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.
