In-depth Guide to Kaizen Way of Habit Building: A Really Easy Way to Read 47 Books in a year
Plenty of choices we make each and every single day may appear to be the products of our well-considered decision-making skills, but they are not.
They are simply habits.
Even though each individual habit means relatively little on its own, with time it makes a big effect.
The food we eat, the beverages we drink, what we say to our spouse every single night, how often we exercise, do we save or spend — accumulates and makes an enormous impact on our productivity, well-being, health, happiness, and financial security.
In order to take care of lives, we need to craft the habits which are going to be helpful to our lives.
And for that, we will use the Kaizen method of continuous improvement. The method is about starting small and when the habit is formed, ramping up on the intensity.
I will show you the Kaizen method on the example of my book reading habit throughout this article.
By the end of the article, you will fully understand how to build a system, measure and track it properly, and gain a new habit that you need easily.
But first, let’s go over some steps which combined with Kaizen will make habit building a piece of cake.
#1. How habits form
“We first make our habits, and then our habits make us” — John Dryden
Each habit consists of 3 parts: Cue, Routine, and Reward.
Cue is a set of elements that trigger the brains reaction to go into a certain routine. This routine is automatic and stops the brain from using any mental effort.
It just lets go of control to BASAL GANGLIA, a part of the brain that remembers and stores sequential actions as automated routines.
The routine can be emotional, physical or mental.
At the end, there is a reward. This helps your brain remember if this sequence of actions is worth remembering for the future.
Basal ganglia is lightened up with repetition, not intensity and Kaizen plays a huge role here, but more on that later. So the thing that we need to do for our habit to become automatic is to determine the cue, create a routine and pick a reward.
For my book reading habit, it looks like this:
- Cue — a special place (small couch in my apartment) where I sit down if I want to read. Whenever I sit there, my brain already goes into reading mode and my books are right next to me. I even created a “bait” to make sure that I sit down on the couch every single day. The “bait” was that I put all the fun stuff right next to the couch (like remote for TV) so if I want to use that, I had to sit on the couch to reach for it. Sitting triggers my books reading habit and I start doing it. This way, I managed to insert this cue into my daily activities.
- Routine — open the book and start reading 20 pages
- Reward — my system which I open at the end of the reading and mark the cell with color green. This gives me a shot of dopamine that I did my task for that day.
It will depend from habit to habit how simple it will be to create an easy cue, routine, and reward. But we will work on creating the easiest (and most helpful) system for you.
#2. Willpower vs System
“Good habits, once established are just as hard to break as are bad habits” — Robert Puller
A habit is an outfit a nun wears.
Joke aside, a habit is an action that you take on a repeated basis with little or no required effort or thought.
The greatest benefit of a habit is that it converts a task which requires a lot of willpower and focus, into something which becomes easy, automatic and most of the times, subconscious.
And when a habit becomes unconscious, then we can ramp up the intensity of that habit as much as we like to. Because when the habit forms, we are already doing the task every single day and we won’t even notice doing a little extra of it (driving 10 km every day and then driving 11 km every day). I tend to read quite more than my required 20 pages per day and I do this so often that it now became 24 pages per day minimum. That is 5 more books per year. But more on this later.
When we become satisfied with one habit, then we can take another task which requires a lot of willpower and focus and create a habit out of it.
This way, we made the hard task easy. Which gives us freedom (and willpower) to tackle yet another hard task and make it easy. We can repeat this infinite amount of times, as long as you take it one habit at a time.
My reading habit is unconscious right now so I’m forming a new habit “writing X (currently 500) amount of words every single day”.
You must think that is super hard right now, but it’s not. It just demands a system IF you want to create a habit consciously. Because you currently have thousands of little habits that you are probably not even aware of.
When taking a shower, do you cross your legs, or only look through the window? What order do you shampoo your body and do you even think about it?
What do you read when you are in the toilet?
Where do you leave your clothes when going to bed?
What do you do first when you enter the car, start the radio for music or buckle your seatbelt?
You see, me, you, and everyone else already has thousands of small habits that we unconsciously do every single day.
Now, we will just add a couple of more using Kaizen which will help you in your life even more. These habits aren’t any more difficult to implement than the current ones but they are harder to build.
