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Today, we are talking all about a habit that can improve all of your other habits: Lifehacking. This is an intentional form of problem-solving that will help you align your habits with your goals while maintaining a flexible, open-handed approach to living.

I’m Cayce Fletcher and this is Season 1 Episode 16 of the More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast. Thanks so much for joining me as we create a life we love and cultivate a heart for God.

Hey everyone and welcome to the More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast. We are talking all about habits in Season 1 of the podcast, and I hope that you are starting to implement a few of these ideas. If you are, head over to the blog at amorebeautifullifecollective.com, and let me know what you think! You can subscribe, comment, and even shoot me an email if you have any ideas, comments, or questions about the things we’ve been talking about. Don’t forget to leave a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts. This helps others find the show by improving the show’s rankings in the algorithm.

I love the New Year. I’ve already got my planner (which I ordered back in October – too excited to get planning for the next year), and I’ve been brainstorming my word of the year. I’ve thought about all of the resolutions I want to set for myself and the vision I have for how this next year will go. I truly love the hope and dream that comes along with a new year of possibilities and opportunities.

The New Year brings out the hopeful, dreaming self in everyone I think. Like a little child anxiously awaiting the new school year – with their pencil pouches, backpacks, and new outfits picked out and perfectly arranged, we arrive at the new year wide-eyed and a little starstruck by the vision of what we will accomplish. But, many people have learned to temper their expectations. We may view the new year more like a sullen teenager with a bad case of senoritis even on the first day. With a cynical air, we exclaim, ‘What’s the use? There’s no point in making any goals, any resolutions. They will just be abandoned by MLK Day and a forgotten memory by March.” So you let this opportunity of a new you in the new year pass you by.

Today, I’m going to encourage you to let this not be the case for you this year. I’m going to give you a strategy to breathe some flexibility and life into your resolutions while helping you to stay motivated throughout the year.

The strategy: Lifehacking.

***If you have enjoyed visiting A More Beautiful Life Collective, please like, comment, share, and subscribe. Let’s make the world more beautiful together. This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase something through this link, I earn a small commission at no cost to you. It’s a win-win!***

What is Lifehacking?

Lifehacking is an attitude of problem-solving, flexibility, and openness while remaining firmly committed to your goals.

We talked about this in our podcast on how to create habits that stick. When you are creating your habits, you should first establish your goals. Then, you should create habits that align with the goals that you set for yourself. The process looks like this:

Determine your aspirations for yourself. What do you want your life to look like? What do you want to accomplish? What do you want your legacy to be?
Then, determine building block goals that get you to that aspiration. What is something that you could do in the next 6 months to a year that would get you closer to reaching your aspirations?
Then, you brainstorm a list of habits that help you to reach that goal.

All too often, this is where we stop in the process. We pick a habit and set an arbitrary requirement for ourselves, hoping that we stick to it. And, all too often these are a little too lofty and a little too unrealistic for our lives.

For instance, we should all have the aspiration to be spending quiet time daily with God. So, many of us set a yearly goal for our Bible Reading to help us get closer to achieving that. I think the most common habit we choose is to read through the Bible in a Year with a Bible Reading Plan. So, we set a habit for ourselves to read between 3-5 chapters a day, which takes about 15 minutes. This is a great and admirable goal, and if we follow through on our habit, it will be something worthwhile. It will be something life-changing.

But, we’ve all heard the stories – and may have lived it ourselves – where we start a Bible Reading plan for it just to be abandoned in the middle of Leviticus. We feel shame that we didn’t follow through. We feel like we need to open up our Bible and power through an entire month’s worth of reading to catch up. And, we feel like with the days going by we’ve become so buried in the weight of our abandoned habits that we will never be able to dig ourselves out of our mess. The combination of all of these factors leads to us giving up. Our Bible remains relegated to the shelf and gathers dust, only to be pulled out on Sundays if we decide to go old school to use it instead of our phones.

Most of our habits go this way. We get carried away and set unrealistic goals for ourselves. When we don’t meet them, we give up. Then, the next year we go through the same process. This type of behavior can lead to a sort of deadening of the pressure of our goals as time goes on. When we first set a goal for ourselves, we can feel motivated to it. But, if we keep choosing not to do the habits that will help us meet those goals by choosing to ignore the triggers we’ve set up to remind ourselves of the goals, we will ultimately get desensitized to those goals. It will always remain on the ‘someday’ list for our life, but will never actually be accomplished.

Well, that stops today.

To move our lofty goals from our ‘bucket list’ to our ‘done’ list, we have to change our mentality. Basically, we need to stop feeling so wedded to the specific habit that we’ve chosen and we have to be constantly assessing how we are doing on reaching goals. We have to be lifehacking our way to becoming the person that we have always aspired to be.

