Hello there, friend!

Finally, the habits article – is done (or at least I’m done with it). If you read the draft last time, you can skip to the Prompts section (though I did make slight edits in the earlier sections too).

From practices to habits

Read more. Exercise more. Doomscroll less. Eat better.

Everyone has aspirations for various habits and practices, but most of us struggle with performing them consistently.

If you want that, you need to get intentional with designing these behaviors. And for that, you need to understand how behavior works.

The behavior formula

The key elements of behavior are motivation, ability, and prompt. Simply put, motivation is how much you want to do something, your ability is how easy or difficult something is for you, and a prompt is anything that reminds you to do the behavior. This so-called Fogg's behavior formula (from B.J., Fogg's book Tiny Habits) can be expressed as B=MAP and graphed as below. If a behavior falls within the area under the curve, you will perform it given the prompt. If it falls outside, you'll skip. What the curve shows is that the more motivated you are, the harder things (i.e. lower ability) you're able to perform, and conversely, the easier something is for you, the less motivation you need¹.

Motivation doesn’t work

Of these three building blocks, the go-to block for most people trying to improve the consistency of their routines is motivation. Unfortunately, motivation is the least efficient point of intervention.

The main problem is that motivation is infamously changeable, meaning that if your consistency depends on you feeling hyped up all the time, you're doomed to fail.

Improving your ability and prompts, on the other hand, offers reliable outcomes. In addition, if you're only relying on motivation, the ability and prompt elements offer better marginal returns on your attention – if you fix them, you'll do more for you consistency than higher motivation alone could.

That doesn't mean you should ignore motivation altogether – in fact, reflecting on your motivation should be an integral part of setting any goals. You must understand the purpose of any new routine in order to stick to it.

But while motivation is a necessary requirement of consistency, it's not sufficient. And because consistency is what we're after, let's turn to the other elements of behavior design now.

How to raise your ability

The ability element is composed of three main aspects – your knowledge and skills, the affordances of the environment (i.e. whether your environment has what you need for the action), and the difficulty of the action itself. Running is easier if you're already quite athletic, but it also helps when there isn't a snowstorm raging outside, you have comfortable shoes, and you don't consider only a marathon-level effort to be worth your while.

This gives you three options for increasing your ability. Of these, developing your knowledge and skills is in general the most difficult and lengthy, developing the affordances of the environment is second, and lowering the difficulty is the easiest. And that means that lowering the difficulty is where you should start.

The difference between practices and habits

Here I need to reiterate the difference I draw between habits and practices. There's a reason why the two household names of habit design, James Clear and BJ Fogg, named their books "Atomic habits" and "Tiny habits", respectively – the atomic, tiny routines that take minutes at most are qualitatively different from the longer, more intentional and more effortful ones. That's why I prefer to call the former habits, and the latter practices.

The difference between these two types of routines is rooted in difficulty– whereas habits are almost effortless, practices can be some of the most challenging things you do. This is why you can perform habits almost wholly on autopilot and fit them virtually anywhere in your schedule. It's also why most habits cannot by themselves lead to significant positive outcomes – for those, you need practices. And the more ambitious the goal, the more demanding the practice.

However, practices start with habits. Why?

Spearhead habits

To paraphrase James Clear, a practice needs to be established before it can be improved. The biggest challenge for any new practice is to wedge itself into your busy schedule and overwhelmed attention. For that, you need to perform it consistently, to allow your subconscious to create an association between the prompt you chose and the practice you're trying to establish. That's operant conditioning in practice.

However, we already discussed that your level of motivation is changeable and that consistency therefore mustn't depend on being highly motivated all the time. This means that you need to adjust your ability to a level where a practice is safely under the behavior curve no matter how low your motivation dips.

You need to stack the odds completely in your favor and make the practice laughably easy. So easy that you can accomplish it even on your worst day, like when you're extremely busy and exhausted at the same time. In other words, you need to downscale the practice to a habit first and start with that.

Such habits can be as simple as doing the first minute of the full practice, which is why I call them spearheads – they're the sharp tip that can easily puncture your schedule.

Instead of reading a chapter, read just one paragraph or even a sentence. Instead of a full workout, just do the warm up or even just get into your training clothes. The point here isn't to do the full practice in its perfect form, but to forge a link between the prompt and the spearhead.

If you can do that, you'll also discover another property of spearheads – they make the follow-up much easier. The initial impulse will often make an initially intimidating practice seem manageable or even enjoyable, and provide you with enough momentum to get fully into flow.

Keep the spearheads sharp (and small)

However, for spearheads to work, you mustn't play tricks on yourself. Don't start thinking that you always have to do at least as much as last time. The power of spearheads comes precisely from the fact that they are always easy, no matter the circumstance.

This requires some humility – you might think that the habit is worthless by itself, or that you'd be a loser if you weren't disciplined enough to do the full practice immediately. And look, if you can actually pull off starting a consistent practice with full intensity from the start, more power to you.

But don't fool yourself into thinking that's the only way or the best way. A bad day WILL come, and if you're not able to drop your expectations then, you will skip. And when skipping becomes a possibility, it lingers as a temptation for much longer.

