ONETIME ACTIONS THAT LOCK IN GOOD HABITS
Nutrition
Buy a water filter to clean your drinking water.
Use smaller plates to reduce caloric intake.
Sleep
Buy a good mattress.
Get blackout curtains.
Remove your television from your bedroom.
Productivity
Unsubscribe from emails.
Turn off notifications and mute group chats.
Set your phone to silent.
Use email filters to clear up your inbox.
Delete games and social media apps on your phone.
Happiness
Get a dog.
Move to a friendly, social neighborhood.
General Health
Get vaccinated.
Buy good shoes to avoid back pain.
Buy a supportive chair or standing desk.
Finance
Enroll in an automatic savings plan.
Set up automatic bill pay.
Cut cable service.
Ask service providers to lower your bills.
Of course, there are many ways to automate good habits and eliminate
bad ones. Typically, they involve putting technology to work for you.
Technology can transform actions that were once hard, annoying, and
complicated into behaviors that are easy, painless, and simple. It is the most
reliable and effective way to guarantee the right behavior.
This is particularly useful for behaviors that happen too infrequently to
become habitual. Things you have to do monthly or yearly—like
rebalancing your investment portfolio—are never repeated frequently
enough to become a habit, so they benefit in particular from technology
“remembering” to do them for you.
Other examples include:
Medicine: Prescriptions can be automatically refilled.
Personal finance: Employees can save for retirement with an
automatic wage deduction.
Cooking: Meal-delivery services can do your grocery shopping.
Productivity: Social media browsing can be cut off with a website
blocker.
When you automate as much of your life as possible, you can spend your
effort on the tasks machines cannot do yet. Each habit that we hand over to
the authority of technology frees up time and energy to pour into the next
stage of growth. As mathematician and philosopher Alfred North
Whitehead wrote, “Civilization advances by extending the number of
operations we can perform without thinking about them.”
Of course, the power of technology can work against us as well. Binge-
watching becomes a habit because you have to put more effort in to stop
looking at the screen than to continue doing so. Instead of pressing a button
to advance to the next episode, Netflix or YouTube will autoplay it for you.
All you have to do is keep your eyes open.
Technology creates a level of convenience that enables you to act on
your smallest whims and desires. At the mere suggestion of hunger, you can
have food delivered to your door. At the slightest hint of boredom, you can
get lost in the vast expanse of social media. When the effort required to act
on your desires becomes effectively zero, you can find yourself slipping
into whatever impulse arises at the moment. The downside of automation is
that we can find ourselves jumping from easy task to easy task without
making time for more difficult, but ultimately more rewarding, work.
I often find myself gravitating toward social media during any
downtime. If I feel bored for just a fraction of a second, I reach for my
phone. It’s easy to write off these minor distractions as “just taking a
break,” but over time they can accumulate into a serious issue. The constant
tug of “just one more minute” can prevent me from doing anything of
consequence. (I’m not the only one. The average person spends over two
hours per day on social media. What could you do with an extra six hundred
hours per year?)
During the year I was writing this book, I experimented with a new time
management strategy. Every Monday, my assistant would reset the
passwords on all my social media accounts, which logged me out on each
device. All week I worked without distraction. On Friday, she would send
me the new passwords. I had the entire weekend to enjoy what social media
had to offer until Monday morning when she would do it again. (If you
don’t have an assistant, team up with a friend or family member and reset
each other’s passwords each week.)
One of the biggest surprises was how quickly I adapted. Within the first
week of locking myself out of social media, I realized that I didn’t need to
check it nearly as often as I had been, and I certainly didn’t need it each
day. It had simply been so easy that it had become the default. Once my bad
habit became impossible, I discovered that I did actually have the
motivation to work on more meaningful tasks. After I removed the mental
candy from my environment, it became much easier to eat the healthy stuff.
When working in your favor, automation can make your good habits
inevitable and your bad habits impossible. It is the ultimate way to lock in
future behavior rather than relying on willpower in the moment. By
utilizing commitment devices, strategic onetime decisions, and technology,
you can create an environment of inevitability—a space where good habits
are not just an outcome you hope for but an outcome that is virtually
guaranteed.
Chapter Summary
The inversion of the 3rd Law of Behavior Change is make it difficult.
A commitment device is a choice you make in the present that locks in
better behavior in the future.
The ultimate way to lock in future behavior is to automate your habits.
Onetime choices—like buying a better mattress or enrolling in an
automatic savings plan—are single actions that automate your future
habits and deliver increasing returns over time.
Using technology to automate your habits is the most reliable and
effective way to guarantee the right behavior.
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