This 5-minute habit can change the course of your life

Hi, Fabulous Traveler,

Writing your to-do list and prioritising your tasks are important skills. Equally important is having plans to achieve your goals.

If you don’t establish your own plans, someone else will make you follow theirs.

Start creating plans for your most important goals. As always, keep them simple. Get a separate notebook just for your plans, and think about sticking to just 3 projects at a time.

Writing a Plan Is Very Simple

Choose your end goal and ask yourself: why do I want to accomplish this? It’s crucial to determine your motivation and write it down, so it will be there every time you need to refuel your desire towards accomplishing the end goal.

An end goal can be: "I want to exercise more because I feel that just will give me more energy for my social life."

Now visualise your end goal, and ask yourself: what are the tasks I need to do to get there? You don’t necessarily need to write everything down right now, but try to come up with the first 3 tasks.

Then choose ONE task you can start working on right away. This is vital as it kickstarts your project and stops you just forgetting about your plan.

Skill: Adjust Your Plans

At the end of each day, review your plans and adjust them accordingly. Ask yourself these 3 questions:

• What didn’t work today?

• What do I need to change to get more things done?

• What are the next tasks I need to accomplish?

Let me give you an example of how powerful plan adjustment is: I wanted to get into the habit of exercising in the gym. I didn’t go for 2 days in a row. Normally, I would have gone on with my life and completely forgotten about exercising, but since I sat down each night to adjust my plan, I quickly understood that owing to time constraints it was inconceivable for me to go to the gym.

I started looking for options I could do at home that wouldn’t take so much time. I decided to do a 7 minute exercise every night, a few hours before sleeping.

If I hadn’t adjusted my plan to make it work, I would never have settled on my new habit of exercising.

This Week

This week, we have a one-time action, and a challenge.

Your One-Time Action

Start by writing 1 or 2 plans. Keep them in a notebook so you can check them every day.

Your Challenge

For the next 3 days, each night or at the end of your day, look at your current plans. See if there is anything that needs to be changed, and adjust them accordingly.

Ready for this? Tap “I accept” below to add the habit to your evening ritual, but feel free to move it around or even to create a new ritual for it. I have an “End of Day” ritual at around 7 p.m. where I put this habit.

Fabulous Traveler, I really encourage you to add this habit to your life. Even if you don’t do it every day, experiment with it and you’ll see how much benefit you can get out of it.

To your success, Fabulous Traveler.