Back in Episode #538, I kicked off the new year of Five-Minute Fridays by introducing the practice of habit-tracking, including providing you with a template habit-tracking spreadsheet. I followed that up in Episode #540 by detailing for you my habit of starting the day with a glass of water.
So Daily Habit #1 was the meta-habit of tracking your habits. Daily Habit #2 is the morning water glass. That brings us today to my Daily Habit #3, which is another morning habit: making your bed.
Lots of people use “make your bed” figuratively to mean “set something in motion” but I literally mean to make your bed! This habit is about setting the tone for the day. If you set up your environment to cue you to perform helpful behaviors, you take the energy and effort out of building habits and maintaining good behaviors. If your bed is made, then your sleeping space is psychologically closed off and you aren’t cued as easily by the bed to take a nap or lie in the bed scrolling mindlessly through your Instagram feed. You’re more likely to engage in the higher-effort activities you’d like to, be it getting your gym clothes on or sitting down at your desk to work.
As a bonus, I think it’s also nice to have a tidy-looking bedroom! Personally, I think it makes me happier and more relaxed.
Another cool thing about this habit is that, like starting the day with a glass of water, making your bed is a quick habit that only takes a few moments. You can easily chain it into a sequence of easily-reinforceable good habits. As an explicit example, you could start each day by making your bed immediately after drinking your bedside water glass. After a while, making your bed will be automatic and effortless.
Like the habits I’ve already covered so far, making your bed in the morning is a binary habit — either you do it or you don’t — so if you were interested in adopting it and you’re using my habit-tracking template from Episode #538, then you’d set the min column for this row of the spreadsheet to 0 and the max column to 1.
That’s it for today! In a Five-Minute Friday in the not-too-distant future, I’ll be back with another daily habit. In the meantime, keep on rockin’ it out there and I’ll catch you on another round of SuperDataScience very soon.