2020: The Year of the Microhabit

Or, The 1% Difference

January 5, 2020

     In the creative / personal growth area of my life, I have declared 2020 the Year of the Microhabit: ten minutes of yoga per day, ten minutes of meditation, ten minutes of journaling, and a microessay.  These are morning practices, which together make up Phase 1 of my overall morning routine.  (Yes, there are multiple phases.  We have a lot going on around here.)

    Brad and I are also working very hard to get the kids in bed earlier than had become our previous habit – a pattern that is taking some time to change.  But we seem to be having some real success.  I am trying, at the same time, to make sure that this bedtime routine includes reading at least two books with the little kids, who have not enjoyed as many bedtime stories (with the attendant cuddles) as Emma had by their ages.  This too is a microhabit, and a highly important one at that.  The data on the long-term benefits of reading to small children are overwhelming.

     The idea behind a ‟microhabit‟ is to harness the power of very small changes that extend and accumulate over time. If you set out to walk a mile and you diverge from your initial path at the outset by only 1%, you will find yourself over 3,730 feet away from your original path, or approximately seven-tenths of a mile, by the time you‛ve walked a full mile on your new path.  

     Of course, this is just a linear calculation, keeping constant the rate of divergence from the original path.  But most people are also familiar, at least vaguely, with the even more dramatic difference made by small but compounding changes.  If you start with a dollar and add a penny to it on Day 1 and 1% every day after that, including the previous day‛s 1% when calculating how much to add each subsequent day, your dollar will have become $37.78 by the end of a year.  And if you did the same thing with an initial starting amount of $100.00, adding a dollar the first day, $1.01 the second day, $1.02 the third day, and so on using the formula for compounding interest, you will have grown your initial $100.00 to $3,778.34 by the end of the year.  

     Now, to be fair, no one in the real world gets a daily 1% return on their investments – or at least not consistently (I suppose jumps like that may happen occasionally).  But that‛s not the point.  The point is to illustrate the power of a small change over time.  Both linear and compounding changes are profound.

     So think about this: if I have 1000 waking minutes per day (24 hours x 60 minutes = 1440 minutes, of which 440 are devoted to sleep), then ten minutes is 1% of my waking day.  Considering the difference 1% makes, what will I do with the next ten minutes?