Building habits and achieving New Year's resolutions

This is building better developers, the developer podcast. We will accomplish our goals through sharing experience, improving tech skills, increasing business knowledge and embracing life. Let's dive into the next episode. Well, hello and welcome back. We are continuing our between the seasons series of special topics. And as we are getting close to a new year, it is a good time to talk about getting into that new year. One things we're gonna try this year is we have, what's coming up is what we're calling our 21 day challenge. This is something that if you're on the list, you probably have already received your email about it. And we're gonna start ideally on January 1st, and we're gonna go the first 21 days of the year. And we are going to essentially get a habit in place. Now the goal for this, it's open to anybody. You don't have to sign up, you don't have to register, you don't have to do anything other than plan. Set yourself a goal. And the purpose of this is to create a habit. So think of something that you wanna do that you want to do better or that you want to start where you can do a few minutes a day. And the goal is roughly ideally 10 to 15 minutes a day of doing whatever it is. And we're gonna do this for 21 days straight, hopefully therefore starting a habit. So it may be writing, maybe you're gonna take a few minutes every day and you're just gonna write, maybe you're gonna journal. Maybe you're gonna write on what you did yesterday. Maybe it's gonna be more of like a technical blog kind of thing. Maybe you wanna start a product, you've got a side hustle. So work on it 15 minutes a day for 21 days straight. You're gonna have to, you will have to probably adjust your schedule a little bit, plan for it. But once you do, particularly as you get closer to that 21st day, I think you're gonna find that it's gonna become essentially natural. It's gonna be part of what you do. So by the time you're done, hopefully, you're just gonna keep on going. Day 21 is gonna go by and you're gonna say, congratulations, patch yourself on the back. And then day 22, you're gonna go back and do it again. Day 23, do it again, and so on and so forth. Now it could be something that's, let's say like a physical kind of thing. Maybe you wanna work out, maybe you wanna do some exercise. You know, depending on what you wanna do, it may or may not fit that. If you wanna do, I don't know, 20 pushups a day or something like that, you should be able to get those done in a minute. So you can do that, but ideally push it a little bit more. So it can take a little bit more time. But honestly, at this point, it really, it's up to you. Or maybe set two or three challenges. So maybe you wanna do, let's say you wanna do 20 pushups a day and you want to learn another, a foreign language, and so you're gonna spend 10 minutes a day on that. Or maybe you wanna learn to play an instrument. So you'll do some pushups and then work on playing that instrument for a few minutes. It pretty much is whatever sounds good. And it could be, maybe you wanna learn to work, jump on a pogo stick or ride a unicycle, cook. Maybe you're just gonna read and read recipes and plan on some recipes that you're gonna work with. Maybe you just wanna generally read for fun. Maybe you haven't read for pleasure forever, it seems. And so get a book and just read 15 minutes a day. It could be a, I mean, maybe it's a meditation thing. Maybe you wanna start getting more focused, more spiritually balanced or mentally balanced depending on how you look at it. So maybe you just, you're gonna meditate or pray for 15 minutes a day. You could study, learn a new foreign language. You can learn some technical skill. All of these are excellent. And honestly, whatever you pick is excellent. The goal is to think about what it's gonna take to make some adjustments and start the year doing this task, getting this thing done, and then get it done every day. Now, if you're on the mailing list, great. If not, feel free to join up. Go out to developerneur.com site. You'll see where our mailing list, you can sign up real easy. And we're gonna end up sending something out every day. It's basically a little bit of a cheerleader type of effort. Small reward each day of, you get a nice little image or something like that and a little attaboy for you. And a little bit of a discussion of, as we go through it, some of the things to maybe help keep you motivated. It's not as good an accountability as writing it down and telling somebody close to you or a friend so that they will check in on you every so often, maybe say, hey, how's that thing going? But it is something that just gives you hopefully another little nudge as we move into the new year. And this doesn't have to be anything that's huge. It could be a minor kind of change. Maybe you want to document your code better. So just spend 10 or 15 minutes writing code documentation every day. It could be something where you want to, oh, I don't need, I can't even, you know, maybe there's some beauty thing. Maybe you wanna work on, I don't know. Like I said, you could do exercise. Maybe you want to, I don't know, brush your teeth longer or take a relaxing shower. I mean, whatever it is, the goal here is a habit though. So while yes, it could be something that you can get done in 21 days, what we really want to look for is something that's probably gonna take you weeks, months, maybe years afterwards, but you want to build a habit. Good examples from my past that I've done that hopefully will help you with some ideas. And I grew into something pretty big. I've mentioned before Duolingo to learn foreign languages. I think it's, gosh, it's probably 10 years ago that I first started using that to do a little bit of Spanish. And that was my goal. I just wanted to do, I think it was 10 to 15 minutes a day. And I did, I did it every day for a couple of years and sort of progressed to that and then picked up Italian and did that for many, many years and just recently have just sort of stopped doing it every day. And it actually, yeah, and I miss days here and there, but it actually took a while for that momentum of doing that every