The Challenge of Adding a Habit

This is going to sound very naval-gazing and artificially deep for a moment, but bear with me.

I have been trying to add in a week in outfits post, as you’ve seen here in January and the beginning of February, but remembering to take the Outfit of the Day, the OOTD, the ooh-tah-dah, is proving to be incredibly challenging for me.

And it’s not a big task, go to my bedroom, look in my floor length mirror, hold my phone up and snap a couple photos. Then sit down on a Sunday night and edit them for light and colour and upload them into wordpress. All in, it takes about 30 minutes of my week to do the pictures for it (actually that has me thinking that I should start timing how long I work on my blog). So why can’t I manage to do it everyday?

I know why for the past two weeks, it has been bonkers during the week and then I’m exhausted on the weekend, but like I just said, it takes seconds to do each day. So why is adding a tiny habit in each day, shouldn’t be that hard.

I read this New York Times article about habits and how the things that prevent us from succeeding at a new habit are called friction and that when we remove the friction points that can help us to succeed at the habit. So, even though taking an OOTD is not an important habit, I think that could actually make it worth trying this on. It won’t hurt anyone or me, if I don’t take my OOTDs, so there won’t be any side-effects to doing or not doing the habit.

So what are my friction points with taking my OOTD?

I hate taking pictures of myself. Well, that is one of the things that I was hoping taking these OOTDs would help with, so that doesn’t help me much.

I forget to bring my phone with me to the bathroom when I’m working in person. So I think I would either need to get back into the habit of keeping my phone in my back pocket or build it into my morning or lunch routine.

I don’t really have a morning routine, so it would probably have to be my lunch routine. In my normal work-from-home lunches I eat, do my dishes, clean the litterbox, and wash my dishes. So in theory, I could habit stack it in there.

But I think it just goes to show, that even a habit as simple and low-stakes as taking an OOTD can be a challenge to execute, so if you have been trying to make a bigger change and are struggling with it, don’t take it too hard. It is so hard to change or add in a habit.

Have you been working on a habit lately, do you have any tips?

Laura