Knowing and Doing are Different

I have a confession to make …

This week’s post was supposed to be about me putting together a ‘Habits Scorecard’ as part of my actions prescribed from reading ‘Atomic Habits’.

It’s one of his first recommendations, to track pretty much every action you make and then rate against your goals as either positive, negative or neutral.

I think it’s a really good idea and a good way of assessing yourself and your daily routines and I was excited to do it.

The problem came when I realised that my routines currently are not the routines that I know I want, and not the ones that I planned out a number of months ago now.

With it being both winter and yet another lockdown here in the UK, my morning routine in particular has gone to shambles.

I know that my previously established morning routine is: turn off my alarm – drink a glass of water – dress in my workout clothes that were put out the night before – make my bed – get my gym stuff – go to the gym – etc.

I’ve no gym currently to force me to that schedule, and it’s cold and dark in the mornings, so I’ll admit – I’ve been hitting snooze fairly regularly.

And I didn’t want to put this on the scorecard as these are changes to the habits I was actively building before.

I know that these are bad decisions that do not really benefit me.

I know that when I hit snooze I am wasting time with no real benefit as I’m already awake by then.

I know that staying in bed so long that I run out of time to workout in the morning is actively working against not only what I want but what I need.

(I fell a lot better during the day if I get chance to do some form of movement at the start of the day)

There are a number of small decisions that I’ve been routinely making recently that would come under the ‘negative’ category of the scorecard.

I’ve been viewing these as temporary allowances while the world is weird, I didn’t want to commit them to the scorecard for this reason and also because I am very aware that these are not the choices I should be making.

But I guess they’ve been going on for a little too long now if I’m honest with myself.

One of the reasons I started this blog was for my own accountability, which is why I’m being honest about this rather than just choosing another topic for this week instead.

I want ‘Action over Motion’, and I said that I would act on the tasks recommended in the books I was reading. If I just put this action off this week, I will keep putting it off until suddenly half the year has gone (I know what I’m like).

So this is what I am going to do – I’m going to do the habit scorecard for my current routines (on average), then I’m going to address the negative habits and try and stick to the routines as I know I should.

I’ll post my ‘bad’ scorecard (it’s not really bad, just sub-optimal) in two weeks and if I’ve made progress by then I’ll post a current, improved scorecard with it.

It will at least force me to be honest with my current choices and where they are leading, and hopefully shame me a little into pushing away the bad habits that I’ve allowed to build.

Hopefully my recent laziness won’t have done me too much damage, but we’ll see how hard it becomes to commit to my previous morning and night routines.

Wish me look and I’ll see you with a scorecard in two weeks.