atomic habits

Today’s One Thing: micro-improvements

/ Gracie Sunderland / 1 Comment

After my blog post last week on improving by 1%, I spent the week thinking about fear and procrastination. Sometimes, even 1% can feel massive. I am personally guilty of thinking ‘oh I won’t bother with the 1% thing, it’s too small – instead next week I will do the 10% thing’. So – I won’t bother cycling today, I’ll do a proper workout tomorrow. I won’t bother counting my calories today, I’ll fast tomorrow.

In the words of the pantomime audience – oh no you won’t!

Especially if you are feeling overwhelmed, trying to make big changes feels, well, overwhelming. I can also be suspicious of the 1% idea, since it suggests that more will always need to be done. And like my small, vegetable-refusing daughter, I know damn well that it isn’t going to end with one green bean on the plate.

So today I wanted to list out some single actions which you can take. Just do one thing – then celebrate. Since FIRE for me is about living more intentionally, these aren’t just about finance but also about wellbeing.

I think of these as minimum viable actions: there is enough of a reason to do them, but not enough hassle or energy / resources required to refuse. Don’t worry about the next one, or the scale up version. Maybe it will lead to a rich new habit, or maybe you will have just done one thing. Either way, I call that a win.

Do one thing! Photo by Lucas van Oort on Unsplash

Health

  1. Breathe. Yeah yeah, if you didn’t do this one thing you wouldn’t be doing much of anything else. But actually breathing is the core to so many wellbeing approaches, including mindfulness and meditation. I always intend to do more of both but never quite find the time. Instead, just take one minute to focus on your breath. Spend that minute counting your breaths, with your hands on your abdomen, and noticing the breath coming in and out. There is a specific one-minute breathing approach in some yogic traditions and lots more to read on this one. But for me, it’s a reboot which I do after I’ve had a stressful meeting, or between work and dealing with the kids, or before driving.
  2. Have a glass of water. Drinking water has so many benefits. It can improve your mood, energy levels and clarity of thinking. Lots of times people think they are hungry they are actually thirsty, so it can also help you eat mindfully as and when you need to. Being dehydrated can make you feel sluggish, and lead to headaches, difficulty sleeping, and dry skin. Sometimes the messaging – drink 8 glasses a day! Or more! – can feel overwhelming. So just go and drink one, maybe even right now. Job done!
  3. Say no to something you don’t really want anyway. I am a sucker for grand statements. ‘I will never eat any more sweet treats in the office’. ‘I will never eat bread again’. Hm. I think we know how this one ends. Plus I use these mythical aspirations as an excuse to not ‘just do one thing’ – in this case, saying no. Try it: on cookies in the office; bread brought to the table in a restaurant; your mother’s insistence on another helping; the third beer. It doesn’t have to be the start of a regime (though it might be…) but breaking the habit of just saying yes is part of more intentionally choosing your desired response to every single decision you make.
Do one thing! Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Finance

  1. Notice if you are thinking toxic money thoughts. This might sound a bit ‘woo’ but it is genuinely hard to make changes if you are always undermining yourself. Talking all over yourself in a Sarcastic Bystander Voice whilst trying to plan or make good decisions will always mean that you lose. So for your one thing, just call it out once. If you hear the internal monologue crank up with the ‘I’ll always be broke’ – ‘it’s so much easier for them’ – ‘as a single parent, I have not hope getting out of this mess’ – turn that record off. It is exhausting battling yourself on this and you are much less likely to succeed. I love Jen Sincero’s book You Are a Badass at Making Money which goes into a lot more thinking on how to get past negative money stories, but today – all you have to do is try and turn down the volume on one thought.
  2. Check your bank accounts. All of them. Make sure you are not locked out of online banking, that you can access them all. You might set it up on your phone. Either way, checking your account means you are sure what you have (or not); what has been coming and going in terms of spend. You might notice a transaction you don’t recognise, or a direct debit you could cancel. Or you might have some extra in there that you can find a purpose for. Either way, knowing what is going on inside your bank account means that you are more able to control it. If the idea makes you feel anxious, know you are not alone – but consider whether the anxiety is really about what’s in your account, or what it means in terms of steps you might have to take.
  3. Look into your work place pension. Ok, this might feel like a sneaky way of introducing One Massive Thing, but at this point all you are doing is research. If you are employed, even part time, a work place pension is likely to be the easiest and potentially one of the best things you can do in terms of planning for retirement. In the UK as in most countries, there is also tax relief which makes it a great way to build up money – and if your employer has a match, you also get free money as a benefit of working for them. Since it comes out of your wages before they hit your bank account, it’s a simple thing to ‘set and forget’.
Do one thing! Even listening to music is a good change.

