I’m planning every day, and I’m using a tickler. Why hasn’t my life changed?
Pedantic me wants to say, “It has! You didn’t plan every day and now you are. You didn’t use a tickler and now you do.”
But that’s ridiculous.
What you’re really asking is, “Why haven’t I seen an improvement in my mood, or my health, or my relationships, or my job, or whatever?”
Well, here’s the deal. Daily planning and a tickler could improve some of those things, but by themselves, the changes will be small.
The real power comes when you use your daily planning habit to stack other habits into your life.
Habit stacking, in its most basic form, happens when you do a new habit before or after an existing habit. Say you’re good at brushing your teeth every day. You can stack flossing onto that by making a rule that you cannot brush your teeth until you floss.
(As an aside, I did that for a while. It’s annoying at first. But after a few weeks it becomes just another habit.)
Daily planning, while using a tickler, can help you stack habits in a different way.
Certainly, you can do the same thing once you have the daily planning habit, and build other habits up either before or after it. I did that at one point in the past too, stacking a daily reading habit and a journaling habit around my daily planning.
But now that I believe in planning the night before, that’s harder. Nighttime works for light reading, but not deep reading or helpful journaling.
Instead of stacking habits around daily planning based on time, use your daily planning to write down the new habit that you’re working on. Put it into your day at the point where you want it to occur once it’s a solid habit. You can stack it with other habits, if you have those.
Additionally, you can use your tickler to remind you to include that habit every day. So even if you aren’t stacking the habit before or after daily planning, you’ll remember that it’s a priority when you do your daily planning.
And since daily planning is ordering your mind for the day, it will naturally include the new habit into that new order that you’re creating.
In this way, a habit of daily planning can be more than just a way to stack habits. Stacking habits is additive. Using your planning and tickler can actually speed up how fast you acquire new habits, so you can more easily move on to a third, fourth, fifth daily habit.
Of course, stacking and speeding up habits like flossing isn’t going to radically change your life, even if it does mean you’ll have beautiful, healthy teeth.
But stacking and speeding up transformative habits will.
Habits like daily exercise, healthy eating, meditation, journaling, or reading great books.
Which habit do you know you need to add?
Now go add it to your tickler so it is included in tomorrow’s daily plan.