How To Build New Habits ‘Faster’ Using Checklists

“A slight change in your daily habits can guide your life to a different destination,” says James Clear, the author of the bestselling book, Atomic Habits. This is especially true for professional success, which is born out of creating better habits to achieve your desired level of success. However, building new habits can be a challenging task. It does not come easy to many. Some of us continue to face challenges in forming new habits. The good news is, you can do it effortlessly and faster on your own. Here is how.

Leverage a familiar tool

As a corporate manager, I have been using a range of checklists for the last 20 years to conduct my business and operations. A checklist is a linear list or a multi-column table to track things like attendance, production, inventory, work quality, errors, compliances, etc. Checklists are simple, accessible, and intuitive tools used by ground staff as well as management. In general, almost all projects, processes, and operations use some form of checklist-based matrix method. As a professional or a manager, using checklist-based tracking systems may have already become your daily habit without even realizing it. Why not use this deeply rooted habit to build, enforce, and track your new habits?

When you use a familiar tool to learn new habits, it becomes easier to adopt new behaviors. All you have to do is make a few modifications in the process and extend it to build new habits in your professional and personal lives.

Read More: 26 Simple Habits to Boost Your Motivation and Productivity

3 Steps to create habit-enforcing checklists

Working in a high-paced corporate environment, we all acquire this unavoidable work practice to boot up the laptop again in the evening after returning from work. In no time, we find ourselves responding to emails late at night. Many of us do this simply out of years of hardened habit. During the pandemic, I got a chance to think about how unproductive this practice was making me. So I decided to form a new habit of “shutting down the laptop at 5 p.m.” and not opening it until the next morning.

Often, making new habits means breaking the pattern of an old one. However, hardened habits are not easy to break. You need a tool that can help you break the patterns and build new ones. I began to think about how I have been using the checklists effortlessly at my workplace to track non-compliance and enforce processes. So I applied the same effortless tool using three steps to enforce my new habit-forming routine:

1.   Define actionable micro-steps

The mistake most people make is to print their big goal (or the habit they are trying to adopt) on a piece of paper and paste it on their desks as a reminder, hoping that it will fill them with motivation to achieve it. However, this does not work because habits are not formed in the mind. Building a new habit requires a series of micro-steps that are actionable, practical, and physical in nature. The best-performing micro-steps are those which require the use of hands or body.

I broke down my impossible-looking goal into a manageable and trackable list of micro-steps. Some of my micro-steps included:

1. Stop replying to any email one hour before the decided shutdown time.

• Shut down the laptop at 5 p.m. manually.

• Don’t open the laptop at home, no matter the anxiety of missing out on something.

Now, I could envision my big goal in terms of these micro-steps. Each of these micro-steps required me to act or not act physically. When you write micro-steps in the form of physical actions, your mind notices if you did it or not and provides you with the feedback you need. This feedback gives the mind a sense of achievement and makes new habits feasible and achievable. The scientific rationale behind why micro-steps are efficient is connected with the reward mechanism in the brain. As you accomplish a task as simple as checking off a micro-step in your list, your brain releases dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with feelings of accomplishment, satisfaction, and happiness.

Thus, the next time you’re faced with creating a new habit, make the process rewarding for yourself by adding micro-steps to your checklist.

1.      Capture compliance of micro-steps

Most people track the compliance of the habit itself, and more likely it does not work. Instead, you need to note the compliance of each micro-step. Once you start recording the pattern of which micro-step is the bottleneck, you can take targeted actions to fix it to attain the overall habit you aim for.

A checklist is a powerful way to capture compliance with those micro-steps. Once I identified the core items to be placed on the checklist, I posted these items next to a 30-day calendar. I listed the micro-steps in a table form, with the first column being the micro-steps and the remaining columns being the dates of the month. Each day, I would check the items that I followed or complied with. This is a simple strategy that acts as not just a reminder of the micro-steps you need to accomplish but also a tool to track your own progress. Additionally, this also serves as a visual representation of your consistency.

2.   Score your performance

The final step towards creating effective checklists is evaluating your progress by scoring your habits. I scored myself daily to see how many ‘yes’ I marked for all the identified micro-steps. That count became my daily score. At the end of the week, I averaged the scores to evaluate my progress. The following week, I compared the average with the previous weeks.

When I saw my scores were not improving from one week to the next, I paid more attention to areas where I missed out. Since the micro-steps were physical in nature, it was easier to identify contributing factors affecting my compliance. When I observed my scores trending upward week after week, I felt the sense of being on the right path. The mind received a sense of achievement. Eventually, I stayed 100% compliant every single day for several weeks.

Read more: 10 Motivational Habits of Successful People to Adopt for a Better You

The result

The new habit became a part of me. I have not opened my laptop any day after 5 p.m. in the last three years.

From a scientific standpoint, a habit is said to be formed when you consistently do something to the same thresholds, with the same frequency or comfort level. Once you achieve consistent scoring for several consecutive measurement intervals, you will be sure that you have formed a long-standing habit. Your scoring mechanism can be repeated hourly, weekly, or even monthly, depending on the type of habits you are forming.

Why it works effectively

The key here is to track your compliance at the micro-step level and then assess your recurring adherence to the habit. If you start scoring the habit directly without scoring the micro-steps, forming new habits becomes an impractical and often tricky goal.

The checklist method will likely work for you as a working professional because your mind unconsciously recognizes it as a familiar habit of years of programming to act upon low scores. Subconsciously, you may act faster on low scores on your checklist, which can lead to full adherence to forming a new habit far quicker than you think.

Additional readings

Clear, J. (2018). Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones (Illustrated). Avery.

Clear, J. (2020, February 3). Checklist Solutions: Do More of What Already Works. James Clear. https://jamesclear.com/checklist-solutions

Francisco Sáez @franciscojsaez. (n.d.). Micro-Tasks. The Pleasure of Checking Off. FacileThings. https://facilethings.com/blog/en/micro-tasks

Gawande, A. (2022). The Collected Works of Atul Gawande: The Checklist Manifesto + Better + Being Mortal + Complications. Penguin.

Guest Contributor

An award-winning learning scientist, Dr Raman K Attri specializes in the science of speed in personal and professional performance. He helps leaders and organizations to accelerate leadership to stay ahead. A prolific author of 50 multi-genre books, he writes on leadership, learning, performance, and workplace learning. Awarded as one of the Brainz Global 500 leaders, he is featured in over 200 media features. To learn more tips to speed up your learning, achievements, and leadership, visit https://get-there-faster.com or follow Dr Raman K Attri on Instagram or LinkedIn