As you might recall from the first post, the concept of stairs was born as a way of gaining new habits. Throughout my adolescent and adult life, I’ve been in a fight to gain new habits that make me more healthy, productive, and happy, and I’m losing the battle¹ !

A retrospective

I’ve tried all the techniques in the book, and I cannot say that any of them stand out for their effectiveness. The bottom line is that one just has to be consistent, which is easier said than done. I’ve faced many problems in the quest for new habits:

Search for reset points

“OK, new habit chosen: I’m going to start reading every day!”

Nice, let’s get to it, I’m feeling ficti…

“But it’s Wednesday, feels weird to start on a Wednesday…”

What do you mean? You just sai…

“Monday it is, time to watch some Youtube videos!”

…

This happens more frequently than I care to admit. Reset points come in many forms, Mondays, 1^st of the month, 1^st of January², but all of them have something in common, which is delaying the start of a new habit gaining journey.

Why am I like this? I don’t know, and maybe I’m not alone. A quick (and I really mean quick³) Google search shows that these points are called temporal landmarks and that studies show that they actually influence one’s motivation. The thing is, they shouldn’t, because, in reality, I’m just wasting days where I could be putting the habit into practice.

I’m going to confess something right now. Ready? I take temporal landmarks really seriously. If I say I’m going to start on Monday I will try really hard to not do the habit until Monday. Now that’s dedication!

Why can’t I put the dedication into the habits?

Habit stacking

Habit stacking is the label I’ve given to the action of trying to commit to many habits at once. Pretty straightforward, right? Let’s take a look at a practical example:

Me trying to get my life together.

I’ve taken this directly from a Notion (sponsor me!) page called “The glue to my life”. Ignoring the wonky grammar, this clever name was chosen because this schedule’s goal was to get my life together. Anyway, let’s count the number of habits I committed to:

1. Having a consistent sleep schedule
2. Reading
3. Having a skin-care routine
4. Working out every day

Four habits, and I’ve done much worse. If I look at my habits app (if you’re into habits you have a habits app), a total of thirteen (!!!) habits that I wanted to start having all of a sudden⁴.

Needless to say, this isn’t a very good idea, because achieving these many new habits requires some abrupt changes in the daily routine, and soon what starts as a major endeavor for self-improvement turns into a colossal failure.

You might be wondering “Well, if you commit to thirteen habits, even if you give up on some along the way, if you keep at least one it’s already a win.”, and I would simply point you to the next section.

Do or die

I put too much pressure on gaining new habits. I commit to a 30-day journey, a challenge if you must, of making my life better.

However, looking at it like a challenge, one where you can, and (let’s face it) eventually will, fail brings about a nasty side effect. It happens when failing to do the habit for one single day creates the feeling of having “lost” said challenge leading me to abandon the habit altogether.

I started this blog by talking about stairs, and how I used the metaphor of going up them to represent the process of gaining a new habit. Am I full of crap? Taking the “do-or-die” into this metaphor would mean that if one day I can’t go up a step I just say “Well fuck it, might as well go down”.

Recapping

So let’s take all of this together and reconstruct a typical life-changing endeavours:

1. Pick 10 of your favorite habits
2. Detail, with utmost precision, how you’re gonna accomplish them every day
3. Start (wait, it’s Thursday)
4. Wait until Monday
5. Start for real
6. Succeed for the first couple of days
7. A life event blocks you from completing a habit or two
8. Rapidly spiral out of control and abandon all habits
9. Wait some weeks for motivation to return
10. Repeat

By now you’re thinking that this post is about my failure to become a better person, which is somewhat correct. However, its main goal is to enable me (and perhaps any of you) to learn from my mistakes and start fresh.

I talked about some reasons why I keep failing to reach my goals, but maybe I should also talk about something that might help me do the exact opposite.

Why were the stairs a success⁵? I attribute it in large part to the accountability that I gained by sharing the journey with my friends. Knowing that, if I fail, someone else will know sometimes gives me the extra push to not give up.

That push is even larger if the other person is also climbing the stairs with you. You start fighting even harder not to fail, or at least that’s how I felt during the first set of stairs I mentioned in the first post.

So what?

Taking all of this into consideration, and even more so because the “branding” of this blog is centered around the concept of stairs⁶, I’ve decided to create a special page where I will track my habits daily.

I will take everything I’ve talked about here into consideration.

I won’t habit stack. The plan is to gather a list of habits that I would like to gain and I will categorize them into two aspects: 1) difficulty and 2) importance. I will then pick the most important hard and easy habits and track them.

I won’t give up if I fail on one day. My goal is to update the page with more than just checkboxes and take you through the ups and downs of this journey.

And that takes me to the accountability factor, which will be achieved by sharing this on the internet with you⁷.

You may have noticed that I skipped the temporal landmarks point. As cool as it would be for me to start on a Tuesday out of spite for it, the fact is that this post is coming out on a Sunday, which means that Monday is the most intuitive day to start it.

And before you get all preachy with me, if I actually did that it would mean that Tuesday would itself become a temporal landmark so your argument has no leg to stand on!

See me climb those stairs.⁸