That is why we will use a system. Adding a new habit takes willpower and focus, but once it’s unconscious, you can reap the benefits for your entire life with little or no effort.
We do not get better without a system
We can’t just rely on our motivation to push us through the habit building process and expect to miraculously wake up one day and have an unconscious habit.
It takes a system to help us build the habit that we desperately need.
When I was starting my daily reading habit, I knew I had to start with a system. Even though I was highly motivated at that time, I knew that the motivation would pass at some point and that I had to rely on something else.
And that something else is a system. I used my excessive willpower during the first couple of days to create a system which will require no willpower, later on, to follow through. And it changed the way that I look at my habit.
My system
My habit was to read 20 pages of a book every single day. I was burning from motivation at the time, wanting to become smarter, knowledgeable, and at the end a better writer.
All of the smartest and greatest people on Earth read a lot. And if you want to be a great writer, you need to read. A lot.
So my simple system involved an Excel file where I made a table with 3 (+1) columns:
Total — the number of book pages I have to read for that day. This was a constant 20 in the first 100 days.
Day — I started from 1 to 365. I use this column to track which day of the habit it is. And every time I hit a milestone (100 days for me), I do a small celebration as a reward and crunch some data about those 100 days (books read, pages read, average pages read per day, days when I did the habit, days when I didn’t).
Done — This is where I enter the number of pages I’ve read on that day. And I did some easy cell formatting in Excel to have better visual cues. I’ve inserted a formula where the cell goes green if I insert a 20 or more in it. This gives me a visual cue that I did my routine for the day.
If the number is less than 20, then the cell goes red, to show me where I missed my habit.
After you get a couple of green fields, you want to keep going at it. Taking advantage of our brain in the best possible way.
Date — I sometimes insert the current date just to have a calendar perspective.
Here is how an empty system like that looks like:
And here is how my system looks like after the first 100 days:
A total of 13 books and 2476 pages read in the first 100 days.
Let us look into the details of tracking and measuring and why those activities are crucial for building a habit.
#3. Tracking and Measuring
“What gets tracked gets managed.
What gets measured gets improved” — Peter Drucker
When you track a habit, you start doing (managing) it. And if you measure it, you start improving it. And I want to show you the benefits of tracking and measuring which include 3 aspects:
- Simple reward structure — tracking isn’t tracking, it’s a reward for doing the habit (The Dopamine hit when you color the field green signals your brain the sense of accomplishment and achievement for the habit on that day).
- Kaizen improvement (tracking means doing, measuring means improving)
- Accountability to the habit (the numbers make it real)
Tracking is rewarding
A tracker needs to be as simple as possible but still efficient.
The rule of simplicity demands that the process of tracking isn’t considered as a task by itself, but as a reward for doing the task.
In plain old English, this means that tracking doesn’t (and shouldn’t) be something complicated that takes 30 minutes to fill up. Working in organizations, I have seen trackers which take more time to fill than it took you to do the task.
This is where the tracking system becomes useless.
The 20-second rule will let you keep things simple.
This rule says that you should keep your tracking system implementable in 20 seconds or less. It shouldn’t take you any more than that to fill your system.
For my books, I keep the Excel file (tracker) on my desktop and every single day when I open my laptop, it is there.
Staring me in the eyes.
Wanting to be opened and filled.
There is no way I can miss it.
If you want to learn how to play the guitar, keep it in your living room right next to your couch. Easy to see, hard to forget. Like my cue for book reading, where all the fun stuff are only accessible if I do my daily habit.
I love exploiting the laziness of our brain for our benefit.
But let’s see what happens when we open the tracker.
2 ways of measuring your habit
I’ve had many years of experience and read many books about creating the right metrics, performance indicators (KPI) and measures of success (MoS) and all I can tell you is that it all boils down to 2 different ways of measuring your activity.
- Time spent (like working for an hourly rate)
- Task done (like working for a fixed rate)
So let’s get right into the measuring.
Time spent
I will take the example of book reading. And with this way of measuring, this means reading a book every single day for X AMOUNT OF TIME. That can be 10 min, 30 min, 1 hour, 2 hours or any amount of time you think is comfortable for you. Just remember that Kaizen way is about repetition, not intensity (in the beginning). So start with the time that you consider ridiculously small and that in no way could you ever fail.
