Routine

To Start a New Habit You Have to Ask One Question

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Habits are notoriously difficult to manipulate. We typically fall into patterns of behavior unwittingly and then get stuck. It’s tough to ditch old habits and it’s tough to start new ones. Unless you have an understanding of how they work. Hopefully, this will help.

BJ Fogg, the author of Tiny Habits, has observed five main obstacles that prevent people from forming new habits: time, money, physical effort, mental effort, and routine. Any one of those things, or several of them together, can derail your most noble habit change initiatives. So what’s the solution? Start with a simple question: how can I make this easier?

Humans generally operate by default, and they usually default to the easiest option. Steve Jobs tapped into this idea when he created iTunes. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the music industry was sweating. The rise of software like Napster and other illegal digital downloading options made music theft alarmingly pervasive. Free music wasn’t just annoying for artists and producers, it threatened to shut down the entire industry. Music may be created for the sake of art, but there would be significantly fewer artists if no one was being paid to create the music. Jobs realized that people wouldn’t stop downloading free music for a moral reason, but they might for a more convenient reason. Thus, iTunes was born. The easiest way on earth to obtain music. Sure, there was a cost, but Jobs knew that people would pay for convenience, that they would drift towards ease. The iTunes/iPod music experience not only transformed the music industry, but also saved it. Jobs made obtaining and listening to music easy.

I think about some of my own recent habit initiatives. I’ve been trying to get out of bed early and consistently for a while with little success. I’ve tried moving my phone away from the bed, I set my clothes out the night before, I even prep the coffee maker in the evening so coffee is hot and ready when I wake up. The issue isn’t time, in fact, it would give me more time if I could nail this habit. It’s not a question of money, I don’t have to pay anything to wake up on time. Nor is there any problem fitting my desired wake up time into a routine. But it does involve some physical and mental effort to get out of bed on a cold dark morning. So my previous efforts are good, they definitely make my desired habit a little easier, but they haven’t tipped the scale yet, I need to make it easier.

Fogg also outlines a concept he calls ‘starter step.’ This is the idea that you don’t have to digest the entire habit all at once. Our habit initiatives often fail because we’re stuck on an all-or-nothing approach which relies on motivation to take action, and motivation is nothing if not fickle. Fogg suggests instead of trying to suddenly incorporate an hour-long gym session into your day, start by packing your workout bag in the morning. The habit you need to develop is not going to the gym and throwing weights around for an hour, you simply need to pack your gym bag every morning. If your gym bag is packed and ready, your mind will be more receptive to the idea of stopping by the gym on your way home from work. If you want to walk every day, focus on simply tying on your walking shoes. You don’t have to pressure yourself to workout or walk, just habituate the starter step and you’ll find yourself doing the workout or taking the walk more often than you don’t.

So I’ve come up with a starter step of my own to make my regular-wake-up habit initiative as easy as possible. Every morning when I climb out of bed to silence my alarm, I will turn on my lamp for ten seconds. If after the ten seconds I still can’t resist the warmth of my flannel sheets, fine, I’ll keep working at it, but my guess is that the light will wake me up enough to eschew the flannel and get started with my day. I wish I could say I’ve already proven this theory and it’s foolproof, but I’ll have to let you know how it turns out. Here’s to the unending pursuit.

How can you make your habit easier?

The key to a good routine

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Change is hard. As posted recently (here), it takes some attention to adjust our default behaviors. We don’t just change because we intend to. One helpful way to attack personal change is to address our routines.

Routine is defined as ‘a sequence of actions regularly followed; a fixed program,’ per Google. A routine is kind of like a large scale habit, like several habits stacked on top of each other. We’ve all got them, some are helpful, some not so much so, and most of them we probably fell into with little or no intention. But the great thing about routines is that you can mold them.