Lifehacking, aka Behavior Design

Lifehacking is an idea that is inspired by BJ Fogg in his book Tiny Habits. When you are creating a habit to reach your goals, you always want to assess three aspects of it:

How motivated you are to do the behavior
How able you are to do the behavior in terms of physical capability, time, financial constraints, etc.
How effective your prompts or triggers of the habit are

When you are going through the process of lifehacking, you want to assess all three aspects of each of your habits with the understanding that you should minimize your focus on motivation, which is fickle, and maximize your focus on your ability to do the behavior and the effectiveness of your triggers. This is where lifehacking comes in. You will not always be motivated to do a behavior, so you need to assess the effectiveness of your habits in meeting your aspirations and goals. If a habit seems to be failing to help you meet those goals, you should rework your habits and change them to more effectively do what you want to get done.

This is what BJ Fogg says, “Because our lives are complex and unique, there will naturally need to be adjustments. Where to put some habits is going to be obvious – what better time to floss your teeth than after you brush them, right? – while others might take a while to dial in. In the first few days or even weeks of experimentation, your new habits might shift a lot, and that’s better than okay; that’s great. It means you’re honing your skills and learning more about pairing Anchors [triggers, prompts] with Tiny Behaviors.

“If one habit doesn’t hook naturally to an Anchor, you might be inspired to replace it with a different habit that seems like a better fit. The moment my head hit the pillow seemed like a good time for me to mindfully take three breaths, so I tried it out. It worked, but I didn’t feel like it was doing much for me. It didn’t grow naturally, and sometimes it felt pointless. Instead of getting down on myself, I got curious. What else could go there? I’d been wanting to practice more gratitude, so after my head hit the pillow, I thought of one thing that happened that day I was thankful for. When I did it the first time, I got a happy little zing in my brain that told me I had found the right spot.

“By playing around with forming habits, we hone our skills. With practice, you’ll get better at using these principles to create habits that help you reach your aspirations. Quite often the skill you’ll need is finding a good Anchor and pairing it with the right Tiny Behavior. Then you can efficiently design for change in your everyday life.”

When we practice lifehacking, we are constantly assessing and reassessing where we are at with our goals and our habits. We experiment with our behaviors and try to find the best mix so that we are constantly moving forward in our lives, becoming more like the people that we want to be in God.

S1E35 – Your Digital Decluttering Checklist: Putting Technology in its Proper Place – A More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast

We are constantly fighting the battle with our digital stuff. Sometimes, we luxuriate in the opportunities provided by technology. Sometimes, we feel powerless to just. stop. scrolling. How can we have a better relationship with technology? We need to do a digital detox. In this episode, we'll go over our digital decluttering checklist with for main steps: Reflect, Limit, Curate, and Replace. Get a 30-day checklist FREE when you subscribe here. View the full post here. Check out the full digital decluttering challenge on YouTube here. Get our guide to 30 days of digital decluttering from our shop here. Want to start a new morning routine that will give you deep knowledge of God, practical spiritual disciplines, and an appreciation for the good, true, and beautiful things? Get a copy of our NEW AMBL Collective Morning Menu: A Morning Time Practice for Thinking People! Visit our Shop to get a copy of any of the resources mentioned in this episode: Read the full post here. I’m your host, Cayce Fletcher, and you can learn a little bit more about me here. While you’re here, would you consider leaving a comment, rating, or review? You can find our podcast, A More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast, wherever you listen to podcasts. Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or watch on YouTube. Subscribe to the blog for access to our latest content and some freebies. I love creating and sharing resources with you. You can find all of our resources at A More Beautiful Life Collective Shop. Keep creating a life you love, and cultivating your heart for God.

Set Your Goals and Review them Regularly

Crucially, we must take some time each season or at least once a year to do the work of assessing where we are at. We need to look at the big picture of our life, our visions, our hopes, our dreams, and then, see if the current way we are living is getting us closer to that goal. I like to look at different areas of my life when I am setting goals. I feel like it helps me to be more well-rounded and complete. I always do this with the recognition that I am not working on all of these goals at the same time all the time. Instead, I’m working on each throughout the year, with my focus shifting based on what life requires.

Normally, the areas I focus on include:

Spiritual Disciplines
Family Discipleship and Family Culture
Home Atmosphere
Mother Culture
Healthy Living
Play and Rest
Hospitality
Work
Service
Church
Relationships
Finances

I recently heard Crystal Paine, author of Say Goodbye to Survival Mode and Time Saving Mom, talk about her method of ‘spending her time.’ When she is planning on her weeks and days, she uses a 6x2x2 method. She has 6 areas of her life for which she sets goals. But, she only focuses on 2 of those areas each day, with a goal of hitting each area twice a week. For instance, a few of the areas that she focuses on are her blog, her children, her friends, and church relationships, and taking care of her home. She can’t be focusing on all of those at the same time. All too often, we try to, and then we end up feeling frazzled, frustrated and defeated because we’ve dropped something by trying to juggle all the balls at once. By focusing on just two areas each day, we basically give ourselves the license and grace to choose our focus. If we are doing a big activity with our kids, our house may take a backseat. If we are busy with our jobs for an event that will run late, we recognize that we may not be able to go out with our friends. But, we don’t let that be a pattern for every day. We know that later on that week our house will get taken care of, and we will set a coffee date to spend time with our friends. I think this is a great idea for making sure that you are being mindful and intentional about several different areas of your life.

