I am currently participating in the 5-day program that BJ Fogg calls 3 Tiny Habits, which has the purpose of creating new behaviors in life.
The three habits that I have chosen include:
After I am finished showering in the morning, I will do 5 push ups.
After I eat dinner, I will read one sentence from my Game Architecture and Design book.
After I finish lunch, I will stretch my arm and hand to help prevent carpal tunnel.
I am currently on Day 2/5 and have made some observations regarding my behaviors. Consciously choosing to limit the amount of push ups that I do in the morning has caused me to focus more on form and quality rather than quantity. The first time I did these five pushups, I thought to myself, “I can do a lot more than five. Why should I stop now?” However, I was interested to see how it would go and I have been working on improving and maintaining my self control (which is why I chose five to begin with… I knew I would be tempted to immediately increase the quantity). My attention is caught by creating that automatic behavior and then positively reinforcing it and this leads me down another path that encompasses reinforcement during gameplay as this is a project I have voluntarily chosen to participate in. There are defined goals and the reward of sharing my accomplishment(s) with BJ in that email to him that says I have successfully completed the actioning of my habits for the day. This leads me to the reaffirming observation that I am partially motivated by sharing my achievements with others.
The most difficult habit to complete so far is to read a sentence from a game design book. I have discovered that this is generated by the context of not eating dinner at the same time in the evenings, eating at home or eating out at a restaurant or with friends, and by making other evening plans after work that cause me not be home immediately after dinner. So I have observed that if there is a delay between my behavior that is supposed to be my anchor for remembering when to do these habits and the desired habit then the chances of me performing my desired habit decrease quite significantly and I do not derive the same sort of satisfaction that I have felt otherwise.
Anyway, that is an update on my progression through this program. I will summarize the rest of the experience at the end of the five days.
