Do You Need to Change Your Habits?

Habits can be comforting, as they save us from making decisions about how to spend our time. This can be a good thing, if you have a healthy habit. When you always take a walk in the morning, you don’t have to spend the day figuring out how to get exercise.  

But we all have habits that fill up time while not accomplishing a thing. “I wasted hours watching TV” says it all.  When you’re trying to create a daily art practice, you might want to take a look at your habits.

The first thing to do is to track how you spend your time. Don’t try to change anything, just go about your normal routines for a week, making notes on what you are doing, hour by hour. What patterns do you see?  

Then look back and identify chunks of time that might be better used. If you’re “a morning person” but spend those hours on trivial matters, try to put those hours to better use. Check your habits: do you always pick up the phone, no matter what you’re doing or who is calling?  

Do you move from one thing to another, responding to whatever comes up? This is a typical pattern for  artists, who have many good ideas but find it hard to focus. To create a productive life, creative people  need  structure. 

One simple tool is to plan (the night before) what you’re going to do the following day. Your plan can be simple, just a few notes on a post-it. As you follow your mini-plan, note any differences between your wide open days and what you accomplish when you have a focus.  

Changing your habits is a gradual process, yet the benefits will show up quickly.