How to make your future habits easy: habits for improving the easy of your life

How to make your future habits easy

I found a story that immediately impressed me with its simplicity and power. It was the story of Oswald Nuckols, an IT developer from Natchez, Mississippi, and his simple strategy to facilitate future habits.

Nuckols refers to the approach as "reset the room".

For example, when you finish watching TV, put the remote control back in the holder, place the pillows on the sofa and fold the blanket. When you leave your car, throw away the trash. Every time you take a shower, clean the toilet while the shower is heating up. (As noted, the "perfect moment to clean the toilet is just before you shower in the shower anyway")

This may seem to be simply "cleaning", but there is a key idea that makes your approach different. The purpose of restoring each room is not simply to clean up after the last action, but to prepare for the next action.

"When I enter a room, everything is in the right place," Nuckols wrote. "Because I do this every day in every room, things always stay in good shape. . . People think I work hard, but in reality, I am very lazy. I am proactively lazy. It gives you a lot of time back. "

I have written previously about the power of the environment to shape their behavior. Restoring the room is a way to return power to your own hands. Let's talk about how you can use it.

The power to prime the environment
Whenever you organize a space for your intended purpose, you are preparing it to facilitate the next action. This is one of the most practical and simple ways to improve your habits.

For example, my wife is left with a box of greeting cards that are sorted according to the occasion: birthday, sympathy, wedding, graduation and more. Whenever necessary, take an appropriate card and send it. She is incredibly good at remembering to send cards because she has reduced the friction of doing so.

For years, I was the opposite. Someone would have a baby and I would think: "I should send a card." But then the weeks went by and when I remembered to pick one up at the store, it was too late. The habit was not easy.

There are many ways to prepare your environment so that it is ready for immediate use. If you want to prepare a healthy breakfast, place the pan on the stove, place the kitchen spray on the counter and place the dishes and utensils you will need the night before. When you get up, making breakfast will be easy.

Here are some more:

Do you want to draw more? Put your pencils, pens, notebooks and drawing tools on your desk, within arm's reach.
Do you want to exercise? Prepare your workout clothes, shoes, gym bag and water bottle in advance.
Do you want to improve your diet? Chop a ton of fruits and vegetables on weekends and pack them in containers, so you have easy access to healthy and ready-to-eat options during the week.
These are simple ways to make good habit the path of least resistance.

The path of greatest resistance
You can also reverse this principle and prepare the environment to hinder bad behavior.

For example, if you watch too much television, unplug it after each use. Just plug it back in if you can say the name of the program you want to see out loud. (Which prevents you from turning on Netflix and "just find something" to see). This configuration creates enough friction to avoid a meaningless display.

If that does not do it, you can go a step further. Unplug the TV and remove the batteries from the remote control after each use, which takes an additional ten seconds to turn on again. And if it's really hard, move the television from the living room and place it in a closet after each use. You can be sure that you will only get it out when you really want to see something. The greater the friction, the less likely the habit is.

Whenever possible, I leave my phone in a different room until lunch. When I'm right next to me, I'll check it all morning for no reason. But when he's in another room, I rarely think about it. And the friction is high enough to not get it without a reason. As a result, I have three or four hours each morning when I can work without interruption.

If it does not seem enough to stick the phone in another room, tell a friend or family member to hide it for a few hours. Ask a co-worker to keep it at his desk in the morning and return it to him at lunch.

The little friction necessary to prevent bad behavior is remarkable. When I hide the beer in the back of the fridge where I can not see it, I drink less. When I remove social media applications from my phone, it may be weeks before I download them again and sign in.

It is unlikely that these tricks will stop a true addiction, but for many of us, a little friction can be the difference between staying with a good habit or sliding towards a bad one. Imagine the cumulative impact of doing dozens of these changes and living in an environment designed to make good behaviors easier and bad behaviors more difficult.

Where to go from here

If we are approaching behavior change as an individual, a parent, a coach or a leader, we should ask ourselves the same question: "How can we design a world where it is easy to do what is right?" Restore your rooms so that the actions that matter most are also the easiest actions to perform.

When you master the preparation habits, the execution habits become easy.