Filed under #100DaysToOffload, #habits and #learning

I've written about this before.

When learning something, it can be very useful to put deliberate effort into repeating the winning moves. Depending on your background this might be obvious or not.

Probably less known is that this works in other areas of life as well, not just in sports.

For example I train my fingers for the shortcuts of my IDE and when necessary I even rehearse my getting-out-of-bed-without-waking-up-everyone-routine.

It is also possible to train “moves” that prevent oneself from getting distracted: an incredibly useful one for me is training my fingers to stop myself from mindless browsing: I once noticed that I had a habit of opening news sites too often when stuck. Remembering to stop is hard once it has become a habit.

Instead I find it easier to learn a new pattern. Say you want to stop mindless browsing of example.com during work hours. What I do once I notice this pattern is to deliberately repeat the first steps of my bad habit, only I choose my own steps at the end, in the case of example.com I'd do this:

• ctrl – l to got to the address bar (others would maybe click the address bar instead).
• start typing exampl as I would do in my bad habit.
• instead of typing out the address I then hit escape to leave the address bar alone