Wellbeing

  1. Replace one news bulletin with music. I am a sucker for radio – I love to know what’s going on in the world, and to keep up to date. But the constant bombardment of news these days, including how accessible and immediate it is, can feel overwhelming. There is, perhaps unsurprisingly, evidence that suggests humans have negativity-bias meaning that we internalise bad news and mentally engage with it in a way that we don’t with good news. So, why not try replacing one session of news with something else? For me, I also don’t make enough time for music which I love and really lifts my mood, so in a double-whammy I replace one bulletin with great tunes. It doesn’t stop there being bad things in the world, but neither does listening to the news on repeat.
  2. Replace one TV show with something more creative. You might not watch TV but if you do, try skipping one show to do something else. The 30 minutes or one hour could be just what you need. And it doesn’t need to be something huge – do a jigsaw puzzle (I’m not 80 years old, it’s a pandemic truth); read a book that you have had for ages but not started; make a delicious lunch for tomorrow; draw or paint something; find your knitting wool, crochet hooks or what not and put them somewhere you can reach them when the TV goes back on. TV isn’t bad, but there are other things you could do too, just once.
  3. Get some nature. Nature Deficit Disorder is really a thing, though a lot of the research focuses on children. Basically any interaction with the outdoors, is a good thing. From stopping work to spend a few minutes looking out of the window at whatever natural phenomenon you can see, to going for a full-on hike, every minute counts. Humans are programmed to engage with and respond to the environment in which we live, but modern life can make us feel disconnected. For your one thing it depends on where and how you live – but see if you can take a 20 minute walk; grow some herbs on your windowsill; or even just open the window. I changed my screensaver to a forest picture, and whilst it seems like a cop-out, just looking at it makes me feel better.

So – small things, and one-offs. Don’t forget to celebrate when you do something, however small it is – you got this.

1% Better: micro-improvements

/ Gracie Sunderland / 2 Comments

A lot of FIRE approaches are about life changing decisions and sometimes they can just seem HUGE. Getting rid of debt, saving millions of pounds, and establishing major shifts in lifestyle can all seem like mountains which are just too big to climb.

This week I’ve been thinking about the small changes and how they really do add up to change, even though it can feel like daily habits which don’t add up to much. When I feel like that, I go back to the great book Atomic Habits which firstly sets out easier ways to get to something to be a habit, and not something you have to talk yourself into doing. It is also a great reminder that all the little steps do add up to the big achievements – and they really are the journey.

This week I also listened to a great Choose FI podcast episode this week with James Clear who wrote Atomic Habits, focusing on the idea that improving by 1% per day makes you 37 times better over the course of a year. So I was inspired to share some of the things I have (or intend to…) worked on to try and make my life 1% better, over and over again.

Here are ten tips of small things you can do, this week, to get that 1%.

Better days without the headaches. Photo by Hoang Le on Unsplash

Make one health change

I have struggled with my weight since I was a teenager, and it’s something I find both time-consuming and crushingly boring to think about all the time. The 1% approach has been really helpful for me in finding little things I can do rather than ‘going on a diet’. To be totally honest, COVID has shafted my diet in a lot of ways (the kitchen is just so CLOSE BY that I can’t ignore it) so I am back on calorie counting, but it’s temporary to get back in the zone. This week I only lost 1lb which feels like small recompense for all the meal-organising and biscuit-refusing that went on, but of course the only way to lose weight is a little at a time.

But the following are permanent changes which make a difference:

