All right, a question here from Monkey Mind. Hi, Cal. What do you suggest to people who pick up habits and suggestions you give but not stick to them for more than a few days? I tell them they're losers. I tell them they need to give up and just watch TikTok videos.

No, here's the thing. You're probably bringing it on too much at a time. It's probably unrealistic. And your mind is probably not on board with all the different things you're doing. So if you have all these big plans, there's a deeper part of your mind-- the planned evaluation center-- that's probably saying, I don't know, Monkey Mind.

This stuff is not all going to work. This is too much. And we're not going to do it. So you kind of overloaded that planning. So what I usually tell people is the foundation-- the foundation to any of these type of professional style habits is daily metric tracking. That's the one thing you have to do.

It takes seven seconds at the end of each day, or you can do it each morning. And you have some metrics you track, and you always do it. That's the thing you have to commit to. It's why my time block planner has this metric planning section on every daily page is you do that.

Now, these metrics then can point towards the habits you're trying to do through the day, and you keep track of it with the metrics. Did I time block plan? Check. Did I do my whatever, my morning deep work session? Check. Did I do my exercise section? Check. How many chapters did I read?

Whatever you're tracking, and you track it there. The key thing is you track it even if it's zero, even if it's no. And even if it's again and again, no, I didn't do this, I didn't do this, I didn't do this, that's fine. But you're tracking. Here's what actually happened.

That's the foundation for any consistent habit formation when it comes to professional habits. Then you begin to experiment with, OK, what is the right first step collection of habits that my metric tracking, I eventually actually start positively marking those things down on a consistent basis. And you start small.

All I want to do is a good morning planning session. And I'll give a check if I do that. OK, I'm doing that. I'm doing that. All right. Now all I want to do is time block plan my day. Let me check if I'm doing that. So then you slowly start seeing what works and what doesn't.

If you try something and you have the evidence in your metric tracking, you're not doing it, you pull it back, let me try something else. You slowly build up these habits. But you have to have that foundation of I'm keeping tabs on a record every day of what I did or didn't do.

Your mind knows it's being tracked. It's embarrassed if you blow things off that you could do. That is the foundation. So do the metric tracking even if you're embarrassed by what you're tracking. Slowly and experimentally add things into your life. Once something sticks, move on to something else. Give this a year of work and you'll come out on the other side with a pretty good set of carefully tested habits that work really well for you and your situation that you consistently follow.

But it takes work and you can't do that work without tracking metrics. (upbeat music)