Four 3-week Habits to Start Me on My Way to Better Life

This time I'll keep it simple, less self-talk, more practical steps.

1. Why four habits?

• Because I've precommitted to start working on my game design goals in 3 months, and I hope these 4 habits will give me momentum.

2. What four habits?

• First, general orderliness. 

• I already have some established routines in that respect (dishwashing, sweeping the floor occasionally).

• I like orderliness and I think it will provide momentum for the rest of the habits. 

•  It gives me a structured way to spend time at home and in between mental tasks, so I don't otherwise waste that time. 

•  I keeps me active and in a state of higher energy.

•  It will keep the situation at home emotionally more pleasant. 

•  Second, focused, quality reading. 

• I need to be much less scattershot about my reading. "Voracious reader" has come to mean something good, but not in my case. I'm more panicky, prone to waste time with casual reading. 

•  I need to implement the quality learning principles I've read about, and that's possible only in a well-developed, rigorously followed reading programme.
• This will start me on my way to contributing more to ShadowDance and finishing my degree.

• Third, implementing GTD.

• The preceding two habits will have given me the confidence to start implementing a more rigorous sort of self-monitoring. 

•  I will have started on GTD partway with the preceding two habits themselves, since they involve some ad hoc list-making, so I will transition into full-blown GTD more easily.
• As I will be getting closer to the 3-month deadline, I will need to get more serious about self-organizing. (This would be a good time to start thinking up more habits to form in the future.)

•  Fourth, cultivating a fiction writing habit.

• One of the most important things I could do for myself, and one that will give me an incredible sense of accomplishment and satisfaction.
• It will be indispensable after the 3-month deadline expires, both for my game design projects and for my general fiction writing.
• It will have been primed by the writing I need to do in order to cultivate and maintain the previous three habits.  

3. How to go about it?

• Establish clear goals, subgoals and deadlines.
• Imagine it done, positively.
• Take stock of how things are now, negatively.
• Imagine it never done, negatively.
• Start out small.
• Precommit: cut out any other options for the duration of the work.
• Establish if/then trigger conditions and routines.
• Track your progress.
• Make yourself accountable.
• Compare yourself to the average.
• Think of and implement rewards that are both stimulating and potentially contribute to further positive habits or strengthen current ones.