day to not bother me basically. And really what I did is I replaced the time I was spending on that on some other things that I wanted to do, which is really gonna be the full strength of this is that we will create some habits of time and space basically. So it's gonna be something that you're gonna do every day for 21 days and hopefully beyond that. And if it is something that you complete, then the best thing you can do when you complete it is instead of just say, okay, I'm gonna get that time back is actually swap something else into that place. So if you wanna learn, you know, like I say, you wanna learn a programming language. And so just go write code and read about it for 15 minutes a day. And six months from here or a year from now, then you're feeling pretty comfortable with it. And you're like, okay, I don't think I need to do this for 15 minutes every day. Or maybe now you got a job, so you're gonna be doing it for more than 15 minutes every day. So replace it, don't just get that time back. Decide to do something else. Maybe you wanna learn design. Maybe you wanna learn more about history. Maybe you wanna learn about architecture. And these things can be, they can be things that can go in the background, like listening to podcasts and having TV shows running or something like that. But really, let's try to avoid that and try to get stuff that is focused, focused time period, you know, 10 to 15 minutes. Not something you're just sort of doing as, along with some other stuff you're doing. And listen to it, I mean, I don't wanna add constraints, you know, too much. I just wanna really set the table for this. Cause it may be something where you said you're gonna exercise every day, but while you're exercising, you're listening to podcasts or, you know, tech news or whatever it happens to be. So you may actually have a couple of things that you put together. And you don't have to limit it to 15 minutes. I just think for the 21 day challenge, the goal here is really around New Year's resolutions. A lot of us make New Year's resolutions and a lot of us, that resolution is, you know, dead and in the past before we're halfway through January. Great example, I think I've mentioned this before, go to any gym on January 1st, January 2nd, January 3rd, it's gonna be packed. If you go on the 10th, it's not gonna be as packed. By the time you get to the end of January, you're probably gonna be back to pretty much normal. And maybe even a little less, because there's gonna be some people that, you know, were working out and just, you know, decided they had enough of it with the crowds that came in in early January. So we've got a little bit of time, but basically think about what would be a cool thing for you to know or to have achieved when you get towards the end of January. What is that skill or series of tasks that if you look ahead, you say, you know, if I got to the 22nd of January and I had done this in the previous 21 days, I'll be pretty happy with that. And then, like I said, maybe write it down, maybe tell a friend, maybe put a little, a mark on your, you know, on calendars so you can check it off every day if you, you know, if it's something like that. And then feel free to sign up for our list and you'll get a nice little, you know, attaboy every day and hey, let's keep this momentum going and let's try to start 2021 correctly. Or actually this works for any year. So if you want to listen to this a year later, it should be the same thing. I think it's actually another habit that's a great one to get, you know, as building habits. So maybe, you know, this works. Maybe every year pick something new and do a 21 day challenge for yourself or every six months or once a quarter, whatever works for you. It's all about getting momentum and getting yourself in the mode, basically, of doing these kinds of things, of getting better. It's that incremental step we talk about all the time. But you'll find that as you build habits and realize how easy it is, it's gonna be almost habitual to build habits. You're gonna be constantly, you know, I think moving towards whatever the next thing is. Working through your roadmap and your plans and your targets and your goals and achieving them. And that feels pretty good. So I think that's an excellent way to start your year. And now I am gonna give you a little bit of your time back. So, you know, normally there'd probably be about another 10 minutes you'd be listening to this, depending on how fast the speed is that you listen to this stuff. And this time around, spend at least five minutes. And once you think through what your task is gonna be, write it down and get ready to start the next year right. Now that's your challenge of the year, you know, the week and the year. And as always, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and let's get the year started right. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Developer Noor podcast. For more episodes like this one, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon and other podcast venues, or visit our site at developernoor.com. Just a step forward today is still progress. So let's keep moving forward together. There are two things I wanna mention to help you get a little further along in your embracing of the content of Developer Noor. One is the book, The Source Code of Happiness. You can find links to it on our page out on the Developer Noor site. You can also find it on Amazon, search for Rob Rodhead or Source Code of Happiness. You can get it on Kindle. If you're an Amazon Prime member, you can read it free. A lot of good information there. That'll be a lot easier than trying to dig through all of our past blog posts. The other thing is our masterminds slash mentor group. We meet roughly every other week, and this is an opportunity to meet with some other people from a lot of different areas of IT. We have a presentation every time. We talk about some cool tools and features and things that we've come across, things that we've learned, things that you can use to advance your career today. Just shoot us an email at info at developernoor.com if you would like more information. Now go out there and have yourself a great one.