I came to technology quite late, after chasing another career path. When I was trying to learn how to code I got into the habit of doing something, anything, even one miniscule thing related to programming, every day without exception.

Even if it was just a matter of looking up the api for one java method, that would still count as my "one thing" for the day.

The habit rapidly took hold, and years later I'm still doing it. After a hard day of programming I'll still spent at least ten minutes working on a side-project, even if it's just reading about a library I may want to use or committing a tiny refactor.

If there's one habit I would encourage people to take up, it's doing 'one small thing' every single day.