  1. Make four touch points to drink large glasses of water: first thing in the morning as I am turning the coffee on: once in the afternoon when I sit back down to work after lunch (or after lunchtime meetings): once when I get home: and just after I put the kids to bed. These are all ‘moments’ which happen every day, and it means that I manage to drink about 3 liters of water, which is the recommended amount for women. I end up drinking more either during the day or in herbal tea or whatever, but it means I get hydrated without thinking about it.
  2. Don’t eat after dinner. Ok, since it’s just me and the kids we eat quite early and we’re normally done by 18.30 – I know for lots of people with longer commutes, or different shifts this might not work. But I eat dinner and then nothing else. When I take the kids up to bed, I brush my teeth as well which also puts me off eating more. This single change has made a huge difference, as all the late night picking, chocolate in front of the telly or just miscellaneous grazing is then off the menu (see what I did there?!). It also means that I accidentally do 12:12 intermittent fasting since I don’t eat between 1900 and 0700, a full twelve hours. By itself it’s not enough to lose weight – the same link suggests that 12 hour fasting is the minimum we should do to give our bodies a break from digestion and boost metabolism – but it short-circuited the late evening mindless eating for me.
  3. Have vegetables with every meal. Maybe you good people do this anyway, but if I was left to my own devices I would live off coffee and Cheetos. I got in the habit of having salad with lunch and dinner, making a pot of coleslaw (no dressing but prepared salad basically) twice a week and just having a serving with each meal. Apparently it’s even better to have a salad before you eat, since you are less likely to leave it on your plate, and the fibre will make you feel fuller and consequently eat less. Sometimes for us it’s a few spoons of green beans out of the freezer. Either way, it has massively increased my vegetable intake.
  4. Reduce your caffeine intake. Having already mentioned coffee twice I should say that last year I switched to only drinking half-caffeine coffee. I used to be able to neck as much coffee as I wanted at any time of day but as I get older (ahem) I have been noticing that it affects me more. Rather than change my habit, I changed my coffee. Easy!
  5. There are some things I find harder. Exercise for me (again, maybe you wonderful healthy people don’t struggle with this) but I have never found anything that has turned into an easy habit. I wrote before about cycling home from work which I do at least twice a week, but I talk to myself about whether I am going to cycle or take the train every. single. time. Still I make myself do it and appreciate the benefits, but it’s through intention rather than a new habit. However, every week that I cycle I get 1% better and fitter, making me more and more likely to keep going. So find something you can stomach, and just do it once a week.
Climbing a mountain one step at a time (in Kenya of course). Photo by Sergey Pesterev on Unsplash

Make one financial change

I feel like a lot of this blog is about the small tweaks which help on the journey toward financial independence, but in terms of real 1% actions, things which have helped me are:

  1. Automate something. There are a million tricks around automation in your finances, with the basic premise being that you are likely to get in your own way at some point. I set up a monthly direct debit to both my ISA (savings) and SIPP (pension) but then also automated the investing against a pre-determined portfolio. So now I don’t need to do anything and it still happens. The approach of ‘set it and forget it’ really does work since it basically takes me and all my worries and twitches out of the investing. And it meant that I continued to invest even when the market was tanking and I panicked: that continued investing meant that things evened out, in the end.
  2. De-automate something. The flip side of taking yourself out of the equation is places where you really do need to get involved. One example is de-automating your insurances so that you get a chance to find the best deals every year. You need to keep an eye on this – though your insurance company is likely to send you a reminder anyway – so that you don’t find yourself without insurance. But you can save around £300 a year by negotiating your insurance, and even more than that if you go through a cashback site. Which take me neatly to:
  3. Set up accounts on cashback sites. Spending money is still spending money, but the biggest returns I’ve had from cash back sites have been on things like insurance or home broadband which I was going to pay for anyway. These sites don’t exist in Denmark, and I always feel like I am missing something. In the UK I use TopCashBack but there is a great article on the different sites and things to think about when using this approach.
  4. Find a way to save that don’t involve, without thinking about it. There are a bunch of ways to do this, a lot of them attached to your debit card. I have a Monzo card and I set up the ‘coin jar’ feature, which rounds up the payment to the nearest £1 and puts it into a savings account. I don’t notice it going out, and it nets about £25 a month in savings – currently, since I never think about it, I have £600 in savings this way, which I plan to use for spends when we go on holiday. It feels like free money, which is the best kind. But there are lots of other apps and approaches available for painless saving. I heard a lot about Plum, though I’ve never used it – but it links to your banks, works out how much you can save, and uses AI to set it up and encourage you to do more.
  5. Sort out your paperwork. Ok, so not everyone has physical paperwork any more, but we all have documents and for most people, there is something they could do to make it better. This is a great area for 1% improvements because it’s so easy to start wherever you are. If you are early on in your journey you might need to just open the bills piling up on the table. Or you might usefully ring up to reduce your credit card limit; go through one month of bank statements and look for any direct debits you might not have remembered; or update your budget spreadsheets. My big job, which I am doing in little 1% chunks, is putting together a Legacy Folder for if the worst happens to me – but more on what that entails in a future post. For now, just pick a small job you’ve been putting off, and get to it.
Finding wholeness in the pieces. Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

So there’s ten things, either on health or finances. There are loads more ideas on just making life that little bit better – if you want more inspiration, try the new Podcast Just One Thing, which has 15 minute episodes about small changes which can make a big difference.

And let me know what changes you will make this month – I’d love to hear from you!