Winter: The time to build new habits

If you're in my parts of the world, it's been a difficult winter. It's cold. It's icy. It's snowing. Sometimes you don't see the sun during the day. It's depressing. Personally, I don't remember such a difficult winter like what we're seeing right now. Without a doubt, this weather can affect us all. However, today I want to offer you a bit more hope for the upcoming winter months. It doesn't have to be all that bad if you choose to spend this time wisely on the things that will have a compound effect for the rest of our year. And today, I'm going to tell you how to do that. I'm going to share some ideas of how we can go about building a proper solid foundation for the rest of the year. Let's go. Without further ado, here's my hypothesis. Winter is the best time to build productive habits. Here's how I came up with this conclusion, this hypothesis. During the summer, yes, we have more energy because it's nice, it's warm, it's sunny out there. We have sun for longer periods of time which definitely affects our mood. But summers are exhausting because we are trying to fit an entire year of events, activities, commitments, celebrations, trips, get-togethers in just, I don't know, four to six months. That's a lot. Summers are very hectic. Your weeks are not the same. Without a doubt, it's fun to be going to new places, new events every weekend, every evening, but your weeks end up being very different and it's hard to plan for something consistent. It's hard to get into some sort of rhythm. Your evenings are booked with commitments. Your weekends are also taken. You simply don't have time to dedicate to anything new, to build new routines and new habits. And we're not just talking about time. We are talking about your energy resources, financial resources as well. If everything is already taken up, you don't have anything left for yourself to build something that would impact your life in a very positive way. In contrast, winter is quite different. We have more time. We don't have as many commitments. Companies don't really like to book any corporate events or travel during this time. So It's a very quiet and predictable life that we're having during the winter. There are not a lot of external demands on our time. During the winter months, we have all this freed-up time. Your days and weeks look kind of similar. Some people tend to call it Groundhog day and I get it. Sometimes, it feels like this if we don't choose to spend this time wisely. If you choose to just get up, do your work, come home, watch Netflixm, rinse and repeat, then, yeah, it definitely feels like a Groundhog day. But if we choose to spend this time intentionally on building new habits, new routines and keeping track of them, analyzing, tweaking them around, adjusting, pivoting, then it becomes interesting and it doesn't feel like a Groundhog day anymore. You can build a certain rhythm. This rhythm will serve as a good foundation for the upcoming sprint and summer months. Building habits is this fun activity that you can focus on during this, otherwise quite boring winter months. If you're in Canada, like me your winter months can last, I dunno for four months, five months, it means that you can build four or five solid habits if you follow the monthly method, or if you just take this simple equation of just focusing on one good foundational habit per month, that's four to five new habits. Imagine how your life will be different if you developed these new habits during your winter months. So ask yourself, what habits do you want to build? Knowing the fact that you don't have the entire year to build all these habits. . You don't have 12 months. No, as I mentioned before, it's very difficult. It takes another level of self-discipline to be building habits during summer, during these crazy busy months. Most likely, you won't be able to build, solidify these habits if you decide to build them during the summer. Build them now, because if you do it now, then they will be solid. It will be Quality Habits because you'll be able to do them consistently every day for a month because you have the time and the energy and just enough brainpower to focus on that. It's highly unlikely that you have the same amount of resources during your summer months. What are these four to five habits that you want to build? We can't really procrastinate on it because we need to build them now when we have time when we don't have a lot of outside demands on our time. Imagine when summer comes, these activities will be already a habit. They will happen somewhat on autopilot, not entirely on autopilot because it hasn't been so long yet, but it will be much easier to do that. Imagine with these new habits, these new healthy activities, how much better your summers, your springs will be. I'm not going to need to spend as much time and effort thinking about taking these actions. Isn't it beautiful? Then you can spend your summer months focusing on the fun activities, knowing that your basics are taken care of through this newly developed habit. All you need to do is just maintain them, make sure that you are not forgetting about them, but the level of effort is not as high as in the beginning. Take these upcoming winter months to build the foundation for the upcoming year. Good habits are this foundation that will serve you really well for the rest of the year. Here are some of the habits that I personally am building this winter. One of the habits that I'm working on is preparing my meals for the day the night before. I have a lot of meetings during the day, even though I'm working from home and they excused can be that, oh, well, I work from home. I can always just make something up during the day. I have all the ingredients. The reality is that, no, I don't have this time. Sometimes people book meetings last minute. Sometimes some of the things take longer and I ended up being hungry. If I don't prepare my lunch the night before, sometimes I have meetings that last longer. When I finished my work, I'm extremely hungry. If the expectation is that I have to cook my dinner and only then have my dinner, I'm already too hungry for that. I might default to some takeouts or what have you. So, the habit here is to make sure that I have all my meals prepared for the upcoming day, the night before. I've been building this habit for the past two weeks and oh my God, I can't say how much I'm grateful to myself for doing that. It saves so much stress, unnecessary stress. I'm always eating healthy, nutritious food and it affects my mood. It affects everything. Definitely recommend this. Another habit that I want to build is to walk at least 10,000 steps a day. Again, not an easy habit given the temperature outside, but you know, something to strive towards. Also drinking at least two liters of water per day, taking my supplements, going to bed on time, getting enough sleep, waking up early. It's the next habit. I've started from 7:00 AM. Now, I'm slowly transitioning it towards 6:00 AM. The reason why is that? I want to focus on this podcast on the monthly method before my full-time job begins because then I have more energy and more creative juices flowing. After doing some of those sprint reviews for the past few sprints, I have realized that it is a mistake to assume that I would have enough energy and brainpower to do what I'm doing with the monthly method after my full-time job. That's why it's helpful to do sprint reviews. Now, I'm slowly transitioning to doing all of this before my full-time job begins. In order to do that, I need to free up my time in the morning. Wake up early. For this to happen and need to go to bed early. Now, you're seeing kind of the logic that I'm following in order to, come up with the habits that I want to focus on. So yeah, here are my examples for this winter. Let me know what you want to focus on for the upcoming months. I know winters are tough for most people. It's tough for me. This winter has been especially difficult, cold, miserable. But if we choose to look at it as an opportunity to build an amazing foundation for the rest of the year, all of a sudden, the winter doesn't seem so dark and so boring and such a waste of time. If you're new to this podcast, I have some episodes on habit building, check them out if interested. Lots of useful tips and advice there. The main one is just to pick one habit for one month and stick with it. In the meantime, decide what habit do you want to start building in February? Choose the habit that if built right now will impact the quality and satisfaction of the rest of your year. What daily habits will make the rest of the year, more enjoyable, more productive, more impactful? And start building it. There is no better time to work on building your new habits than right now. Believe me. that's what I wanted to share with you today. If you have any topic requests for the upcoming episode, just send me a message through Contact Us Page. The link is in the show notes. I check every email and I respond to emails myself. So, don't worry. I will definitely see this email and those requests do impact what I decided to talk about on this podcast. Don't be shy, don't be a stranger. Send me a message and I'll make sure to respond to it as soon as possible. That's it for today. Have a fantastic week. Please subscribe if you want to have a freshly baked episode delivered to you next Monday. Bye.