Many of us have big ambitions. Whether that is to start your own business or perhaps grow it to a particular stage—if you’ve already established one. However, major goals like these can be challenging to work towards. They can feel overwhelming at times—especially at the beginning, making it easy to procrastinate. Fortunately, there are a few ingenious ways to overcome procrastination, like the one we’re going to be exploring today: micro habits.

Micro habits offer a practical and actionable way to make progress on tasks that feel too complex. They can help you achieve your long-term ambitions—no matter what your goals are.

In this guide, we’ll explore micro habits—with a twist. We’ll cover how they can help you if you’re a leader, an aspiring business owner, or simply a person with a demanding schedule.

What are Micro Habits?

Let’s start off with the basics of micro habits: what are they? As the name implies, they’re just small habits. However, what sets them apart from a typical habit you might think of is their purpose. Unlike traditional ones, you must establish micro habits consciously to help you achieve something big. As mentioned previously, perhaps you may want to start a business or grow an existing one to a specific target. 

At first, both examples may seem like unachievable dreams. However, by breaking them down into small, actionable steps, you can start making steady progress towards them. This is also the biggest benefit of micro habits—they can make big ambitions more achievable.

The Versatility of Micro Habits

Besides making unachievable things attainable, micro habits can also help you in smaller tasks. They don’t require a lot of effort to set up, however—you’ll need a bit of time and discipline to get started. Despite this, research on habit formation has shown that they can last for quite a while. This means that perhaps establishing a habit isn’t the best idea for shorter-term goals. But, small yet long-term ones—like planning your days ahead of time or managing time effectively—are perfect for the strategy.

Why Micro Habits are Effective

At this point, you might already be eager to take advantage of micro habits. But, before we take a look at how you may do so, let’s explore why micro habits are effective. After all, knowing the root cause of their effectiveness will help you use them to the fullest.

As you establish a routine and complete it successfully, you’ll get satisfaction from making measurable progress toward your ambitions. This will provide you with a bit of dopamine each time you use the strategy effectively. Consequently, this will give you lots of motivation, helping you get other related tasks done more effortlessly as well.

So, keep in mind the importance of an appropriate reward for your efforts to take full advantage of micro habits. We’ll explore this a bit further later in this article, but now—let’s cover how you can establish a micro habit for yourself.

Turning Big Ambitions into Micro Habits

To make progress toward a major goal with micro habits, you must first break down your ambition into a small, repeatable task. Setting this correctly is the first step in the process and it’s particularly important to make sure that it’s easy.

Set an Easy Goal

Make sure you set yourself a goal that’s easy enough for you to complete—especially when first starting to work on your micro habit. It should also be quick to complete. At first, you might want to allocate as little as ten minutes to your habit per day. You can then gradually increase this duration as you start working on your ambitions on autopilot.

Establish a Habit Loop

After identifying the habit you want to establish, it’s time to work on the habit loop. There are three key stages to the typical habit loop:

• The Cue
• The Routine
• The Reward

As habits always follow this order, we’ll explore the cue in detail first.

The Cue

As you might imagine, the cue is what starts a habit loop. For example, if you’ve got a habit of checking your phone when you’re bored, boredom is your cue. Besides a particular emotion, habitual cues can come in lots of other variations:

• Place
• Time
• An Action
• An Event

This gives you lots of flexibility on when, where, and how you want to start your habit loop. For growing a business, you may want to get in the habit of starting work—like replying to emails—early in the morning. Be careful with this particular example, though, as you can quickly face issues like work overload if you take it too far.

The Routine

The routine is pretty self-explanatory: it’s the thing you want to do more of. While we explored lots of examples already, there are countless other positive things you may work on with a micro habit.

The Reward

The last stage of the habit cycle is the reward. For example, if you have a habit of drinking coffee in the morning, the feeling of being energized may be what you’re pursuing. As you complete your initial habit cycles manually, you’ll start associating it with its reward. You’ll then begin craving this reward when the opportunity presents itself—resulting in a fully established habit.

Micro Habits in Businesses and Teams: How They Drive Growth

Besides using micro habits for yourself, you can also take advantage of them in your team. By helping your staff implement micro habits to improve their performance or expand their skill set—you’ll get higher-quality work from them.

However, doing this can be somewhat challenging. Depending on your team’s professional engagement, job satisfaction, and a variety of other metrics—it could take you a long while to see results. Fortunately, you can improve your efforts with a popular productivity tool: time tracking software.

Taking Advantage of Time Tracking to get the most from Micro Habits

Time trackers can be particularly helpful in tracking micro habit progress in a team. You’ll need a high-quality time tracker that lets your team members track time in various projects and tasks. Once you have this, you can make sure your employees spend enough time on forming your desired habits.

As an example, if you want your staff to expand their skills, you might want them to spend ten minutes each day on learning. You can create tasks for this in your time tracker and have your employees track time in them. You’ll then be able to check their progress periodically to make sure they’re working on their habits.

4 Examples of Micro Habits for Business Owners

Before closing off this article, let’s briefly explore a handful of examples of micro habits you may want to develop as a business owner. These will help you in a variety of aspects of running a business, helping you speed up the growth of your company.

Delegate Tasks

Delegating tasks correctly can be especially challenging for new entrepreneurs. There are quite a few variables you’ll have to decide on—like which tasks to delegate, who to delegate to, and more. In some cases, this process will result in decision fatigue, bringing down your productivity. You might even start avoiding delegation altogether to not think about these factors.

However, spending a bit of time thinking about the best practices of delegating your tasks can help you make these decisions faster. Set aside 10-15 minutes each day to review your tasks and choose your delegation approach. It’s also important to choose when you want to practice this micro habit correctly. While delegating isn’t a low-priority task, it’s also not one you might want to do early in the morning.

Write Down and Manage Your Tasks

Continuing on the topic of tasks, managing them correctly can help you immensely. Doing so will help you prioritize them in a way to get more important tasks done on time.

An excellent way of managing your tasks is in a productivity app. You can use dedicated task management suites or even the task management functionality of a high-quality time tracker like WebWork.

Establishing a micro habit for writing down your tasks will vary greatly on how you work. If you’re a writer, you might want to get in the habit of opening your management app each time you create a new document file. If you prefer managing all of your assignments for a day at once, you might instead wish to plan ahead with a strategy like time blocking or timeboxing.

Dedicate Time to Learning

Learning is something you should never stop doing—especially as a business owner. There are so many things to discover and master in the world of business, that dedicating time to learning is always a good idea.

Setting aside time to learn is a simple habit to form. You might want to open your favorite learning platform when you get to the office or shortly after getting home. Make sure to give yourself an adequate reward for completing your initial habit loops to ensure you establish it fully.

Dedicate Time to Reflect on Your Goals and Progress

Lastly, setting aside time to reflect on how you’re performing can be very beneficial. This is a habit that will benefit anyone—no matter if you have a business or not. Many of us have packed schedules that don’t leave much room for reflection time. However, just 5-10 minutes of it per day can help you stay focused on your long-term ambitions.

Use this time to remember why you’re doing what you’re doing. Reflect on what your goals are and why you set them in the first place. The human brain is excellent at forgetting such details—which play a key role in your motivation.

Final Thoughts

Micro habits are a powerful tool that can help you make steady progress toward big ambitions. They can take a while to establish fully, however, they can have a measurable effect in the long term. Using a tool like a time tracker, you’ll be able to track progress on your micro habits—as well as those of your staff. This way, you can be assured that you’ll get excellent long-term results both for yourself and your business.