Improving habits basically means overcoming your orientation toward immediate gratification to instead improve delayed returns.
To create habits that stick, you need to:
Make it obvious
This is the cue/trigger to remind you to do the thing
Design your office/home/desk/etc. to encourage the habit you want
E.g., don’t hide your fruit & vegetables in the crisper drawer, put them on the counter!
Make it attractive (the more attractive it is, the more you crave doing it)
Make it easy (the lower friction it is, the better)
Make it satisfying (he more satisfying it is, the more you want to repeat it)
The goal of doing these is to remove willpower from the equation
People who are successful in maintaining good habits are the ones who do not face temptations… not the ones who are magically more strong-willed
Willpower can’t sustain you long term
Resisting negative cues in your environment is very fatiguing
For negative habits (stuff you want to stop doing; “habits of avoidance”), do the opposite:
E.g., make it non-obvious—don’t tempt yourself by seeing it!
A few approaches to making the negative habit satisfying:
Replace the bad habit with a good one
This is important: you need some sort of reward for doing the new thing
It still needs to satisfy the same craving that you used to have
It can’t just be about having willpower to resist doing the original thing
Increase the friction massively to do the bad thing (remove the exposure to trigger yourself)
Make “doing nothing” more satisfying than doing the bad thing
E.g., instead of buying a coffee, every time you were going to buy one, put $5 in a savings account
Gives you a benefit for when “nothing happens”
For big, important, key areas of your life, you can start by making the habit really easy (and basic), and make it successively more difficult to get the “reward”
E.g., start with 1 minute of working out a day, scale up to 30 mins or whatever
Only applies to areas you want to be truly great
For most things, good enough is good enough (it’s not worth being the best flosser ever)
Reaching more abstract goals (e.g., write 25 blog posts this year) by shaping your habits
The key is to make it *feel* immediate and concrete
Give yourself a strong visual of your progress
E.g., start with two bowls, one full of paper clips; each time you take the action, you move one paper clip over; your goal is to move all the paper clips from one jar to the next
Habit trackers work the same way
Putting an X on the calendar is satisfying
Each X reminds you to do it again
Automatic habits (stuff you do without even being aware of it) can lead to really important routines
You want to make the first 2 minutes or so of your important routine effortless
E.g., if I get home from work and put on my workout clothes, going to the gym becomes automatic and easy; but, if I have to make a conscious decision to put on my workout clothes, it might not happen at all