This month, my family and I embarked on a brand new routine. Routines can be very sticky, but including the whole family has made it significantly more so. Kids, especially young kids, will notoriously derail attempts at a new routine, so I’ve given up resisting and made them part of it. The routine revolves around their school schedule, which is great because school happens regardless of how my wife and I are feeling or how well or not well we slept (one of the primary derailing factors of children). The start of the school day is a cornerstone that we’ve built our new routine around. We’ve got a series of actions we take leading up to getting the kids ready and out the door, and a set of actions we take after the kids are dropped off. It happens every weekday, and we’ve settled into the regularity of it as a family. James Clear talks about habit stacking, using one of your existing habits as a cue for a new habit. The school bell is not a habit, but it functions in a similar way, it’s a regular thing that we can build additional habits around, an anchor.

Why Do New Year Resolutions Never Work?

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It’s January, the time of year when we aspire to be or accomplish something new. You don’t have to wait for January to decide to improve yourself, but it’s as good a time as any, and definitely the most popular time. We’re two weeks in now, the gyms are packed, we’re paying closer attention to our budgets, our pantries are full of healthier foods, you know how it goes. These are all good things, but unfortunately, studies show that about 80% of New Year’s resolutions fail by mid-February. Maybe your resolution is already floundering.

James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, says people don’t rise to the level of their goals, they fall to the level of their systems. I think he’s exactly right. We’re good at setting goals and making resolutions, but we’re bad at making lasting changes. And it’s not because we don’t want it enough or because we make disingenuous resolutions, it’s because humans operate by default and we fail to address our default habits. Goals don’t change behavior regardless of how SMART they are or whether or not they qualify as BHAG. We need new systems, new defaults, and new habits, maybe not another resolution.

So how do we change our systems? James Clear talks about becoming 1% better each day by doing something small. It could be one pushup per day if you want to build a workout habit. It could be one call per day if you want to build a networking habit. You mold your identity by consistently doing the things the type of person you aspire to be does. Each time you do something, no matter how small, your new identity is reinforced. If I’m an athletic person, I workout. Weight loss and muscle gains simply follow. If I’m a successful salesperson, I network. Income is simply a result. My default habits would never change by simply thinking about my weight loss goal or even by putting down my income goals on paper (I, like most of us, have tried). Change requires action, no matter how small. A helpful quote I’ve come across (attributed to several different authors including Millar Fuller and Jerry Sternin) summarizes this idea nicely: “It’s easier to act your way into a new way thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting.” Alan Deutschman, in his book Change or Die, says, “It’s obvious that what we believe and what we feel influences how we act. That’s common sense. But the equation works in the other direction as well: How we act influences what we believe and what we feel. That’s one of the most counterintuitive yet powerful principles of modern psychology (p78).” He adds, “You have to do things a new way before you can think in a new way (p79).”

It’s interesting to think about the purpose of all of this. We set goals at the beginning of each year because we want to accomplish things, for sure. But I think the more significant reason we spend all of this time on goals is that we aspire to be better persons. The most basic thing we’re after is a change in our identity. I won’t stray into the mire of philosophical implications here, but I think that’s a clarifying thought. The accomplishment we’re after is a change in identity, not another New Year’s resolution. Our identity changes when our default behaviors and habits change. Act different in order to think different. Start small, start simple, do something laughably easy, and then don’t ever stop.

