Do You Use The “30 Days to a Habit” Strategy?

The premise: many studies and researches found that successful people tend to have more habits (positive habits, mind you) when compared to average people. That’s because habits add consistency and discipline to your professional and personal life, traits that are essential to reaching your goals.

Examples of positive habits one can have:

• Exercising for 30 minutes every morning
• Meditating before going to sleep
• Remembering and using the first name of everyone, on every interaction
• Learning a new foreign language every couple of years
• Settings goals for the day every morning
• Reading a technical book for 30 minutes every morning

Cool, but how do we go about developing those habits?

The best strategy I have seen so far is this one: at the beginning of every month you will sit down and decide on which habit you want to develop over the next 30 days. It can also be a bad habit that you want to get rid of (e.g., smoking or eating junk food). After that you commit yourself to stick to the habits for those 30 days. Once the month is over you may decide to halt it, but most people find that 30 days is enough to get the habit rooted inside you, so most of them will stay.

For some habits I find that 30 days is not enough, so in those cases I commit to sticking to the play for 60 days at least, which seems to do the trick.

Matt Cutts, head of web spam at Google, is a big fan of this strategy. In fact if you visit his blog you’ll notice a category titled “30 days”. There you’ll find all his posts about the different habits he pursued in the past.

The month is almost over, so which habit will you develop over the next 30 days?