.KEYWORD habit
.FLYINGHEAD EMPOWER YOUR LIFE
.TITLE Create healthy daily habits and keep them on your Palm handheld
.FEATURE
.SUMMARY How do you create a healthy daily routine for yourself and make it stick? Personal success coach Heather McDaniel will show you how you can use your Palm handheld to instill a number of simple habits that will keep you clear, motivated, and focused.
.AUTHOR Heather McDaniel
Have you ever wanted to create a healthy daily routine but couldn’t find a way to make it stick? Here’s something that might help. Make up a list of habits that you’d like to become a routine for yourself. Coming up with ten daily habits is a way to create a kind of constancy in your life that helps keep you clear and focused.
Habits are recurrent behaviors, usually performed on an unconscious level. They’re acquired through frequent repetition. The word "habit" often gets a negative connotation, but there are both good and bad habits.
Right now, we’re talking about instilling a series of good habits as a way of creating routines that can keep you clear, motivated, and focused. These habits don’t make more work for you, because you keep them fun. They’re things you want to do.
.H1 What should I pick for habits?
When you choose your habits, make sure they’re things you want to do. You can spend your entire life judging yourself for not doing things you feel you should do or you could do. Start with habits that you look forward to doing and give you pleasure, but that you might forget to do in the course of a normal day.
Most habits tend to be things that give you energy and add to your well-being. I like to choose things that I always want to do during the day but never get around to doing.
Start by making a list of as many good habits you can think of. They could be things like making your bed, eating more vegetables, eating five meals a day, doing yoga, or going to the gym. Then, shorten the list to your top ten habits.
What if you find that keeping up with ten habits is overwhelming? What if you find you could spend the entire day doing the ten habits you created for yourself? In that case try re-evaluating you habits. Are you taking on too much? Keep them simple. If you’re taking on too much, try cutting down the number to eight. Even five is better than none. I have a friend who has a list of 20 or so habits. Every day she makes sure she works in five or so.
Remember, habits become ingrained with repetition. Once they do, you might not even have to think about making sure you do them after awhile. Once a habits is naturally a part of your routine, and clearly something you’re going to continue doing, you might not have to track it as closely. Then, you can replace it with another habit you’d like to instill.
.H1 How can I use my Palm handheld to keep track of my habits?
There are great benefits to keeping your habits on your Palm handheld. When I first started to track my own list of habits, I created a chart in Microsoft Excel and printed that out. I colored in a box each time I accomplished something. The problem was that the piece of paper would get torn up by the end of the week. It was great fun to color everything in, but tracking the piece of paper became a chore. I had one more thing to track.
So, I turned to my Palm handheld and thought, "There must be a way to track the habits and see which ones I accomplish each day." I was off on my search.
The first place I looked was my good ol’ To Do List. I created a category called Daily Habits and listed my ten habits in the To Do List. I then listed the habits as you can see in Figure A.
.FIG A Using the standard To Do List was a great place to begin tracking my daily habits.
This was fine if I wanted to make sure that I did them. All I had to do was enter the habits and check them off each day. I even set a daily repeat to make sure that these would reappear the following day.
This worked well, but I wasn’t able to look back and see which items were accomplished each day.
I also used ToDo Plus from HandsHigh Software (at http://www.handshigh.com/html/todoplus.html). This is great if you just want to use a piece of software to make sure that you accomplish each habit every day. Figure B shows you how my habits looked in ToDo Plus.
.FIG B Here’s how my habits looked in ToDo Plus.
This was a lot of fun because I was able to scratch out notes to myself to remind me why I chose that habit. For example, I chose habits like keeping systems updated and making my bed because it’s important that my apartment be clean and organized. Making this a habit every day will help me achieve that. Figure C shows a note I drew to remind me why I created a few of my habits.
.FIG C Neatness counts!
The only downside to using this software was that I couldn’t go back to track which habits were working well for me and which ones were not. I like to be able to go back at the end of the week to see which habits are starting to become a part of my life and which ones need more of my attention.
Then I had a great idea. What if I used something like QuickOffice (at http://www.quickoffice.com) or Documents to Go (at http://www.dataviz.com) to download a spreadsheet to my Palm handheld?
I decided to use QuickOffice, since that came with my HandEra 330. Now that I have the document on my device, I can easily track which habits I do on what day and keep track of them for a week. I can also create a new document for each week and track which habits are working for me and which ones are not over a period of several weeks. If it looks like, for example, I’m not filing my papers, I can ask myself why and come up with a plan to fix it. If you look at Figure D, you can see that I didn’t eat five servings of vegetables.
.FIG D I need to focus more on eating my veggies.
.BEGIN_KEEP
As you can see, I have my table on the Palm handheld, and while it’s not as much fun as coloring a box in with a crayon, I can just mark each completed task with an X. Figure D also shows that I’ve been a good girl and have taken my vitamins every day.
I’d like to know what works for you, and hear about any other ideas that would help you create a routine. Feel free to contact me at heather@coachheather.com.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
For more information on ToDo Plus from HandsHigh Software, visit http://www.handshigh.com/html/todoplus.html.
For more information on QuickOffice, visit http://www.quickoffice.com.
For more information on Documents to Go, visit http://www.dataviz.com.
For more information on Palm handhelds, visit http://www.palm.com.
.H1 Easy, flexible article reprints
ZATZ now offers a quick, easy, flexible and inexpensive way to use article reprints in your marketing and promotion efforts. You can now get article reprints for a one-time fee of only $200. For details, visit http://mediakit.zatz.com/reprints.
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO Prior to starting her own personal success coaching business dedicated to helping people reach their goals, Heather McDaniel was both a longtime news editor and sales manager for ZATZ, publishers of this magazine. She’s widely acknowledged as a leading expert on the handheld industry. Although no longer a ZATZ employee, she’s still a member of the ZATZ extended family and now writes for PalmPower on topics about personal growth and development. For a free coaching session, contact Heather at heather@coachheather.com or visit http://www.coachheather.com.
.DISCUSS http://powerboards.zatz.com/cgi-bin/webx?50@@.ee70015
.END_KEEP
