Ten Minute (or less) Posts

Right, so you’ve stacked your habits, eaten your cues and are now sitting/standing at your desk/on your couch, fingers poised over your keyboard/around your pen. You get the picture. What matters is that you write not what you write. It’s all about the habit. Just as...

Habit Stacking In the early days, the greatest danger is simply forgetting. Once it becomes a habit, this is much less likely, but in order to get there, you have to build up a streak of consecutive days. And you can't even blame the procrastination demon if you...

Making it Easy The easier you make it to start your routine (the writing itself) the more likely it is you’ll maintain your streak and establish a solid habit. Take this morning as an example. As I write this, it’s a Saturday in late March just after the UK has closed...

Most of us have become familiar with the old enemy: the procrastination demon. It sits on our shoulder, whispering in our ear, doing all in its power to prevent us from moving towards our goals. "You don't have time for this." "Shouldn't you be [insert chore here]?"...

In the last days of 2012, Stephen Guise found himself contemplating his lack of fitness, as many of us do at the turn of the year. For the previous decade, he’d tried various exercise regimens and failed with every single one. I can relate to this, and I suspect you...

Tap the button to listen to this article It’s easy to imagine in the early days of a writing career, that words are a strictly rationed commodity, as if they’re drawn from a well that will one day dry up. This is because writing is hard, especially at the beginning....

Habits form our identity, not the other way around. A smoker doesn’t smoke because they’re a smoker; they’re a smoker because they smoke. In other words, do it to be it. This simple truth, which is covered at length in Atomic Habits, is nevertheless profound. A...