Hi blog! Oh how I’ve missed you. How’s the pandemic going for you? Anyways, that’s not what this post is about. It’s about atomic habits! Ive posted a few posts on this book, here’s two of them linked here and here. Check them out if you have no idea what atomic habits is! Understanding the book, author, and habits will help make this post easier to understand! Lets get into this post…

For this PGP assignment we were given this awesome opened ended project. Ms. Maxwell made a cool visual for us students to use and guide our project. Ill put a pic here, and explain a little.

 

It consists of 3 curricular competencies, and how we should show our knowledge. As I said earlier, it’s super open ended. You could choose any of the boxes, and recommended to follow it in a horizontal line (as each box is connected to each other in that way) but of course, in Luca fashion I didn’t fully follow that (sorry Ms. Maxwell!) I chose to do these ones in the pic below this text.I chose those 3 because it felt the most natural towards my project. At first I was following just the middle row, but I felt the first two boxes in last row fitted my project best as I adapted and revised it. Anyways, these boxes inspired my project, and I’m going to go through each box and show my journey of making my final product! (A daily calendar adapted to the habits.)

THINK

“Summarize the 4 laws of atomic habits.” At first, I had decided to do the middle row box, but as I started creating my calendar I realized I could include not just ONE but ALL of the habits in it. So, I went with this box. I could go and summarize all of the habits, but past Luca did a great job at doing that in my Atomic Habits blog post. Instead, I’m going to talk about the importance of them.

So, when I first started reading atomic habits back in January, I was like hopefully this book will leave me smarter and more organized, and to my surprise, it actually did. I’m a organized person and I have a lot of techniques and routines to get stuff done, but never really though about why or why not they work. This book solidified ideas I had floating around my head, and deepened my understanding of my work habits. Connecting it to the competency THINK “how do I make choices, question decisions, and develop habits to support achievement” this book helped me with those exact statements. The book made me really focus and break down what I’m doing, and how I’m doing it. How I make the choices I do, how I question my decisions and how I develop habits to support achievement. The book basically revised my ways of thinking, and the product I made for this product is psychical evidence of my deep understanding of the book.

 

ACT

“Create a tool for you and your friends to use in the future that demonstrates a thorough and thoughtful understanding of your topic.” So, as I mentioned, I created a calendar. Woohoo calendar, I know… But, this ones special, and it’s adapted to help support and organize a busy teenagers brain. I’m a procrastinator as we all know, and I’ve noticed I consistently leave all my assignments to the weekend. So I made a sort of Sunday calendar. I called it that at first because Sunday’s are my homework day, but because of corona, everyday is kind of a Sunday. My days are basically empty besides calls and seeing friends, so I just end up designating a day or two to all my assignments, so I made the calendar surrounding that habit because that’s how my brain works. Regular calendars just don’t work for my busy daily life. They are good for overall weekly plans, but for those long work days they just don’t work.

Anyways, I wanted the calendar to be something I could fill out and plan the day before a very busy workday. I find myself having a way more successful work day when my day is laid out the night before, so I highlighted that and removed the long and painful time where I’m moping around in the morning being stressed and confused on what I have to do that day. As I was developing the calendar, I was focusing on the law “make it attractive” as the calendar is all about making the busy day less scary and stressful, but as I developed and revised it I noticed I could attach a habit to each part of the calendar. Ill show my calendar draft here, and you can see the pink highlighted parts are where I show the connection to the laws.

Half of the calendar is to be written the night before, and the other half is to complete during the day. I’m going to break down the four parts of the calendar and the laws connected to it.

PART 1 (MAKE IT EASY): To do list. This is the make it easy habit, as it’s there to do the night before so the next day is easier. As I talked about before, I have a more successful work day if I have it laid out for me when I wake up. It makes everything easier to focus on. There’s no worry of “oh what is due?” “What do I have to do?” “Do I do this today or tomorrow?” It removes the stress. During the day you check off the boxes, which also connects to MAKE IT SATISFYING, as what’s more satisfying than checking off some boxes, am I right? Also, I added a cool little feature where there’s 3 colours to colour in the check box (you do this while writing the list the night before.) Each colour shows you how long (approximately) each thing will take. I like this feature as it helps me know what I should get done first, as well as showing me how long everything will approximately take all added up.

PART 2 (MAKE IT ATTRACTIVE): Nightly checklist. This is pre written, and has 3 key things that I feel are very helpful to a successful day. I don’t know about you, but If I wake up to a clean room, clothes folded ready to put on, and a to do list already pre written, I’m more likely to actually do my work then if I wake up all unorganized and stressed. This makes the day more attractive, which is why that’s the law I connected this part to.

PART 3 (MAKE IT OBVIOUS): Goals for tomorrow + one thing you’re proud of yourself for doing in the day. The goal is the part connected to the law, as make it obvious is all about breaking and setting habits. It’s a place to set a small goal for the next day. It’s not meant for big things like “raise your math mark by 10 percent” its meant for things like “stay off phone when doing homework” or “get work done before 5:00 pm.” It’s to help set goals/habits, and the proud of yourself part is either for just something like “I’m proud of myself for getting out of bed on time today” or, if you used the calendar the day before you could say “I followed my new habit of staying off my phone during homework.” I wanted to include something like this in my calendar so it makes it more meaningful, and it’s also a place to give yourself some self love by talking about what you’re proud of.

PART 4 (MAKE IT SATISFYING): This the space where you get to reward yourself after your hard day of working. You can write the thing like “watch a movie” or “hangout with friends” either in the morning, or just when something you want to do pops up in your head. I leave it blank until I’m working on my to do’s, as ill be sitting doing homework and Ill think ah I wish I could play some animal crossing on my Nintendo switch right now, and instead of giving into that craving, ill write it down as my reward so once all my to do’s are done, I get to do what I want. This is connected to the law make it satisfying as after a long day of working hard, you get to reward yourself, and that is beyond satisfying.

I’m really proud of this calendar, and I know it’ll help me and my friends out in our busy lives. As I mentioned before, the circular competency for this part is reflect, “How do I create and demonstrate thorough and thoughtful understanding.” And I fully believe I showed my understanding of the laws in this calendar.

 

REFLECT

This part of the tic tac toe board is basically this blog post, but it also requires you to talk about how you plan to move forward with atomic habits. That question fits into my project well, as my creation was a tool that I actually use. I printed out many many copies of this calendar onto thick card-stock and stapled it together into a little book. This is so I have nice paper copies to continue to use. I’ve given some friends some copies too (Adlih and Isy) and I know they will use it as they helped me revise and develop this calendar. The task was to make a tool for me and my friends to use to continue our use of atomic habits, so that’s what I did, and I’m very proud of the outcome! I put a big clear copy of the calendar at the beginning of this post, so if you want, you can screenshot it and print out to use for yourself!