The Pros
You can dedicate the exact amount of time it will take you to do your daily habit (and with this, insert it in your busy schedule). I recommend this tactic for those who rely heavily on their plans and have a very busy schedule.
This is for people who plan their days like Elon Musk, where every minute is precious.
The Cons
30 minutes of reading Kant and Fifty Shades of Grey is not the same and doesn’t have the same effect. Some books require you to concentrate heavily on what is being read and if there are any distractions around you (kids, TV), you will have low efficiency.
Sometimes you will read 5 and sometimes 40 pages.
You can spend 20 out of those 30 minutes on the same page, sometimes because of distractions, sometimes because the material is heavy or you just get lost in your thoughts.
One more thing here is that your books per year will vary widely depending on your reading speed. The average reader reads 200 words per minute (wpm).
I have not tried this tactic on book reading myself, but my friends did and it worked for them. I have used the next one and it was the best one for me.
Task done
I will use the book reading example again. With this way of reading, it means reading a book every single day for X AMOUNT OF PAGES. This can be 10, 20, 50 or a 100 or any amount of pages you feel is comfortable for you. Just remember that Kaizen way is about repetition, not intensity (in the beginning). So start with the number of pages that you consider ridiculously small and that in no way could you ever fail. We will, later on, ramp up the intensity.
For me, the number was 20 in the beginning and I have increased it to 22 by Day 200 of the habit.
The Pros
You know exactly when you will finish a book (feeling of certainty is strong here) and you are not time bound. You can take as much time as you want to finish your 20 pages. The difference in literature doesn’t mean anything here.
As 20 pages are always 20 pages, no matter if it’s Kant or Fifty Shades of Grey.
The Cons
This reading is highly affected by your wpm. It is harder to plan for the time needed to read those 20 pages because of literature or because of print (wider margins with more words on them).
So far I have used this tactic and in a year I’ve read 47 books.
Yes, theoretically that could have been way more books in a year, but there is a big difference in starting with frequency and not intensity. We will explore that and the nuances Kaizen brings in the next chapter.
#4. Frequency and Intensity
“80% of success is showing up” — Woody Allen
When you first learned how to drive a car, you didn’t drive the first day for 15 hours. You drove for 2 hours and then called it a day. Then, on the next day, you did the same thing.
Over and over again. Until you mastered driving.
You showed up every single day and did what was necessary. And guess what?
You created the habit of driving. Remember, in the part of “How habits form”, we talked about how habits form with repetition, not intensity.
When I started my habit of book reading, I thought it was way too little pages per day (“only” 20).
Today, I see, that I was so wrong. And that in a year I read 47 books and 9273 pages of books. This is more than I’ve read in the past 10 years.
And it was a matter of showing up. Every. Single. Day.
But there are more variables concerning frequency and intensity.
Don’t wake the amygdala up!
When starting a new habit, we need to be aware of not waking up the amygdala. Amygdala is our emotional center and is in charge of our emotional reactions.
When we put up a big goal in front of us (intensity), that goal triggers an emotional reaction.
“Will I be able to do this even once?”
“How will I do this every single day?”
“It will take so much time.”
“It is bothersome. It takes so much effort.”
And this sends a very simple message to our amygdala:
“STOP the action of thinking. It causes FEAR and ANXIETY. Shut down the neocortex and run from that perceived danger. “
So amygdala does exactly that. It hijacks our body, shuts down our thinking (because, why think about your reactions when you are afraid. It is something dangerous so run. Or fight).
This, in turn, incapacitates our thinking brain and we don’t even start doing our habit.
And this too much depends from individual to individual and that is why Kaizen was built. (The above is an oversimplification of what amygdala does — there are effects and processes behind it).
Kaizen
Kaizen= continuous improvement. You start with the smallest possible task that you feel comfortable with. It needs to be something that is so easy to do that it doesn’t even look like a task.
This way we don’t feel fear or anxiety and our amygdala is not triggered. Our thinking brain (neocortex) stays active and can manage our actions.
In the case of reading, it can be so small as to just open a book daily or read 1 page of a book daily.
This is so ridiculously easy that there is absolutely no way you can fail at this.
So you do this.
