Being flexible with building habits

When I got laid off around May last year, it opened up the opportunity to explore other things or even focus more on aspects about life you didn't had much time for. For me, it was more on the aspects of things I wanted to do, but wasn't successful at building an habit around. So, I thought I could use that time to create a habit around them before I started working again.

One area in this category was learning German. I had started learning prior to the layoff personally through Babel and also attended some part-time classes in the evening after work. I specifically choose Babel after the classes ended as a way to keep me in the loop of learning and practicing but I wasn't successful as I thought.

I wanted to go on Babel every single day and make sure I did something no matter how the day goes. That was the goal, but cumulatively, I couldn't sustain this partly due to how my day-to-day work is structured and also maybe I didn't plan well enough.

It did cross my mind that I could bias for less frequency and more time to compensate but I quickly dismissed the idea. I might have thought that this kind of flexibility means giving up on my own goal and I basically roughed it through that two months on Babel. It felt like I was struggling to catch up with my own goal and yet I didn't achieved it as I wanted.

During the layoff, I had more time, and of course more agency of what to do with it and decided to spin the idea back again. This time, I would start the day learning German and was consistent with it months after the layoff. I got in tune so much so that I completed the A1 courses and my understanding drastically improved. It felt good and the feeling that I have finally built an habit around this, given the last failure was also great.

I started another job in October and then the frequency started to decline again. Initially, it started that, the time I do my German learning in the morning is overwritten by some activities at work. Then unto irregular activities across the day. Just like before, I tried to cling to the idea to “just make it work” and of course the struggle started.

I finally revisited the idea of adjusting the frequency to once a week and got on to work and things started to get better with less of the struggles. Given how my activities are, it's more feasible to achieve weekly consistent learning compared to daily ones. I could see that progress was been made even though I appeared once a week and that was all I wanted after all.

I think often times when building habits, it's easy to rule out being flexible even in the face of irregularities or unpredictabilities of our day-to-day or even change in priorities.

This is not an encouragement to stop doing what matters to me the moment it gets difficult to sustain, but to change perspectives on what can be changed around my routines to help reduce the struggles while building a habit. I know this would probably apply differently to individuals, but in a world where we sometimes don't have control over events, being flexible to fine tune what regular means in the moment can help in guaranteeing a habit over the long term.