All my clients are motivated when they start their book projects. They’re full of enthusiasm. They know they will be challenged to do good work, and they’re ready for the challenge. Most of them are not ready for the challenge of consistently producing good work for a year or more. Developing good keystone habits can help them meet that challenge.
Keystone Habits and Why They’re Powerful
Charles Duhigg coined the term “keystone habit” in his 2012 book, The Power of Habit, to refer to habits that disproportionately impact other areas of life. The concept was around before he wrote about it, but Duhigg popularized a name for it and a framework for applying it.
Keystone habits are powerful because they do two things. They ripple through your life, affecting many other things that you do in a positive way. They also generate a lot of small wins, the small, achievable successes that can add up to something big over time. The seminal psychologist Karl Weick said, “Once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion that favor another small win.”
Put another way, keystone habits are the levers that help you generate outstanding performance.
Sleep: The Mother of All Keystone Habits
Vince Lombardi said that fatigue makes cowards of us all. It’s worse than that. Fatigue also makes us lazy, sloppy, and unproductive. The way you beat fatigue is to get enough good sleep. If you want to do good quality writing, the odds increase dramatically if you get enough good sleep.
So, how much is enough? Sleep experts say seven to eight hours a night is good, but almost two-thirds of us get 7 hours or less, and 40 percent get less than six hours. The odds are pretty good that you’ll need to increase your sleep.
Good quality sleep means long stretches when you go through complete sleep cycles of an hour and a half to two hours or more. You can improve your sleep quality by doing a few simple things. Make your room completely dark and moderately cool. Develop a pre-sleep ritual you follow every night, winding down for 30 minutes or more. Eliminate caffeine 8 hours or so before bedtime and empty your bladder before you go to bed.
You can do many other things, too, but most are pretty expensive. You probably don’t need advanced sleep tracking devices, light therapy equipment, precise temperature control of your bed, or anything else that costs a bunch of money. You just need to pay attention to common sense advice.
Touch Your Project Every Day
Many writing experts encourage you to write every day. That may be fine if what you want to be is a full-time writer, but if you’re like most of my clients, you’ve got a demanding day job and a bunch of family and social obligations. You probably can’t make that advice work. But you can touch your project every day.
Touching your project every day helps you maintain momentum and keeps your project top of mind. Touching, in this case, means spending a little time with your project. 10 to 20 minutes will do it if you do it every day.
Ensure you have all your writing materials where you can get to them easily. I encourage my clients to have a project box where they can put the things that aren’t computer files. Use your daily time to make any notes about ideas you’ve had. Do a little research. Do some writing if that works for you.
Between touches, let your default mode network work on the project. You’ll get ideas, so be sure to capture them. Some ways to capture ideas include a notebook, index cards, a small digital recorder, or phone notes.
Seek, ponder, and use feedback
None of us is savvy enough or self-aware enough to find all the issues with our writing and all the ways it might be improved. You need other people for that.
Critique your own work using a writing improvement program like Grammarly. Seek feedback from other writers, experts in your field, and intelligent folks who can explain why they like or don’t like your writing.
Ponder the feedback you get. Some of it will be worthless. Some of it will be gold. Figure out what golden feedback is, then use it to improve your writing.
If you want to set yourself up for success on your book writing project, start with these three keystone habits. Get enough good quality sleep. Touch your project every day. Seek, ponder, and use feedback.
