Recommendation: If possible, ask at least one person to pursue a goal with you when you want to form a new habit. At least make someone else aware of your goal and ask that they hold you accountable in some way.
My experience with the meditation challenge
After learning about the clinically-supported benefits of meditation, I decided to try to adopt the habit myself. The measureable goal was simple–meditate 15 minutes/day for 7 days or 2.5 hours/week for 2 weeks in a row. I decided it would be a good test to see if this blog could produce a practical recommendation (which is the whole purpose). Thus, I recruited 10 peers to tackle the goal together.
In the beginning, all communication was done via email, and all messages to team members came from me; in other words, there wasn’t any communication among the team from what I could tell. I think this may have been one reason that nobody reported success in the first 7 days. I only made it 3 days in, but hadn’t kept the group updated on my own progress. The next week I began anew on Monday and I’m not sure how it turned out, but I do remember a few of us made significant progress because we encouraged each other and shared our experience.