First of all, how are you doing?

Feel free to email me back and vent. Use expletives if you want. 

I won’t be offended. I’m right there with you. My son is two and we’re living through a pandemic with both of us parents working full time. 

If you know, you know.

So as I always do when I’m stressed, overwhelmed, and just trying to figure out how to keep my head above water, I do some research.

This time, it’s on how to use habits to reduce the amount of willpower I have to use because I’m tired and running low.

I’ve long been a fan of productivity studies, so when Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones by James Clear was published in 2018, I very excitedly put it on my wishlist. But somehow I didn’t get around to buying and reading it until this month. 

It was a fun and fast read, and basically consolidated and systematized a lot of what I’ve read over the years into a comprehensive and actionable plan. 

Although I highly recommend reading the book yourself, I want to share how I’m implementing it as a grant writer, business owner, and mom, and all within the context of the pandemic.

So I hope you’re ready for a multi-part series on this, because here it is.

Part 1: Make it Obvious

James Clear’s first law of Atomic Habit Formation is Make it Obvious. 

He explains that to create new habits you must be aware of the habits you already have.

I started by doing a time study for a few days. A time study is simply listing out everything you do in a day and listing the time periods you spent doing them alongside each item. There are a ton of apps that can help you do this, but I just used good old pen and paper.

What it made very clear to me is that I jump into work either as soon as I wake up (or get back from taking my son to daycare), take very few breaks, and short ones when I do. I’m talking ten minutes for lunch. Then I work, work, work until I’m exhausted and all I can do is mess around on TikTok for an hour (also not really resting).

I also realized that I no longer have a good morning routine, which I used to be so into. Yes, journaling, reading, planning my day, all while calmly drinking my coffee and having breakfast. That went out the door when I had my son and even though I’ve tried and tried to reintegrate it into my day, it’s been hard. He’s been home with us full-time through most of the pandemic and just got into full-time daycare at the end of September.

Now, rather than taking any time that my son is being cared for to rest or relax, I feel just as pressed for time, like I can’t “waste” a single minute on a morning routine or self-care during the day given how at any moment his class could be shut down for five days because of a positive COVID case in his class.

This is why we have to talk about habits in terms of the pandemic.

All of this has made me truly physically depleted. I have to have an MRI done on my back this week, and I’m in physical therapy because of how bad that situation has gotten over the past two years. 

Not being able to rest or not feeling like we have time to rest costs us in so many ways. 

There are several new habits I want to implement to improve my health, mental well-being, family life, and professional life. I’ll share one with you now and how I’m going to make it obvious for myself.

I want to restart my morning routine.

Create a day, time, and place for your habit

Clear says that the first step to building a new habit is to create a day, time, and place that you will do it. Seems simple. But what about when your daily routine does and could change at any moment?

In my case, daycare dropoffs and the potential for daycare shutdowns mean that my mornings can change at any minute. So building a routine that is triggered by me waking up isn’t going to work because I can’t do it at the same time every day. 

But I can modify this to account for variable schedules and pandemic-related scheduling messes. For me, I work at least five days a week. That means I can count on myself to sit down and start work at some point in the day. You always want to establish a habit trigger that is a habit you already do without thinking or drawing upon any motivation.

So my habit trigger for my “morning routine” is going to be sitting down at my desk to work, regardless of what time that happens. Instead of sitting down and immediately opening my email or project management software, I’ll open my journal and write my “morning pages” (see Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way for more on this).

This habit helps me clear my mind and have a much more productive and focused workday.

I’ll also be implementing Clear’s second recommendation for making your habit obvious: I’ll put the journal and pen right on my desk and keep it there. I won’t have to go searching for it and get distracted by the twenty other things I need to do around the house before I get started.

According to the research in Atomic Habits, simply making something obvious (and therefore easy) is one of the best ways to ensure you adopt a new habit. 

Stack good habits

Then, I’m going to build on this one good habit with what Clear calls “habit stacking.” My trigger for the next positive habit I want to implement is the end of the first habit. So it looks like this:

• After I sit down at my desk, I will write my morning pages in my journal.
• After I write my morning pages, I will write my top 3 tasks for the day in my planner (also on my desk, next to my journal).
• After I write my top 3 tasks, I will get down on the floor on the thick, comfy rug by my desk and do my physical therapy stretches (also listed on a sheet of paper that I’ll keep on my desk).

By stacking my desired new habits on top of my existing habit of sitting down to work, I’ve taken advantage of momentum and my existing routine. This makes it obvious and easy, no longer requiring me to have the motivation to do these things, but just allows me to go into autopilot.

You can also use habit stacking to build less frequent habits. For example, as a grant writer you could implement a habit stack like this one:

Every time I submit a grant I will (existing habit):

1. Mark on my grant tracker spreadsheet that it was submitted and note the date.
2. Find the next grant application to work on while in that same spreadsheet.
3. Write the grant deadline in my project management software/calendar.
4. Break writing the grant down into smaller tasks, each with due dates.
5. Tag or email anyone else who needs to work on that grant with notifications on due dates.

There you go. Once you trigger this habit enough times, it will become second nature to you. In the meantime, I recommend writing these five steps down as the last things you have to do for your next grant submission. 

If you have fancy project management software like ClickUp, which is what we use, you can even create an automation to create this habit stack list for you every time you check off a grant submission task.

Now, I’ll report back to you next week on how my new habit stack, “morning routine,” goes.

I would also love to hear from you. What is your new habit stack that you’ll practice this week?

If the habits you’re looking to implement deal with getting organized, I invite you to take advantage of all the resources inside my Get Organized! Productivity for Nonprofit Teams Course.