Motion vs Action

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I read Atomic Habits by James Clear a little while back. The book is packed with helpful insights, a highly recommended read. One that stuck out to me is Clear’s distinction between what he calls motion and action.
Motion is like busywork or planning work. It’s often preparatory, and it rarely moves you forward. The great thing about motion is that it feels productive, but you don’t really have to do any real work. I love motion, and I’m really good at it. I’ve got my checklists and my idea notes, my daily planning routine, all of it.
We’ve all heard the phrase (well, maybe not all of us, it’s popular jargon in the business motivation world from Jim Collins) “good is the enemy of great.” Clear has a better one, a quote from Voltair, “the best is the enemy of good.” In our most impassioned moments when we’re moved to improve ourselves or situations, we tend to immediately get mired in thought about which direction to take. If you’re anything like me you’re obsessed with the theoretical best option. This applies to all sorts of things, like crippling indecision when facing a plethora of product options on Amazon, but especially when thinking about how to improve myself or my career or whatever else needs improving. What’s the best way to do it, or the best route to take? In my mind that’s the right question and it deserves a lot of attention. But the time I devote to that question is motion, and at this point, it’s close to 100% wasted. I might as well be tuning in to the financial news (gasp!).
In beautiful contrast stands action. We’ve got all sorts of nice pithy quotes for this one, “Well done is better than well said” (Benjamin Franklin), “Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you” (Thomas Jefferson), “Small deeds done are better than great deeds planned (Peter Marshal), you get the picture. These are a little soupy but they’re actually pretty close to the truth. We need action! Think about writing your grocery list. The list is great, especially if your handwriting is nice, but writing the list isn’t going to put groceries in your pantry. It can help guide your shopping trip which is valuable, but you’ll still be hungry until you actually go shopping. And if you had to choose, wouldn’t it be better to go shopping without a list than to have the nicest, cleanest, most thorough list without ever shopping? Think about sales calls. You could spend a lot of time formulating a call list and writing up the perfect script, but until you actually pick up the phone you haven’t accomplished anything. Lists and scripts are motion, shopping and calling are action, you get it. Motion isn’t worthless, but only action can create an outcome.
So that’s the point, as fun and busy feeling as planning and emails and lists are, those things are motion, and motion can’t move the needle, motion won’t ever create an outcome. Act!

Habit disruption

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Full disclosure, I’ve been reading Atomic Habits by James Clear, which is hard to over-sell (it’s really good), and this writeup includes ideas I’ve gleaned there.

Clear structures the book in a really helpful and practical way. He deals with both the creation of good habits which you’d expect, but also the opposite side: disrupting bad habits. Perhaps as important as establishing good habits is getting rid of, or at least minimizing bad habits. Most of us have gone through life accumulating all sorts of habits with hardly a thought to why. They’ve become so automatic we don’t even think about what they are, let alone why we do them. Some are certainly good (brushing your teeth before bed), but oftentimes many of them are bad (see a cookie eat a cookie), and the bad ones are the ones that are tough to deal with. Clear points out that we fall into habits because they’re easy. Many of them develop as a response to some sort of stress because they offer some sort of relief, like Netflix binging after a long day at work, but they begin because they’re easy. By now these bad habits are so ingrained it seems almost impossible to dig ourselves out. As easy as it was to fall into these bad habits, to break out of them seems incredibly difficult. Clear offers a remarkably simple idea here. If we fall into these bad habits because they’re easy, what if we just made the habit a little more difficult? An example from the Netflix binge example would be to unplug the TV every time you turn it off, which would require that you plug it back in next time you want to watch. That one little step does two things: 1) It simply makes it harder to follow through on the routine. Adding difficulty to anything makes us less likely to do that thing, humans follow the path of least resistance. 2) Perhaps more importantly, it disrupts the automatic habit loop that takes over when you step into your living room in the evening. Breaking the habit loop is critical. The simple act of plugging in the TV, which is not part of the normal routine, takes you off autopilot. It forces you to think about what you’re doing (do I really need to watch more TV right now?) and gives you the chance to choose to do something different (maybe I’ll grab a book instead!). Charles Duhigg, in his book The Power of Habit, points out that people who simply put some thought into their routines are much more likely to complete the desired task (I wrote a little bit about this here). Conversely, when people are forced to put some thought into the routine they want to break they become much more likely to find success in breaking that routine.

So the moral is, set up a few roadblocks for your bad habits. Clear helpfully fleshes out the idea that in order to change our habits we need to make good habits easy and bad habits hard. A little extra friction between you and your bad habits could make a lot of difference in your pursuit of good habits.