The topic of habits has been very lucrative in the personal and professional development space.  The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg and even more so Atomic Habits by James Clear have been two of the top selling business/personal development books over the last decade.

We all struggle with developing good habits, and in many ways often even more with overcoming bad habits.  Both of the books listed above provide lots of great research based ideas on how to do just that.  I am not going to provide an overview of the two approaches (which are actually quite similar) here. However, I want to focus on one key area that I have found that has worked for me.  It may not work for you, but I want to share it in case it does help you on your way to living a life of more good habits, and fewer bad ones.

I am a very competitive person by nature.  If you give me a scoreboard I will do everything in my power to “score points” so I can win the game.

One thing that I have always struggled with was maintaining a good exercise routine, especially when I am traveling.  I always used the excuse that I didn’t have room in my carry-on to pack sneakers and workout clothes, and there was no freaking way I was going to check a bag!!!!  As a result, I would get in a decent routine of exercise (cardio and weights) for a while and then I would hit a rough patch of travel and I would “fall off the wagon”.

However, using the fitness app on my phone, I started to keep track of my exercise and counted my steps.  I started to gamify my exercise routine.  How many steps did I get today.  How many minutes of exercise did I do.  How many days is my current streak of closing all three rings (Calories Burned, Exercise Completed and Hours Standing).

At first I was just using the app on my phone.  I had resisted getting an Apple Watch for years, despite the urging of everyone else in my family.  I liked my old school Tag watch and didn’t see the need to have a digital watch that I had to charge every night.

However, as I realized that with an Apple Watch I could take the gamification to the next level I finally broke down and got one.  Now I track different type of exercise, monitor my heart rate during different types of exercise.  I can even sync my watch with some of the equipment at the gym so all the data is automatically shared with my watch and is stored in the fitness app.

Somehow I was able to find space in my carry-on for the work out clothes and running shoes, where it didn’t exist a few months earlier.  Since I started to really gather and use the data, I have closed all three of my rings every day except for a couple of days when I was driving from Florida to Toronto or vice versa.  Hard to get 10,000 steps in when you are in a car for 13 to 15 hours in a day.

I am almost embarrassed to admit that on occasion I have even paced around my hotel room for 20 minutes late at night just to get my step total over 10,000.  You can get a lot of steps if you are willing to pace circles around a hotel room 200 times!!!  Without the scoreboard I would have just laid down on the bed and watched Netflix or read a book until I feel asleep.

If you are competitive like me, could you find a way to gamify your way to better habits and a positive outcome?  Give it a try and let me know what worked for you.