We all want to improve our lives – whether it’s being more productive, advancing our careers, getting healthier, or just becoming happier. But with so many potential habits to choose from, it can be overwhelming to know where to start.
That’s why we’ve created the ultimate habit tier list. In this research-backed guide, we’ll rank 27 top habits into 3 tiers: B tier, A tier, and S tier. The higher the tier, the more potential impact that habit can have across all areas of your life.
Our rankings are based on the proven benefits of each habit as shown by science, as well as how difficult they tend to be to successfully build. Keep reading to see our full analysis and discover which habits you should focus on first to create the life you want.
The Productivity Skill Tree
Let’s start with habits specifically focused on making you more efficient and effective:
S Tier: Batching
Batching simply means grouping similar tasks together and completing them all at the same time. For example, checking your email sporadically throughout the day can hinder your productivity. Batching responses together helps you consolidate those minutes wasted switching between tasks.
Studies show that batching deep work versus shallow work is especially useful. Do your hardest cognitive tasks like writing, research, and studying in the morning when you have the most mental energy. Then batch easier admin work like email and errands later when focus tends to drop.
S Tier: Using a To-Do List
Keeping track of your responsibilities relieves mental strain. With so much on our minds, a to-do list helps ensure nothing falls through the cracks so you can fully focus on the task at hand.
Apps make this especially convenient – add an item as soon as you think of it. Review your list briefly at the start and end of each day without getting sucked into monitoring it all day long. This habit complements many others by keeping you accountable.
B Tier: Taking Breaks
Frequent short breaks prevent mental exhaustion during intense study sessions, allowing you to work for longer overall. Think of weightlifting – pushing yourself to failure heightens injury risk. Strategic breaks let you recover and lift more total weight over time.
Apply this concept to mental work. Timebox deep work, then let your mind rest. You’ll get more done in the long run.
S Tier: Prioritization
With endless demands on our time, prioritizing what matters most is crucial for life satisfaction. Regularly reviewing and organizing responsibilities from most important and urgent to least leads to greater perceived control.
Using a framework like the Eisenhower Matrix provides structure many find helpful. Weekly planning sessions can ingrain prioritization habits, keeping your focus aligned on your biggest goals.
A Tier: Routine Cleaning
Letting messes accumulate breeds chaos in life and mind. Consistently tidying living and work spaces clears physical and mental clutter. With your environment orderly, you’ll feel more motivated attacking meatier goals.
While not actively life changing, practicing basic cleanliness enables progress elsewhere. And regularly Cleaning infuses most days with small wins.
B Tier: Identifying Daily Highlights
When facing unlimited tasks, identifying one above all else relieves self-imposed pressures to achieve everything. Highlighting a single most important accomplishment for the day concentrates your efforts while lowering unhealthy expectations.
As this habit strengthens, raise standards slowly – maybe three daily highlights over time. But starting small when forming habits beats aiming too high and quitting.
The Work Skill Tree
Now let’s cover career advancement and accelerated learning habits:
S Tier: Reading
Reading exposes us to more accumulated wisdom and failures than individual experience allows. Books grant us lifetimes of perspective to shortcut personal lessons.
But with endless options, finding enjoyment is key to building reading habits. Explore new genres until you discover subjects that captivate you. Consume information you love first, then expand into educational texts once reading habits solidify.
B Tier: Listening to Podcasts and Watching Videos
Audio and video training offers convenient learning while multitasking – cleaning, exercising, commuting. But passively playing in the background hampers retention compared to focused reading.
Still, injecting niche topics into spare moments advances knowledge. Combine with reading for sturdiest comprehension.
A Tier: Frequently Searching Unknowns
Curiosity and hunger for wisdom through constant investigation accelerates growth. Whenever wondering about something unfamiliar, look it up instead of letting the question fade.
Answering budding curiosities gradually improves intellect. Downsides include distraction and internet rabbit holes without time boundaries. But chasing interests for under 30 seconds satiates most transient questionings.
A Tier: Studying and Reviewing Independently
Beyond mandatory schoolwork, voluntarily practicing and reviewing class material ingrains understanding while developing self-regulation habits. Treat learning like athletic training for maximal skills enhancement – the more you work out, the more it compounds.
Ultimately though, theory alone limits real-world applicability. Complement studying habits with hands-on experience for fullest comprehension.
B Tier: Learning a New Language
Speaking multiple languages boosts cognitive abilities while unlocking cultural richness. Enhanced employment opportunities arise needing translation skills.
But substantial commitment is required before daily habits form. Unless advancing language skills meaningfully impacts income or life enjoyment, most won’t find this habit changes everything.
A Tier: Writing
With increasing automation, creativity through writing may emerge among the most valuable future-proof aptitudes. Composing books, blogs, scripts, songs, and code ultimately springs from human originality – difficult for artificial intelligence to replicate.
Despite importance, consistently writing challenges most. Success requires concerted effort over months before observable lifestyle enhancements arise. But practicing a little daily instills this artistic habit effectively.
A Tier: Tracking Finances
Monitoring spending spotlights wasteful behaviors while illustrating forgotten costs that constrain lifestyles. Budgeting and expense analysis promotes consciousness around personal finance and debunks assumptions.
Ignorance of money management detrimentally impacts life choices and stress for decades. While tracking finances alone won’t dramatically alter destinies, visibility institutes accountability improving long-term quality of living.
The Fitness Skill Tree
Physical health habits influence energy, appearance, and self-confidence:
High S Tier: Exercise
Exercise provides a fountain of youth through nearly universal benefits – reducing disease risk, strengthening heart and mind, boosting energy, even lifting moods. But most uniquely, exercise can tangibly transform how we look while empowering personal beliefs about what we can accomplish.
