The Power of Rituals
You plan to wake up at 5:00am every morning starting tomorrow. So day one you wake up at 4:59am. Awesome! Day two you wake up at 5:00am. Day three you wake up at 5:02am. Not bad! Day four you wake up at 5:15 am. Things are starting to slide. By the end of the second week you're getting up at 7:00am. You're back to square one.
What went wrong? Was getting to bed late preventing you from waking early? Was it your screen usage right before bed? Was your alarm sound too annoying? Were you exhausted from the previous day?
All of the above could be factors preventing you sticking to your plan. But none of them are sufficient in themselves or together to stop you from waking up at 5:00am. The real culprit, the real factor, that is sufficient in itself to prevent you from building a habit is the lack of an ecosystem.
Habits are formed over weeks, months, years, and decades. The more habits you have the better you'll be at starting a new habit. Similar to the more money invested, the greater the compound.
The best way to start creating a strong inclination towards habit formation is to create a ritual. A ritual is habit with a surrounding ecosystem. Rituals are powerful because they create an ecosystem in which the habits are subconsciously practiced.
So if you want to get up at 5:00am, your goal just cannot be to get up at 5:00am. You have to create a ritual around it. i.e. Ritual example 1: Get up 5:00am to do 30 push-ups; jump into the shower for 5 minutes (shower has a sub ritual of alternating between cold and hot water); walk to the kitchen and make coffee; listen to an audiobook for 30 minutes; meditate for 45 minutes; program for 1 hour.
In this example, even though your initial plan is to get up at 5:00am, the ritual expanded the goal such that the initial goal is absorbed into the larger whole. So now you get up at 5:00am to begin the ritual process.
This approach is applicable to most things that are goal-oriented.