without a specific weight loss goal). Start brainstorming about it now, and we’ll meet up next week to talk about the next cycle. Til then…

Thrive in ’09,

etc