Advance your career through habits

Do you find yourself unable to give time for your personal learnings? And do you find yourself blaming this on lack of time available due to office and work commitments?

Don't worry, we can work on these issues by following a few simple hacks.

The problem, I feel, is we try to find a few hours in just one day of the week to focus on personal growth, and it becomes difficult to get that much time together to learn new things.

Why not create a habit instead? A habit of working on personal growth daily. What I do is, I spend 15 minutes in a day reading up on a technology blog, 15 minutes listening to a technology podcast, and 30 minutes working on some pet project of mine.

I know it might sound difficult to take an hour out of the day, but if we divide it into smaller tasks, it becomes more achievable.

More importantly, we should try to attach these tasks to some habit / routine of ours that we perform daily. When we attach it to a routine that we already have, it becomes easier to do the new tasks and develop a habit for them as well. For example, I read a technology blog after having my morning coffee, and I listen to a technology podcast while having my afternoon coffee. So the coffee acts as a reminder for the new habit that I want to develop.

Of course, the habit is not going to be developed within a day. We have to be consistent with it for a few weeks and then slowly it becomes natural. I read this book “Atomic Habits”, where I learned these things, and they have worked quite well for me.

As I belong to the software industry, I have given examples related to personal growth as a software developer, but this can be applied to inculcate any other habit which will aid in our personal growth in other wakes of life as well.

I hope you can take away something from this short read and try it out in your routine. Do let me know if it works for you. Thanks for reading!