Key Components to Transform a Challenge Into a Habit

You’ve just successfully completed a challenge. That’s awesome.

Now if you’ve enjoyed the process and happy with result, you ask yourself how to transform this challenge into a long-term sustainable habit. You want to leverage the actions from the challenge to support and elevate your life.

But how to do that?

It’s super important to understand the difference between a challenge and a habit. I see challenge as a sprint while a habit is a marathon. They are very different. Therefore they require very different approaches. A challenge is driven mostly by motivation and short-term self-encouragement. By their nature both motivation and self-encouragement are hard to maintain in a long run. Therefore marathon should rely on something else.

You need to deeply integrate new habit into your daily routine. Here are 5 key components I use to to do this.

1 – Extend the challenge

Injecting a habit into daily routine is actually a challenge.

It takes some time to adopt a new habit in life. Exact time varies from person to person. And it’s more than mythical 21 days. On average it’s between 2 and 3 month. I personally tend to give myself 3 month to adopt a new habit. During this time I put in a lot of self-discipline and motivation. Meaning I put in a lot of energy. I consider this challenge successful if at the end I follow the habit on autopilot (or semi-autopilot) and it doesn’t drain my energy to sustain the habit.

So approach integrating a habit as a challenge. You’ve done a shorter challenge already. Now it’s time for a longer one.

2 – Be flexible

Inevitably you’ll have days when going off the script makes more sense than following it.

Sticking to the schedule is good, but life is non-linear. Sometimes your other activities in a day can (and should) substitute your habit. Does it make sense to run in the morning when later in the day you’re going on a long bicycle trip? Would it be reasonable to read a chapter in non-fiction book after studying for eight hours straight? What is more important go to bed early or to meet with old friend who is in town only for one night?

Giving yourself some flexibility to skip a day in favour of some other activity is crucial to build a long-lasting habit.

3 – Use a rule of 2 times

This component is to balance the privious one.

Make an agreement with yourself that occasionally skipping a habit one time is fine. It’s OK to still consider such a situation as an ongoing successful streak. Doing so decreases pressure on hard days.

At the same time make a rule to never skip a habit 2 times in a row. Double down to do the habit next day. Once you skip it today, tomorrow it becomes your priority.

With the rule of 2 times you’ll have less stress and higher chances to keep going.

4 – Have a minimum version

There will be days when skipping the habit is too attractive.

These are the days of low energy or high stress. These are the days of high excitement about something else as well. Even weather or season may have a great influence. The tension to skip a day may come from many directions.

It’s super beneficial to have a minimum version and use it at such days.

I have a long-lasting habit to have an hour walk in the morning. Sometimes I wake up too late. Sometimes it’s raining or very windy. Sometimes I have early appointment. In all these cases I fall to minimum version and walk just half an hour.

A minimum version of a habit let’s you keep the streak which is very important mentally.

5 – Track progress and reflect

Without tracking progress and reflecting on it, you simply cannot know how things are going.

It doesn’t matter how you track a habit. It can be as simple as pen and paper. You can track progress with an app or digital document. The tool doesn’t matter. You just need to easily see where you are.

When you see the picture, you can review the situation and decide if any changes are needed.

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