Nothing easily rivals the total life changes from adopting consistent workout habits. Feeling and seeing bodily improvements breaks negative self-images, building confidence to attempt bigger challenges in all aspects of life.
B Tier: Stretching
Stretching enhances flexibility critical for avoiding injuries during sports and activities. Particularly as we age, increased pliability protects joints from weathering. For most though, stretching won’t substantially improve life quality unless presently impairing athletic performance.
S Tier: Improving Sleep Habits
Sleep touches everything – moods, focus, decision-making, energy, even weight maintenance. Refining sleep habits like optimizing bedroom conditions, reducing evening screen time, and waking at a consistent hour realigns circadian rhythms for restfulness.
But ingraining behaviors supporting ample, high-quality sleep requires tremendous diligence across lifestyle domains – exercise, diet, stress management, etc. Success MANIFESTs sweeping benefits but the struggle is real. If you haven’t already, check our sleep hygiene channel for guidance.
B Tier: Getting Outside Daily
Embracing daylight, especially early, bolsters vitamin D improving seasonal depression susceptibility, immunity, energy levels, and sleep-wake cycles.
Beyond health perks though, most won’t find this habit alters life drastically. Still, soaking in some external brightness daily needs little effort.
A Tier: Cooking Healthy Meals
Preparing our own food empowers control over ingredients benefiting diets and body composition. Commercial meals notorious for stuffing dishes with sugar and sodium often leave eaters unsatiated and craving immediate post-meal snacks.
Building cooking skills and equipment access enables healthier intake. Additional boons include saving money, learning about nutrition, and sharing culinary creations through deeper social connections.
A Tier: Grooming – Regular Hygiene and Appearance Upkeep
Consistently caring for bodily and beauty maintenance enhances attractiveness and self-worth while reducing infections. When looking sharp, people radiate elevated confidence and social appeal.
But widespread cultural expectations regarding grooming impose unfair financial and time burdens upon everyone. Do what makes you feel personally comfortable while filtering unrealistic beauty standards propagated pervasively online.
The Mentality Skill Tree
Finally, we’ll explore powerful mindset habits for defeating inner demons:
B Tier: Positive Visualization and Affirmations
Mentally rehearsing desired outcomes primes actualization – whether excelling playing piano or acing exams. Combining vivid visualization with spoken affirmations cements positive visions deeper than either alone.
But solely wishing for skills or accomplishments builds little. Attach reality-based planning for chasing dreams. Repeating “I easily earn $1 million a year” while never progressing career capabilities will never manifest materially.
S Tier: Journaling
Journaling excavates inner truths, untangling emotions through extensive self-reflection. Reviewing recorded experiences builds wisdom through heightened meta-cognition while emptying overloaded memory banks to focus on the present.
Forging consistent journaling habits establishes foundations for personal growth by confronting deep-seated fears, undesirable behaviors, and relief from minor anxieties accumulating daily.
Low S Tier: Meditation
Extensive research confirms meditation benefits all life facets – productivity, health, relationships, purpose. By calming mind chatter, we gain renewed perspective upon what matters most.
But monumental commitment to practice is essential before positive impacts emerge. Thus meditation helps many life aspects but requires strong grit first. For initial habit progress, couple meditation with other favorites.
A Tier: Socializing – Making Time for Meaningful Relationships
No one achieves greatness alone. Satisfaction and support throughout the emotional journey of life necessitates meaningful personal connections. While modern conveniences facilitate global communication, often those nearest receive the least attention.
Check in frequently with your inner circle – even if just a phone call with longtime friends or attending a local religious service weekly. Monthly should be maximum gaps for most unless geographically distant.
B Tier: Cold Showers
Nothing conditions seeking discomfort quite like direct chilling water exposure. Turning the hot nozzle off trains participating in activities outside behavioral norms. Cold showers build mental fortitude strengthening resilience against daily frustrations.
But sheer dreadful discomfort hampers habit stacking potentials with this one. Succeeding here demonstrates capabilities to push beyond many perceived physical limits though – grab the shampoo!
S Tier: Practicing Gratitude
Gratitude journals prime contentment by shifting focus toward blessings instead of fixating on negative. Daily listing a few privileged aspects cultivates awareness of just how profusely life gifts us. In turn, we aspire spreading more joy ourselves.
Physically, gratitude manifestation lowers unhealthy stress responses improving sleep, blood pressure, and pain tolerance. Psychologically, thankfulness augments production of happiness chemicals like serotonin and dopamine contributing to upbeat moods, optimism and relaxation.
Spiritually, appreciating interconnections makes us feel part of something larger than ourselves. Try closing eyes while lying in bed, recalling a few privileges and excitements from that day plus hopeful tomorrow events. Sweet dreams!
Start Building Your Habits
We covered a ton of ground laying out the most impactful habits proven by science to better your life when practiced deliberately. No one masters all these straight away, so pick a couple favorites to integrate into your routines first.
Consistency beats intensity always, so aim for small bites daily rather than overzealous volumes causing quick burnout. As those simpler habits solidify in a few months, stack additional self-growth rituals progressively.
Soon you’ll notice compounding confidence, energy, productivity and purpose. We all endure setbacks on the path to higher potential but using this guide as your habit skill tree roadmap will facilitate smoother advancement.
Which habits resonate with you? Any we missed? Let us know in the comments your biggest takeaways and priorities for elevating your life!
