In my post, A New Plan For Habit Formation Part 3 - A New Hope, I outlined, well, a new plan. I scrapped the old way of doing things and focused specifically on one habit until I reached my estimate for it becoming easier - the halfway point.

My halfway point for 750 words was 25 days (50 for full automaticity).

Turns out, in this case, I was spot on. About day 30, I felt a flow to the habituation, supported by two things: A daily progressional flowchart using the ideas in the Self-Discipline in 10 Days book, and the notion of “bookending” - having a daily set of things you do in the morning after getting up and at night before going to bed.

In this case, I used the solid event of getting up and made myself do 750 words right after. By doing this I attached it to a daily event, something I wasn’t doing before. Before I would tell myself to do the task whenever, as long as it got done - and that often resulted in not doing it.

On day 50 I achieved an SRHI Score (a self reported score measuring habitation - I’ll do another post going into this in more detail) of 73 (out of 84) and for me that felt like that habituation was achieved.

Today is day 71 of 750 words. Despite going on a trip to northern Argentina with long travel days and a few days in the jungle, I’ve been on a 48 day streak, and it feels incredibly solid. This is a huge win, especially looking back at my track record and feeling like I was all over the place.