“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

– James Clear, Atomic Habits

You may have seen (and read) so many articles about habits and what people do to become effective and productive yada yada.

The truth is – and what I discovered myself – one habit for someone may not necessarily be true for you and me.

A solid example? Morning rituals.

After reading Tim Ferriss’ “4-Hour Workweek” and “Tools of Titans,” I discovered that successful people have their own versions of a morning ritual. So I experimented on various shapes and sizes of mine.

Waking up at 5 AM (sometimes 4 – yeah I’m crazy). Meditation. Morning coffee/tea/hot chocolate. Meditation. Yoga. Meditation.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Then I listened to the audiobook of “Atomic Habits” by James Clear and discovered what’s causing it to fail.

I was treating what I thought were habits as goals, to-do lists.

But checklists are only part of effective habits. It’s about sticking to goals and putting systems in place to make sure those tiny boxes get ticked.

And this is why sometimes, setting goals and box-ticking alone don’t work at all.

When something throws a curveball on my day – an emergency meeting, an unexpected email, an emotional breakdown, or an “Instagram break” that turns into a 30-minute scroll – there goes my to-do list.

But putting systems around my day can throw the curveball back to that something and tell it to go f itself.

You may ask – what do you mean by systems, Tina? What are you talking about?

I’ll give you an example. Here are some of the ways I make sure I actually get to tick as many boxes through systems:

• Eating healthy. It’s not about counting calories for me. NEVER. Life’s too short to be measuring any part of my body, calories included. But to make sure I actually eat healthily, I favorite and save healthy recipes I find on Instagram and YouTube. I list the healthy ingredients using the Bring app. Then I schedule my weekly trip to my local grocery every Sunday morning. I organize my meal preps on Sunday evenings. I consider this to be an efficient form of self-love. Meal prep Sundays make sure I have something to eat (without wasting an hour or two cooking) in the next four days. That’s right! Because my stomach could only take small portions, my meal preps could last me until Thursday. Then Fridays are rewards for me – where I’d go for lunch outs with colleagues or order in a weekender pizza.
• Regular yoga. I used to struggle a lot with this. I’d usually book classes, only to end up canceling them (or worse, not showing up) because I’d feel too tired or lazy. I thought the right system to use was to book my classes at the start of the week so I’d be forced to go to them. But when Classpass started charging me fees for cancellations and no-show’s in a month ($100 cumulative by the way), I knew something’s gotta change. So the new system? I would bring my yoga mat and clothes to work, take them out of my bag, and bring them on display next to my table. Constantly seeing them throughout the day helps with psyching myself up. And when the clock ticks to 4 PM and the “too tired, too lazy” mindset starts to creep in, I would try to beat it by dressing up into my yoga clothes… even an hour before I leave for the class. It’s true what Newton says about the law of motion – the time rate of change of momentum is equal to the force acting on the particle. In layman’s terms, just do it!
• Personal finance. I used to mess this up so much. But when I listened to Ramit Sethi’s “I Will Teach You to Be Rich” audiobook, I got so obsessed with personal finance that I made a spreadsheet of my weekly and monthly expenses. Call me obsessive-compulsive but I would constantly update this spreadsheet with every little expense I make every day. And here’s one of the best parts – I’ve automated most of it. Credit card payments are directly linked to my payroll account ensuring I pay my bills full every month. My savings account is linked to my investment accounts. Through this microfinance app, Raiz, I could do recurring investments every day. I’ve also created a trading account and linked it with the same bank as my savings account. And my rent and bills are scheduled for automatic payment in the next 6 months. When I need to tighten the belt, I cut back on some discretionary items. Putting a bright, red line on the rows for “plants”, “clothes”, and “cosmetics” (meaning no purchase allowed for the month) really helps me stick to the plan.
• Reading a book. I used to think that buying as many books as I can will help me achieve this goal. Who am I kidding right? After selling 90% of my books before moving abroad, I resolved to only buy those that I know I’ll actually (want to) read. So how do I put a system around this goal? Putting my book next to my bed so that I will read it an hour before I doze off. Kills two birds with one stone – I get to spend less “blue-light time” while getting to read a few pages before bed. And while I’m not a big fan of digital books (looking at you Kindle), I would buy Audiobooks for long train rides and drive to work. To date, two of my favorites are pages I consumed through audiobooks – “Atomic Habits” and “I Will Teach You to Be Rich”.

See what’s common in those systems?

They’re repeatable, easy enough, and oddly satisfying.

• Eating healthy – I enjoy learning new recipes as long as I have enough time to do it. Sunday works best because I don’t have to rush for work nor feel tired after a long day of sitting in front of a computer. Every Sunday morning when my body wakes up, it almost automatically expects that one of the first agenda would be to go to the grocery.
• Regular yoga – easy to pack clothes and mat. Tuesday evenings and Saturday mornings are my usual sessions – and my body is building its muscle memory to it. Every after yoga sessions, I’m actually grateful and beyond happy I showed up. I try to remind myself of happy hormones especially when I feel reluctant to go.
• Personal finance – really easy and doable setting up automation and creating my spreadsheet. It took me 20 minutes to automate my bank and investments, 30 minutes to create the spreadsheet and fill in the items. After that, there’s nothing else to do but revisit them weekly, sometimes fortnightly. (You can download a template of my budget spreadsheet here.)
• Reading a book – constantly seeing my book prompts my brain to go pick it up when I’m in bed. It’s like my body almost equates book with snooze – all because I always fall asleep a few pages in!

Habits are 50% checklists and 50% systems. You just need to give your own body a chance to get used to the systems and build a “muscle memory” for them. Once it finds that it’s easy, satisfying, and easy to repeat, then you could go full auto-pilot. Before you know it, you’ll kicking goals and kicking ass!