This article is written by Ramanuj Mukherjee, CEO, LawSikho.

The simple answer is: the habit gap. 

When I created a habit of filling the satisfaction void in my life with eating delicious food, that led to my putting on a lot of weight and becoming obese. 

When I created a habit of eating moderately and fasting regularly, that led to rapid weight loss. 

When I created a habit of working out after waking up every day, that led to a transformation of my physique. 

When I created a habit of noting down new words and looking them up on the dictionary and then making a funny sentence with them and write them down, I developed a very good vocabulary. 

When I made it a habit to spend 10 hours a day studying for an exam for close to a year, I topped it. 

When I developed a habit of meditating every morning, my concentration and focus became very sharp, which helped me to study for 10 hours in a focused manner in the first place. 

When I made it a habit to call one potential client a day and speak on phone about their business for half an hour every day, learning more about the challenges they are facing in the course of their business, I was able to come up with products and services that I could earn crores of rupees from, and built several successful businesses.

When I developed a habit of doing a deep dive with my colleagues about what they are working on and what they should be focusing on a weekly basis, the performance of my entire team was elevated within a few months to an altogether different realm. 

What if you looked at every challenge and goal in your life in terms of a challenge of building a new useful habit, or discarding bad habits?

What are the accomplishments you are looking forward to? What are the greatest challenges in your life? What are the problems you really need to address?

If you wanted to create certain habits to deal with those challenges, goals or problems, what habits would you want to develop?

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It is not a one time process either. There are always new habits we need to learn, and old ones we need to unlearn, because what did very well in the past may stop serving us tomorrow.

I recently began to use Twitter a lot. I noticed a few days back that I am spending a lot of my productive time reading through twitter feed and even engaging with others who respond to my tweets. 

It is great at some level. I am building better engagement on twitter. 

However, when I looked at it from the macro perspective, it is a horrible investment of my time when I open twitter first thing in the morning and begin to outrage about some injustice or post some witty lines about what happened yesterday, when I could spend that time writing for my community or picking up the phone and talking to paying customers or working with my colleagues on building the next product or technology that can help my business to grow. 

Instead, I want to build a habit of spending my mornings writing, exercising and meditating. That means I need to stop going into the rabbit hole of my phone first thing in the morning.

I have been trying to figure this one out for the last few days. One thing I have finally found is an app. It is an advanced blocker. I paid for the premium version, and it is allowing me to set daily time limits for specific apps. 

One thing I did was to block off all distracting social media, communication and entertainment apps between 1130 at night and 1 pm in the morning. This includes WhatsApp.

Now I have little choice but to open my computer, even if it is to check WhatsApp. This increases the likelihood of me opening up my word processor and beginning to work on my several unfinished writing projects, the next book, or the next email. 

This also solves a great problem, of not sleeping on time. When I have no phone to distract me with, I have a really high chance of sleeping on time. 

So what are the habits you need to build, and what goals will they help you to achieve?

Would you respond and share? Writing down this list may be the best thing you can do before 2019 is over, and working on building those habits could lead to some crazy breakthroughs. 

Here is a one time opportunity. Want me to personally coach you on how to build habits that can help you to achieve your goals?

Respond to this mail with what habits you think you should develop or discard, and what goals that would help you to achieve. I will pick the 10 best answers and personally have a call with you to help you develop a plan on how to make sure you stick to those habits.

Looking forward to your ideas!

Tomorrow I will tell you about 10 powerful habits every lawyer should try to build, so keep an eye on this space.  

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Students of Lawsikho courses regularly produce writing assignments and work on practical exercises as a part of their coursework and develop themselves in real-life practical skill.