Building the Success Habit

What you do repeatedly becomes a habit. You want to build the habit of success by making sure your daily behaviors end with a success.

One "success" that I'm working on is always completing the tasks on my daily todo list. I've gone through many, many cycles on my todo lists. I used to start with a short list and then think of other things I could add, and then I would add some more. Of course, some of the items didn't get done, so I would carry them over until tomorrow, which made the next day's list longer.

Usually after a week of this, the todo list would get too daunting and I would stop looking at it. This meant that what I had been doing, eventually, was practicing failure.

What I'm doing now is limiting the list. I'm writing up my list the night before, and only adding items I'm certain that I can complete. In this way, every day, I check off the items on my list, and I build the habit of success.

I can do other things, of course, but by making a short list the focus, I get the important tasks completed, and I build the habit of getting things done. And as I go, I learn what I can pack into a single day and I can slowly add more items.

Don't let your todo list grow out of control. Prune it, and manage it, and above all build the habit of finishing it every day.