The Common Sense Way Habits App

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"You make your own luck by continually trying"

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"If you are doing something, do it as best you can within the time you are willing to dedicate to it."

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"Rather than letting yourself be frustrated at what you can't do, work out and do that what it is you can do."

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"Now, right now, you can either make the effort to do something worthwhile, or can simply let the opportunity to do so pass by, again, and again, and again."

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"The more often you try to do the right things the more likely you’ll succeed in doing so."

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"If you want to achieve something worthwhile, expect there to be difficulties along the way.

If you accept there will be struggles and obstacles to overcome, then you are less likely to get downhearted and demotivated when the occur."

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"Look after your body, it is where you live."

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"Don't confuse motion with progress."

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"The secret to success is preparation, hard work, and learning from failure."

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“The world is as it is.

Other people are as they are.

You are as you are.

Deal with it.”

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"It's not what is happening in the world that causes us troubles, but the way we interpret and react to what is happening."

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"We are never illogical in our actions, we always act in accordance with some internal logic. So it is with others."

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What’s it all about then?
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This App is about nudging your behavioral and thinking habits in a direction that will be more beneficial to you and to the people around you and will help make your life more meaningful and fulfilling.

The underlying concept is that in the long term, improved behavioral and thinking habits come about through influencing and modifying your subconscious. One of the key ways you can do this is simply through repetitively reminding yourself of basic truths about the way the world is, of various good thinking habits, and of the biases and pitfalls that trip us up when we are not paying attention. By so doing we significantly increase the likelihood of our doing things which are more positive and productive, and avoid doing the things which are causing us long term harm.

Even when you ‘already know it’, you need to regularly remind yourself for it to become firmly embedded in your subconscious, and as a result become an instinctive basis for your thinking and behaviors.

By spending about 5 minutes a day running through some of the sub-topics within this App, by reminding yourself of the motivations and guidance, by learning by heart certain sayings and mantras, by regularly doing the quizzes, then you will change your subconscious and find that you start doing the right things more often.

Motivations
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[Motivations Link]

There are many good reasons for improving your behavioral and thinking habits in a direction that will be more beneficial to you and to the people around you and will help make your life more meaningful and fulfilling. You should regularly remind yourself of those that apply or which particularly resonate with yourself.

Changing Habits
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[Habits Link]

Habits largely dictate how we live our lives, for good and for bad, and learning to replace bad habits with good habits will make a huge difference to the quality of your life. Areas of potential habit change include those relating to dieting and exercising, watching too much TV, drugs and alcohol abuse, chronic procrastination or putting off important tasks, spending too much time on social media or certain types of website, ability to keep organised, and an overly negative mindset.

The FeedBack Diary (Click)

The Feedback Diary provides a simple and highly effective way of gradually becoming ever more effective in the application of the habit changes you need to make. It is unlikely you will magically and instantly succeed in adopting your new habits and you need, for a while, to pay attention to what trips you up and finding ways of doing better in the future.

Use (Click)

Use of a Feedback Diary is a personal and powerful way of gradually getting better and better at making decisions or changing your thinking and behavioral habits to be more productive and meaningful.

A Feedback Diary is in part a diary, a record of the daily occurrences of things you do or decide which in retrospect you think maybe you shouldn’t have done. As such it is likely to be retrospective: often it is only in hindsight that you realise that some of the things you have done or decided are open to being questioned. A useful source is when someone points out a mistake you have made, or possibly offers up an alternative viewpoint. Rather than get defensive in such instances you should take it as a potentially useful learning opportunity. Other examples might be instances of emotional outbursts which you immediately regret, or when you recognise yourself as having fallen foul of a cognitive bias or having been influenced in a way that was against your best interests.

You should also use the Feedback Diary to record instances you come across such as when reading or watching TV or on the internet or social media which give you pause to think differently than you might instinctively have done.