You do it every single day for a month.
You repeat the action. And a habit gets formed. Now, you don’t limit yourself to just 1 page per day. You start reading 3, 5, or 10 pages per day. Because the habit of reading is already there and increasing the intensity is so easy at this point that you barely notice it.
That’s how I started reading +25 pages of a book per day and increased my minimum from 20 to 22 pages per day.
Just up your intensity by small numbers. It needs to be something you are comfortable with. If it becomes fearful, tone it back a little bit.
If 10 pages are too much, tone it back to something comfortable like 7 or 5 or even 3.
Don’t rush the process.
This way you built the habit without triggering the amygdala and now, just now, you can scale on the intensity.
Imagine you driving a car. And every single day you drive for 5 kilometers. After a month you scale it to 10 kilometers and it’s way easier to add 5 kilometers to 5 then it is to add 5 on top of 0.
After a couple of months, you feel comfortable taking a road trip with a friend to a “nearby” city which is 400 kilometers away.
Kaizen does this for us. It is about showing up every single day and later scaling to intensity. I have seen it on my own skin.
Don’t worry about “losing” the intensity in the first days. You will scale up so fast and so much that you will be astonished what you have achieved. I am still surprised how I managed to read 47 books in a year without a hassle.
All of this started to affect me and the habit become more than just a habit, it became a part of my personality. And that’s when I figured out that if you merge your habit with who you are, you make it even easier to build up and scale. More on that in the last chapter.
#5. I do vs. I am
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” — Aristotle
The difference between PERSONALITY (Who I am) and CHARACTER (What I do) is what separates a conscious and an unconscious habit.
You see, when you just do something, you are not feeling it deep within you. It is just something that you do. It can be time to time (going to movies), occasionally (cleaning my apartment), seasonally (harvesting crops) or geographically (taking a swim) related.
And the same thing happens with our habits. We want them to become unconscious so that our unconscious does them on autopilot. This frees up our willpower to tackle other habits and problems while this one runs in the “background”.
I have just said that the above-mentioned actions are just something that we do. This makes them a part of our CHARACTER.
But look at those same actions, which are currently CHARACTER oriented, become something which we are, or PERSONALITY oriented.
I watch movies = I am a cinema lover
I clean my apartment = I am a clean person (I am a cleaner)
I harvest crops = I am a harvester (farmer)
I take a swim = I am a swimmer
The PERSONALITY part becomes ingrained in us. This makes us identify with the action that we are doing.
So we are not just doing it, we are embodying it in our PERSONALITY.
This is why it’s such a problem to clean up people who have a drug-related problem.
They believe their PERSONALITY is one of a drug addict, but it’s just a mere action that they are doing. Nonetheless, they believe “I am a drug-addict” instead of “I am doing drugs”. This makes it way harder to heal them.
It is deeply ingrained in their PERSONALITY.
Ok, so how can we do the same thing with our habits?
When you pick your habit (or in my case, book reading) you frame that action and habit like it’s a part of your PERSONALITY.
So you stop being the guy who reads 5,10, or 20 pages of a book every single day. You become a bookworm or a reader.
“I read books”
“I am a reader” or “I am a bookworm”
You ingrain the habit that you deeply want into your PERSONALITY instead of just your CHARACTER.
When you ingrain it in your PERSONALITY, then it will become automatic.
Conclusion
And this was the Kaizen way of building habits.
We have talked about the way habits form. You understand the nuances of our brain that create them. Therefore, you are knowledgeable about the depletion of our willpower and the strength of a system. This helps you focus all of your willpower on the system in the beginning and trusting it to work. But for a system to work, it needs to have the right tracking and measuring.
You need to do it every single day (part of a routine), you need to track what you do (tracking as a reward), and you need to measure it the right way (number of minutes or number of pages). Frequency first, intensity later is the golden rule of Kaizen.
At the end, when you are on the right way, you ingrain your habit in your PERSONALITY (I am) instead of in your CHARACTER (I simply do).
This was the Kaizen way of building habits. You can take this framework and apply it to any habit that you wish to ingrain in your everyday life. Just remember, take it one habit at a time.
Let me know about the habits that you will start in the comment section.
I will be more than happy to help out with a system.
Cheers,
-Bruno
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