In my two previous posts about the 5% Idea, I mentioned that we often have difficulty making and keeping maintenance habits (an example for me is flossing my teeth regularly). With habits like flossing, exercise, working on future business planning, etc. we sometimes bounce between forcing ourselves to work on the habit (and overstretching) and forgetting it entirely (becoming burnt out by the habit). We talked about why that is, and why the 5% Idea can be a fresh approach. If we’re a little patient, this approach can get us some great new results that last a lifetime. In this post, I want to detail exactly what you need to do to start using it.
At a high level, here’s how you apply the 5% idea to build up a consistent maintenance habit:
- Examine your past, either by measurement or logging a period of time, to establish a true “average” for you.
- Work to build the habit at that level, focusing on delivering those results continually. Be patient.
- Grow the level of the habit in small increments until you’ve built up the habit to the right level for you.
Step 1 – Establish the baseline for this habit based on evidence
Step one in getting new results in a tough maintenance area is to get realistic. Remember, you’re likely not working on this habit in new ways because it’s easy for you. I’m talking about the maintenance activity you’re really challenged by, but still want to improve. To make progress on flossing (always so hard for me), I had to start by asking myself, “What’s a realistic expectation of myself in this area?
We tend to arbitrarily pick our goals for maintenance habits, usually based on how often we think we should be doing the habit. Keep in mind though, should isn’t useful. It’s usually based on emotion, on a value (sometimes not even yours), but it’s not based on evidence of what you’ve been able to do before. We want something we’ve got some evidence for. So, how to find that?
There are two ways to get this baseline expectation from the evidence. The first is to look at your past behavior over a period long enough to show your true pattern. It wouldn’t give me a very good baseline to just look at how often I flossed last week, while that flossing habit was fresh on my mind. Go over any records you have, combined with your best guess as you walk through that past time, to figure out how often you’ve been really doing this habit.
When I did that with my past flossing habit, I thought through my performance over the previous year. I had to gut feel it a bit, but I came up with an average of less than once a week. I know that’s not a very good average. (OK, I’m feeling embarrassed again, but flossing has always been so hard for me. Hopefully you can relate in some other area.) My less than once a week was all over the place. I was often skipping flossing for long periods, then rushing to try to do it before the dentist. So again, the first part is gathering evidence, looking at how often you’ve done this in the past.
Another way to gather evidence is to do a trial on the habit. This can work beautifully, but you have to do the trial long enough to get a real baseline. It’s easy to exercise more for a week, or focus on our employees for a week, or floss for a week. It’s harder to do that for a month. Based on my experience with clients, 3-4 weeks of recording how often you do it is usually a good trial for any maintenance habit, but you be the judge. Usually by week three or four, if you’ve been overstretching the habit, you’ll have a relapse. That’s good. That relapse will affect your average for that behavior, and you’ll get a truer starting baseline.
So again, the first step is either looking at our history or doing a trial. The goal is to detect a realistic level of achievement in this area for now.
Step 2 – Build the foundation of the habit, doing the habit consistently
Step two is to build the consistency of the habit. If you’re me and you’re only flossing once per week, you’re likely going to want to focus on flossing at exactly that frequency, but doing that consistently. At this point you’re focused just on getting a habit of consistency going in this area. I think this is the hardest part of the stretch for most, for some of the reasons we established in the last post. Just remember your goal at this point: to develop the habit of doing your historical average in this maintenance goal area, but doing that average consistently.
Lets’ say you find that you’re doing an average of an hour of project work a week as you look over the last three months of work. So now, you focus on doing that exact average at a consistent basis for the next few weeks. Your focus should be to build in that hour a week, to get that project work in no matter what. Just keep your focus on building the habit and remember, it’s near impossible to grow the frequency of a habit you haven’t got. It’s like trying to build a house on a foundation that’s still drying. Bad idea, but I think we often do that.
As an example, I started on my flossing habit with once a week. This was hard—to do it consistently, I couldn’t forget to do it for weeks as I had before. To help me get in the rhythm of this new consistency, I chose a day of the week and put the floss in a particular place I knew I would see it. If I missed that day, I’d do it the next day. The goal at that point was to just see if I could do flossing once per week.
Step 3 – Build on the consistency by increasing the frequency of the habit
Once you’re consistently delivering on your average, you’re ready to grow the average. Again, three to four weeks seems to be a good measure of consistency for most habits. If you can do your historical average consistently for that period, you’re probably ready to grow it. If you miss a week, perhaps add another week to the test just to make sure. You don’t need to be perfect, but when you miss, you want to ask yourself, “Did I miss, but I’ve still got that habit, or am I barely able to hold this together, and need to work on the consistency some more?”
Now that you’ve got consistency, your next step is to build in small increments. Even though I call this process of building up your maintenance goals the “5% Idea,” I don’t mean 5% increments literally. That being said, 5% can often work as a starting point for your incremental change, but again, you be the judge. In general, I counsel you to start doing less of an increase than you think you can. As an example, in working on building up my flossing frequency, I thought I’d build to twice a week. But I remembered my own advice: less than you think you should. So I chose to follow the following build:
- Once a week for a month, twice a week for the last week.
- Once a week for two weeks, twice a week for two weeks
- Twice a week for a month…
Remember to be patient and stay focused on the cumulative benefits of doing more of this habit over many years of your future, as opposed to the impatience that drives you to build the entire habit now. If you slip for a month, consider going back to your last level and working on doing that more consistently before you build again. As you prove to yourself you can do the habit consistently at each level, increase it slightly for the next period. Keep growing it until you reach the level in that area that’s right for you.
I still am working to floss more than my current level, but I’m enjoying the fact that I now do it consistently and 2-3 times as often as before. That’s an improvement! I’ve had a lot of fun and some rewarding results with the 5% Idea. I’ll talk in the future about other ways I’ve used this idea. I’d love to share how I built up my current exercise habits using this approach.
Here’s your assignment: apply the 5% Idea
For now, here’s your assignment. Choose an area you’d like to patiently build up as a solid maintenance habit. Remember, it could be anything. Time spent writing, jogging, talking to the spouse, on yourself and your hobbies, in front of clients, in educational pursuits, whatever. But choose something that’s been hard for you and deserves some patience.
Work this through the 5% Idea. Remember to 1) find your past average based on evidence, 2) consistently perform at that average until you’ve got the habit, then 3) slowly grow the average in smaller increments than you think you should. Pretty soon you’ll see the results. Let me know about the results, good and bad. Perhaps we can post a frequently asked questions to help fill in areas that are still unclear.
Good luck!
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