• I use Loop Habit Tracker to form new habits.
  • There are 3 kinds of habits I track:
    • the most important ones (marked in red)
    • behavior at work (marked in green)
    • health related (marked in blue)
  • A few examples:
    • Red: Don’t rant on Twitter (rarely successful in this), Listen more, No vertical relationships(read Courage to be Diskliked to understand this more)
    • Green: Be kind, Don’t send a Slack DM in anger
    • Blue: Sit in the sun, Meditate, Take Vitamin C
  • I am tracking some 20 habits at this point.
  • Every night before I sleep I mark each habit with Yes or No.
  • For health habits, I don’t want to think and just act like an NPC. Gobble up all my Vitamins, meditate using Waking Up, and stretch before I start my day. Other habits are where I want to be more intentional.
  • Whenever I fail, I don’t wait for the night to update the app, I just mark them as failed for the day. One example being, sending a text in anger. One message sent in anger means I fail the habit for the day.
  • When I fail to maintain any of the major habits I am tracking, I tell my wife about it. Then I start transferring 500/1000 on UPI to her everytime I fail. Got pissed at someone for not taking ownership? Raised my voice? Have to transfer 500 INR after the zoom call ends. Now you might ask the right question: How is transfering money to my wife a loss to me? The money stays in the family. I disagree. The very act of sending the 500/1000 bucks to my wife makes me think about what I did.
  • My phone homepage is also a screenshot of my Phonepe page so that I remember.
  • When I do this exercise at night, I go throughout the day in my head. This helps me live my life more intentionally and not default into NPC mode like most people.
  • I am writing this post so that I can send this to people I mentor. I have shared a few of these tips in silos, but this captures most of what I do.
  • When I joined my current company, I promised myself that I will take ownership of my career. I marked around 5 habits that was holding me back in my career and promised to get better on all of them. Big thanks to my manager for identifying them and giving proactive feedback during our 1:1s. He also helped me with my gap analysis.
  • One of the habits I track is called “Act like L+1”. L being my current level, L+1 the next. When I was a Product Lead (L4), I was tracking whether I was acting like a Manager (L5) or not. When I was a Manager I tracked whether I acted like a GPM or not. Now I track my day with the lens of a Director at Gojek. In 3 years I have gone from new joinee -> Product Lead -> Manager, Product Management -> GPM, with a promotion almost every year. (This point is not to brag, but to prove that this approach works.)
  • Now you can get there by luck too. Join the right company at the right time, let the machinery do the work, and you can just be pulled up over time. The other options are being super political or working 80 hour weeks. I like shipping vs being political and I am somewhat lazy. Relying on just luck is sub optimal and I wanted something that can be replicated by people I mentor.
  • I get an alert from my Tick Tack app everyday that reminds me to update my Loop Habits app before I sleep.
  • Public accountability helps. This is the reason I used to share my personal OKRs publicly till last year.

Related post on how I learn any new skill: So you want to learn Poker?