When we are developing a new habit and incorporating it into our daily lives, we can try to link it to another new habit.
An example: When reading books, I mark text passages that particularly interest me with a highlighter. I have marked many exciting sentences in many books, but I don’t pick them up again, or only rarely. Therefore, I have made it a habit to open one of the books daily and record 1-3 sentences or text passages in the Evernote app.
That’s the primary habit. Within that, I have implemented another new habit. Even though I was typing on my grandpa’s analog typewriter on a keyboard by the time I was 12, my typing speed slowly increased. To this day, I type with a maximum of three fingers and have to constantly look at the keyboard.
I wanted to change this for so long but never found the time. Now that I have internalized the first habit, I have started to type the book passages with 10 fingers and without looking at the keyboard. In doing so, I’ve built two new habits in one.
We can apply the same to a wide variety of areas. If we’ve started jogging for an hour every morning, we can turn on that audiobook or podcast we’ve been meaning to listen to for so long. If we’re learning a new language, we can draw the vocabulary instead of writing it down to improve our drawing skills. Discovering the possibilities may take a little time. But they are there.