But in addition to noting down the above, the Feedback Diary is also used to reflect on the instances and seek to identify ways you might behave differently in the future or provide reminders of ways you should think differently to how you might instinctively do so. You use your notes and observations to identify changes to try in the future. And you record your successes and failures in trying these changes and continue to adjust them and to try other things and keep doing so until you find yourself behaving and instinctively thinking in a way that you believe is helping you live in a more meaningful and productive manner. Which you will succeed in doing so if you persist and you are honest with yourself.

Template (Click)

Your feedback diary doesn’t need to be anything more than a notebook or normal diary in which you record your daily information, albeit you will likely find a ‘day a page’ type diary too restrictive. Simply record the date in a lined notebook, and then lines of what you record for the day. Record instances of behavior or decisions which in retrospect you could have done differently. It doesn’t matter whether they relate to past dates, put it down against the today’s date, ie. the date you are noting it down, though you might make a note that it occurred some time ago.

Note that the use of the Feedback Diary is a tool, not some accurate representation of reality. You note down incidents, and then you note down your reflections on them, trying in particular to identify specific ways you might behave or think differently in the future. Use underlining or multi-colours to highlight practical guidance you tease out from use of the diary that you can remind yourself of from time to time and you can use as the basis for changes to seek to apply in the future.

Record in your diary your success and failures of doing and thinking about things differently.

Note that this seeking out ways to adjust your behavior and environment and ways of thinking is a continual process. What you try won’t always work and you should seek to understand why not and make further adjustments. It may be that there are deeper underlying reasons which themselves need to be tackled. Keep looking for what you can do, not matter how small, rather than looking for excuses for why you can’t.

Example Feedback Lessons (Click)

The following are a couple of examples of how you might use your Feedback Diary:

You find you’ve kept put something off, and now it has become a problem. Take this as a prompt to address your tendency towards procrastination. Learn and note down in your Feedback Diary the basic techniques for addressing procrastination – techniques such as breaking the tasks down into small less daunting steps; planning an explicit time when you’ll work on whatever it is; just getting started on doing something about it, for 5 minutes say and not trying to do it all at once; giving yourself permission not to try to have to do the task perfectly. And then explicitly keep a record of your successes and failures in adopting these techniques for some particular task you have found yourself starting to procrastinate on, and look to learn to better apply the techniques or adapt them to yourself.

Identify something you know other people believe to be absolutely true, but which you do not believe to be so. And identify something you believe to be absolutely true which you know others do not believe to be so. And explore them both alongside each other. Over a period of time make notes in your Feedback Diary about both sets of beliefs and what evidence may or may not exist and what it is that makes other people, and yourself, so sure about the beliefs. Ask the same questions of both others beliefs and your own and try to be as fair as you can in judging them both in the same way. In this way you are using your Feedback Diary to become more open minded and less judgemental and more appreciative of the fact that other people think differently.

Whenever some instance of someone having fallen for a scam, or having done something especially stupid, particularly catches your eye, rather than simply dismissing them as having been stupid - as though that were an explanation, which it isn’t - try to understand what it was that drew them into the scam or led to them having done it. Write down the instance in your Feedback Diary. For the most part those who fall for scams or do stupid things don’t do so simply because they are stupid. They may have done a stupid thing, but this is only blatantly obvious in hindsight, and in hindsight it is as obvious to them as it is to you. Seek to tease out, and write down, some particular thing they did which seemed ok to them at the time, but in hindsight clearly wasn’t, and use it to derive some particular guidance for yourself that might help prevent you doing the same thing some time in the future. Write it down in your Feedback Diary and highlight it in some way so that it stands out when you come at glance through Feedback Diary in the future, which you should from time to time.

Self Reminders
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[Mantras Link]

Short sayings that you can and should learn by heart and remind yourself of regularly.

Effective Use of the Existing Clear-Thinking Industry
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[Existing Industry Link]

Links to sites which are about helping people become better all round thinkers. If you know of others you believe are trying to cover much of the similar ground as that addressed here and at www.aboutcommonsense.com, then please let us know – see Footer.