TJ Walker (speaker) argues that people should become their own habit planners instead of outsourcing daily habit control to companies or others. He describes his personal system: a phone notes checklist (about 60 items) that he reviews each morning, daily measurements (weighing himself every day), short exercises (20 jumping jacks), a writing habit (targeting 500 words per day, started December 18, 2019, producing ~40,000 words so far), and a voice-memo ‘selfie speak’ routine for meditation and self-coaching. He emphasizes planning habits deliberately and selecting yourself as your habit planner rather than letting apps and corporations set cues.
Questions this video answers
About 60 notes/items.
Every single day.
20 jumping jacks each morning.
Write 500 words per day.
Since December 18, 2019.
Chapters
You already have a financial planner, right? You might have a personal trainer to help you with the gym routine, but why not a habit planner for every aspect of your life? So many of us believe in outside coaching, consulting for certain niches of our life. You have a good financial planner long enough, and then you might need an estate planner because you've got so much money and you want to avoid taxes and you want to give money to your children and grandchildren. We're big fans of planners, most of us, but there's one big hole that I see, and that hole is in the most important thing we do with our lives, our daily habits. You might plan your finances here, you might plan your workout here. You might even hire a dietitian to help plan your menu. But what puts it all together? I think it's time for you to hire a habit planner. Now. I don't mean me. I mean someone who's closer to the subject. Someone who knows you a lot better than I do. I'm speaking, of course, of you. You need to become your own habit planner. You need to hire yourself through the job. No one is going to benefit more from you doing a good job at this than you. But you need to take it seriously. So many people who take their job seriously, taking their car in for servicing regularly, they take that seriously. And yet, when it comes to the most mundane, yet time consuming aspects of their life, it's just a reaction. Somebody calls you, you're bored, and what do you do? You might start a solitaire game or some other game. The phone call ends and there you are playing on your phone for the next half an hour. You just wasted a tremendous amount of time. You need to plan your own habits. I'll tell you exactly how I do it. I have a list right here on my cell phone. And I go every single morning, I just go to the notes section and I have morning personal development and I have 60 notes. These are 60. It's all one, two, three, maybe five or six words a sentence at most of something I'm going to do. So, for example, at 9am today, I fill this one out. Wait. I weigh myself every single day. It's a very standard management axiom. You don't improve anything that doesn't get measured. What gets measured gets improved. Gets monitored. You can fix that. I weigh myself every single day. It's on here. You need to have something for. You might not care about your weight. You may have the perfect weight every day and you don't even think about it. And you weigh yourself once Every year when you're at your annual physical for a doctor. Okay. But you need to plan. I have a plan here. It may be too many plans for you. It might not be the right plan for you, but I have a plan. And I have hired myself to be my own habit planner. I have everything I want to do in the morning here in a checklist of a hundred different things. Things I want to do. For example, I have every single day starting off with 20 jumping jacks. Is that going to get me into the Olympics? No. But it gets me going, gets the blood pumping. It makes me feel like I'm in kindergarten. In a good way. And you know What? It takes 20 seconds. You can't tell me you don't have 20 seconds. So I have planned my day. So I'm going through this list. This is part of what I do each morning. This is typically around 7, 7:30 mark, after I've done meditation, after I've listened to my selfie speak program. And I have things, as I've mentioned to you, write 500 words per day. And I have today's date, the 27th. And I have a W for when I know I did it. And I did it the 26th, and I did it every single day. This is a habit I've not been doing that long. I've gone on and off for years writing. And there have been times in my life where I did write seven days a week. I've only gotten into this habit again since December 18th. That's the blink of an eye. But I've already written about 40,000 words. That's longer than a lot of best selling books already. And that's a habit I've only done since December 18th of 2019. So that's a highly specific example of how I decided to take control of my habits. And of course, the most important habit of all is I just go to my utilities every morning. I go to my voice memo and I hit the selfie speak programming. And the first 10 minutes is my meditation and then the next 20 minutes is just me. You are going to program yourself. I talk to myself like I am my own client. And I tell myself how I want to program myself. Someday maybe I'll play this whole thing for you. It is personal because it's stuff just for me. But I will share with you at least one of those versions one of these days. So I'm asking you take this seriously. We take so many other things seriously in our life. Financial planning, planning to get our car oiled and lubed. And checked up and the gas and water and air pressure for our tires. But why is it we spend more time listening to a mechanic plan for the life of our car than we do planning the habits that really define our lives? Our lives really are made up of the stuff we do consciously and unconsciously on a day to day basis. Now I'm not suggesting you go out and hire a life coach. I don't have any problem with you hiring a life coach. Some people consider me a life coach of sorts of do advise people. But I'm not trying to drum up business by speaking to you on this subject today. I first and foremost interested in you hiring yourself as your own habit planner. Your own habit coach, if you're more comfortable with that word. And the reason it's so important is if you don't think about it, you're basically getting all the power to other people, to other cues. You're giving your power to the person who put up the McDonald's logo and the billboard on the way to work that you see. You're giving your power to Mark Zuckerberg who's going to send you that cue. Oh, your best friend from high school just had this post. You're going to want to check it out. Maybe. But maybe there's better things you could do at 11 in the morning when you're at your peak rest, your peak time for creativity, your peak time to really be productive in your career. And maybe 11am in the morning is not the best time for you to check up on the person used to party with in high school. You need to decide. Not big corporations, not other friends texting you for that matter. It's not about corporations, it's about you versus the whole rest of the world. I want you to plan your own habits and for you to to decide exactly what your habits are. So before you do anything else, I want you to make a decision. Who's going to be your habit planner? No decision means you have decided. You've decided to make your habit planner be the CEO of Amazon and Netflix and Google and Facebook and Instagram. Your life is on someone else's agenda, making them rich and fulfilled, not you. Select a habit planner. Select yourself for the job.
