I used to wake up, write a blog post, meditate for 10 minutes, and work out, all before getting in the shower around 6:45-7am. I used the Atomic Habits strategy of stacking my habits one-after-the-other so that I reduced a lot of friction in my mornings. I’d start writing and the rest of the stacked habits just happened one after the other.
A couple things happened to change this. I have been spending more time writing, stopped meditating, and started spending more time stretching. However, it was the writing time that was the big change since both the meditation and stretching were both 10 minutes long. What I’ve noticed is that my workouts and stretching are getting shorter.
So, I need to unstack my current habits. I need to write most or all of my posts at night, then I can start my morning with meditation, cardio, stretch, then a strength routine dedicated to one or two muscles, which is my usual routine. Essentially I’m not really unstacking my habits, I’m re-stacking them in a way that they give me the outcomes I want without compromising any of them at the expense of others… I just changed the title of this post from ‘Unstacking habits’ to ‘(Re)stacking habits’… Because stacking works, but it needs to work for all the habits, not just some of them.
As a good friend said, I won’t know how well this works until I try it for at least a couple weeks, because a few days aren’t long enough for a pattern to be formed, for a habit to truly become a habit. Let’s see how this goes. If I remember, I’ll give a progress report some time later this month.