Lifehacking in 2 Simple Steps

To practice lifehacking, you need to do 2 things:

Write down your goals.
Review and assess your goals and habits regularly.

That’s it! 2 simple steps to creating a life you love. So let’s break that down.

Once you’ve figured out your goals, write them down in a place where you can go back to them. I like to write down my aspirations on a vision board, and then divvy up my goals by area and write down things I can accomplish. You can write down your habits too.

Then each week, you need to assess where you are at. To do this, pick a time for a weekly review. This could be when you are making your meal plan for the week or writing out your plans in a planner. A perfect time could be during your morning coffee on Monday or when you are preparing for the week ahead on Sunday night.

During your weekly review:

Assess each of your habits as either needs to improve, doing good, or ready to grow.
If your habit needs to improve, ask the following: “What is making this behavior hard to do? How can I make it easier to do?”

Is there something holding you back? For instance, if you want to wake up earlier to do your Bible Reading, but every night you are up till midnight. You’ll need to make some changes to your schedule. You may decide to move your Bible Reading at night when you are awake, or you may decide to go to bed earlier so that you can wake up earlier. This is essentially the point of lifehacking. You’re experimenting with what you are currently doing to find the best mixture for your ability, life goals, and current life circumstances.

Sometimes to make a habit easier to do you may need to improve your skills. Sometimes you’ll need to find a tool or resource to make it easier to do. For instance, if you are reading through the Bible, finding a great Bible study that walks you through the Bible will make it easier to stick with the goal.

This requires self-awareness to help you understand what exactly is holding you back from achieving your goals with the habit that you’ve chosen. You may also decide at this point that you need to pick a different habit. If you are exercising, but just can’t make running work for you, maybe you should switch to group exercise or yoga. Again, you’ll go through this process and see if it sticks. If it doesn’t you’ll try the next thing.

For some of your habits, you’ll find you’re doing great with sticking to them. With some habits, you may even find you are ready to grow. You may be ready to take more classes or add on other habits to keep improving. You can brainstorm these next steps during your weekly review.

A Note about Self-Discipline

As BJ Fogg states, you won’t always feel like doing your habits. Motivation is fickle and fleeting, and you should not rely on feeling motivated to accomplish your goals. You may not always ‘feel like’ planning meaningful activities for your kids or choosing to have a daily meal together at the dinner table, but these things are important for your family culture. Motivation, or feeling like you want to do something, does not imply morality. You may not feel like reading your Bible, but you still need to read your Bible daily for your spiritual formation. As someone said, your feelings are a gauge, not a guide. If you are not feeling motivated to read your Bible, you should use that feeling to ‘lifehack’ your way to a habit of daily bible reading, not abandon bible reading altogether.

Sometimes, this means that you need to just be disciplined. Discipline breeds desire. You will find that the more that you do your habit, the more that you will grow to love your habit. It requires discernment and a commitment to your goals to recognize when you should abandon or change your habit and when you just need to exercise your self-discipline muscle.

Lifehacking Your Way to a Life You Love

When you practice lifehacking regularly, you can be more intentional about all your habits. You will regularly go back to the goals and aspirations you have for your life which will automatically help you to achieve those things. Many times we just need to be reminded of our goals to actually achieve them. By doing a weekly review, you are being reminded of your goals every week. You also have the flexibility and spontaneity to figure out the habits that work best for you. Maybe you choose at the beginning of the year to do a habit that you think will work great for you, but you find come the second week of January that it’s turned into a slog and you are about ready to give up. Maybe you listen to a podcast or have a conversation with a friend and you learn about something that sounds like a great thing to try. Doing a weekly review gives you the flexibility to assess whether or not that habit will help you reach your goals and gives you space in your schedule to figure out where to add that habit into your life.

What happens if you hear about an idea that you would like to try but it just won’t fit in your schedule? Or do you really want to do a certain habit but it’s just not working right now? Use your weekly review time to jot that idea down in a notebook. You can add those habits to a ‘someday’ list. If you practice this weekly review process regularly, you can go back to your list and choose that habit later, even if won’t work for you right now.

What are some of the goals you have for the next year? What are some aspirations that you have? What are some habits that you would like to try out? How would you want to practice lifehacking? I would love to hear from you!

I’m still regularly posting on Instagram and Facebook with announcements of new blog posts and podcasts, but I am taking a break from checking it regularly. If you would like to get in touch with me, please check out the blog amorebeautifullifecollective.com and comment on this episode. You can find the link in the show notes. You can also leave a rating and review wherever you listen to this podcast to help others find the show. Don’t forget to subscribe to get the next episode of the podcast to show up in your feed.

I’m Cayce Fletcher, and I hope you’ll join me next week for the next episode. Until next time keep creating a life you love and cultivating your heart for him.

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