Last week I talked about how important it is to establish a regular follow-up habit.

Easy for me to say you might be thinking.

Not so easy to do.

And that's true. Good habits are hard to establish, especially when they take effort and initially involve you going outside your comfort zone a little bit.

So I'm going to repeat a tip I gave you a few months ago. One that's worked brilliantly to help me establish good marketing habits and stick to them.

It's to use “habit stacking”.

There's a good article on habit stacking by James Clear here. It's an excerpt from his book Atomic Habits all about how to adopt better, healthier habits in life.  

In short, habit stacking is a technique where you make it easier to adopt a new habit by attaching it to an existing one you already do.

I used it to “force myself” to get into the habit of wearing a heated eye mask to help with a little eye problem I had a while back by attaching that new habit to my existing habit of having a freshly brewed coffee first thing in the morning.

And when it comes to follow-up, I stacked the habit of following up with my top contacts every Monday morning onto my existing habit of going out to a coffee shop to do my weekly planning.

(There appears to be a coffee theme emerging habitwise which I wasn't aware of…but let's let that slide for now).

I pretty much never miss my walk out to the coffee shop. So all I needed to do was add 20-30 minutes of follow-up after I'd done my weekly planning.

It was a good fit too as my planning activities sometimes highlighted things I could pick up on in my follow-up.

Now you don't necessarily have to do your follow-up on a Monday morning, or after doing some planning, or after a coffee (although it's a pretty good starting point).

But what you should do is anchor the new habit you want to do to an existing related one that you're good at sticking to.

And that makes it a lot, lot easier.