Incorporating a new habit into your routine can be difficult, especially if it's not an everyday activity, so personal development blogger Steve Pavlina offers several tips for maintaining that new habit. For example:

Suppose you want to exercise 5 days a week, and you really want to keep those off days. Instead of doing your regular exercise, you could schedule an an alternative activity for the same time. Instead of doing your usual workout, you could use your off days to go for a walk, read, meditate, write in your journal, etc.

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Developing new habits can jumpstart our creativity and even help us grow new brain cells, reports the New York Times. Research by authors Dawna Markova and M. J. Ryan suggests that stretching—but not stressing—yourself can develop your mind and creative skills.

"Getting into the stretch zone is good for you," Ms. Ryan says [...] "It helps keep your brain healthy. It turns out that unless we continue to learn new things, which challenges our brains to create new pathways, they literally begin to atrophy, which may result in dementia, Alzheimer's and other brain diseases. Continuously stretching ourselves will even help us lose weight, according to one study. Researchers who asked folks to do something different every day—listen to a new radio station, for instance—found that they lost and kept off weight. No one is sure why, but scientists speculate that getting out of routines makes us more aware in general."

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Marketing VP Steve Rubel says that daily practice and research in any field over the span of several years can turn anyone into an expert, as long as you put in the effort.

Anyone with just even a little bit of natural talent in a given domain can master it in about 10 years by methodically practicing the essence of their craft two hours daily (including weekends) and measuring their progress from one day to the next.

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The 80/20 rule of economics can be applied to a lot of life's dilemmas, but blogger Jodie Clements used the rule as one of her "10 Commandments" to help her drop 10 pounds and feel better overall. The 20 percent, in her case, applied to eating the foods she really wanted to enjoy:

Eat healthy 80 percent of the time - the other 20 percent - eat whatever the hell you like (but not after 9pm). The whole point of eating well for the long term (your whole life) is knowing that you can also have whatever you want sometimes and that yes, a little bit of what you fancy really does do you good. So - how about eating healthy Monday to Friday and saving the fun for the weekend? Works for me.

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Think the best way to jump-start a project involves a large dark roast with extra shots? Think again, according to Wired magazine. As part of a roundup of mental boosters, one writer suggests that research has shown smaller, regular doses of caffeine—think tea breaks or half-cups of coffee—do more to boost alertness and reduce jitters than a large blast of the stuff:

Test subjects reported that periodic small shots made them feel clearheaded and calm, both of which enhance mental performance. Even better, add a lump of sugar or have a carbohydrate-rich snack at the same time for an extra cognitive kick. It seems that glucose and caffeine together do more to enhance cognition than either does alone.

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Even the most motivated morning people among us can wake up seemingly unable to rise from bed and tackle the day. Over at the UbuntuCat blog, the author notes that moving his alarm clock to another room, along with having an impatient cat, have (almost) fixed his multi-snooze tendencies. We've offered up some alarm clock hacks and morning motivation tips before, but let's hear it from those who have escape the pull of "Just Five More Minutes," and those still fighting to become a functional morning person: How do you make sure you get up in the morning? How do you prevent your groggy self from making decisions your working persona will regret? Share your tips, philosophies and wake-up war stories in the comments.

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If you want to increase your happiness, check out this list of 9 ways you can improve your life - by treating yourself like a cat! It was the best thing I read yesterday by a long shot - it was nice to be reminded that while we might lavish our feline friends with the best care, we sometimes neglect ourselves.

The list includes those perennial feline favourite activities like stretching, napping and bathing, as well as a call to pay attention to what you eat:

"I stopped free-feeding my cats and they lost weight, yet I kept stuffing my own face and stayed overweight! Eat protein, eat vitamin and mineral rich foods and the right sort of fats. Check out the complexity of your pedigree cat food and compare to your own diet. Eat grass. I provide cat grass for my cats and they chew on it every day before each meal. Fibre and fresh leafy greens are essential for us every day."

The Zen Habits weblog faces down the long, hard road we all take to break a habit, whether bad or just unproductive, and pulls out 13 reasons why they remain unbroken. Key among the counter-programming tools we have available are motivation, blogger Leo Babauta says, but one tip in particular helps keep your habit-breaking in league with projects and goals:

You have to write down your goal. Write a start date. Write an end date (30 days is a good time frame). Write down exactly what you're going to do. Write down how you're going to be accountable, what your rewards are, what the obstacles are, what your triggers are. More on these below. Main thing: put it on paper and stick to the plan (don't file the plan in your inbox, you piler you!

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The only thing worse than constantly reaching for your phone to Twitter at social occasions is a constant need for a nicotine fix, and health organisation Tobacco Free Florida must sense their linked nature. Every so often, post an update with the number ("X") of cigarettes you've recently smoked to their Qwitter applet like so:@iquit X. You can also send diary-style entries to chronicle your progress, and see a graph of your cigarette intake at the Qwitter site. For those whose mobile extroversion is a lot stronger than their willpower, it's an elegant craving substitution.

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Does watching TV news or checking business news sites give you cold sweats as you ponder how your investments are doing? Are you logging into your financial site every day but still feel your money slipping away? Just ignore your money, J.D. at Get Rich Slowly says—stocks pay off in the long term, not day-to-day, and worrying about it is the easiest way to make a money-losing mistake:

In Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes, the authors note that it's dangerous to watch your investments every day. When you pay close attention, you tend to become emotionally invested in even small movements. You lose sight of the long-term and make decisions based on short-term events. Peek in every month or so, but don't constantly check your investments.

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