Building Mini-Habits with Trello and Siri Shortcuts
If you haven't heard of Mini-Habits, the basic idea is that you can establish habits slowly over time by setting very low expectations. If you want to meditate for 20 minutes, set a daily goal of meditating for 1 minute. If you want to run a marathon, start with a daily goal of walking 5 minutes and so on.
The key to success with mini habits is to do them consistently, but I always had a problem: I had so many of them that I wanted to achieve, but I didn't have a good way of avoiding favouring one habit over another. I also didn't want to just do all my mini-habits at once, because one of the goals of mini-habits is to gradually expand the length of time you're doing them.
I toyed with a few different ideas but in general the administrative overhead of tracking the mini habits was so great that it dissuaded me from taking action.
Eventually what I ended up doing is creating a "meta-mini-habit": a single mini-habit that randomly triggered all of the other mini-habits that I wanted to build into my life.
Of course, I used Trello and Siri Shortcuts :) Here's how:
First, create a Trello board with a list called "Mini Habits" and create one card for each mini-habit you want to establish. If you want to over-represent a particular habit, just duplicate that card to create more of them:
Then create the following shortcut:
Save it as something like "Mini Habit". Now when you say "Hey Siri, Mini Habit" it will simply select one card at random from your list of mini-habits and read it out to you.
My "meta-mini-habit" is that every time I stand up from my desk during the day I say "Hey Siri, Mini Habit" and it picks something for me to do.
I set the same thing up for my kids on their iPad and they all of a sudden got a surge of motivation to do little bits of lots of little self-improvement tasks (piano practise for a few minutes, fold 5 pieces of clothes, put away 1 toy and so on). I wonder how long it'll take for the novelty to wear off for them ;)
For me, though, this has been a way to build persistent habits that have graduated from mini habits into my life such as running every day (currently up to 12km/day), doing pull ups and tricep dips (2 sets of 6 reps each currently).
What sorts of mini habits would you like to incorporate into your daily life?
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Iain Dooley
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