How many times did you go all out on a new practice, only to skip it when you didn't have the time or energy such intensity required, and then watch more and more excuses pop up every time you think of returning to it until you conclude that now is not the right season for this practice and you postpone it indefinitely? Was the satisfaction of the initial effort really worth it?

You get no points for ambition, only for consistency. It's much easier to maintain a practice than to restart it and for that, not scoffing at the spearhead habits is essential.

So when the bad day comes, acknowledge your limits and feel content with doing just the spearhead. You'll have endless opportunities to improve if you can only keep going.

Enhancing affordances

Downscaling practices to spearheads should always be the first thing you do. But as long as you don't use it as an excuse for postponing the start, improving the affordances of your environment for your routines can be a potent complement.

The main difference between this and downscaling the difficulty of a practice is that affordance improvement generally requires some work, whereas downscaling is largely just a shift in your expectations.

Improving affordances will also often have limited yields in increasing your ability – once you buy all the equipment that can meaningfully help, buying more of the same is pointless.

That said, enhancing your environment can make the whole routine more rewarding by letting you perform more with the same input, or by simply making it more fun. And occasionally, removing enough friction can actually unlock workflows and practices that weren't previously feasible².

So be sure to take some time out to consider how you can improve your environment to make it more conducive to your routines and make a plan for following through with these ideas. Just don't ever postpone getting started because your environment isn't perfect yet.

Choosing prompts that work

Overinflated expectations are the doom of many habits. However, just as often something far more inconspicuous is to blame – a badly chosen prompt (i.e. the reminder to do the habit.)

Many things can serve as prompts – a paper note on the fridge, a notification on your phone, or simply a train of thought that ends with you remembering the habit.

But while all these can work, not all of them work well. In fact, the above are examples of bad prompts that would unavoidably lead to inconsistency.

Prompts that don’t work

Relying on "just remembering" simply doesn't work. And even when it does, you have no guarantee of remembering the habit in the moment when you can actually perform it – it's no use remembering to take food supplements when you're in a meeting and the supplements are in your home.

As for different kinds of reminders, they're more reliable, which is already a step up from just remembering, but if you ever tried them you experienced the core problem yourself – you quickly get used to the reminder and start ignoring it.

In the case of visual reminders, like paper notes on your fridge, the root cause is that you get prompted too frequently, as you usually walk past the reminder more often than you want to perform the habit. But every time you do that, you're training yourself to not notice the reminder, until it becomes virtually invisible. Though you could partially reset the noticeability of the reminder by placing it on a different place every day, doing so would add additional friction to the habit, which is what you want to avoid as much as possible.

For timed reminders (e.g. an alarm) the root problem isn't frequency but timing – you can't guarantee the reminder will go off when you're able to perform the habit, because the reminder is set for a fixed time while your daily schedule usually changes a bit from day to day. This will again lead to the reminder loosing its potency as you keep piling up the times when you ignore it. Sure, you can snooze and try to reschedule, but 1. this again adds friction and 2. you can't guarantee that the new time will work better.

The above are also the reasons why using habit trackers as prompts doesn't work – regardless of whether they're sending you notifications or they're embedded somewhere in your workspace where you keep seeing them, you'll most likely ignore the reminder more often than not until it disappears from your attention altogether. That said, such tools still have value as checklists for reviewing which habits you performed and which you skipped, thus showing you which habits you need to redesign. Just don't expect the tools to actually work as prompts.

What you need is to find prompts that are more synchronized with your habit than static reminders and more adaptable to your schedule than timed reminders. And the way to do that is by anchoring your habits to already existing routines.

How to choose an anchor

There are many such anchors that occur reliably and predictably, but not always at the same time – waking up, brushing your teeth, your daily meals, going to the bathroom, etc.

Any action that's virtually impossible for you to skip is a good candidate for becoming an anchor. In fact, even your thoughts and feelings can serve as anchors (though this requires some proficiency in mindfulness, so you actually notice such anchors). The point is, there's an abundance of potential anchors for any habit.

The key is to match habits with anchors that fit the prompt criteria. These require that the anchor occurs, relative to a given habit:

• with the right frequency (i.e. the same frequency as the target frequency of the habit)

• in the right external conditions (i.e. in an environment with affordances conducive for the habit – if you want to start reading more, finishing dinner is probably a better anchor than arriving into the gym)

• in the right internal conditions (i.e. when you have enough TEA – time, energy, and attention (TEA coinage credit goes to Ondra Mrkus)

For simple habits (i.e. ones not intended to be expanded into a practice), you can usually ignore the internal conditions and focus only on the other two criteria, as minimal demands on your TEA are the key value proposition of habits. Designing simple habits is thus quite straightforward.

Spearhead habits, on the other hand, are slightly more challenging since you also need to take into account the requirements of the practice they're meant to expand into. Designing them thus requires a bit more thought as you screen the potential anchors for TEA as well:

• When will you have enough time for the practice?

• How does the practice affect your energy – does it recharge you or deplete you?

  • If the former, at what point in your day would you most need to refuel?

  • If the latter, when do you have just the amount of energy that's high enough to go through with the practice, but low enough that you'll be able to justify not working on more demanding tasks?

Ditto for attention – does the practice focus you, or does it send your mind racing?

Combining these considerations with searching for the right environment is usually simple enough, but adding the frequency criterium on top of that can sometimes leave you with no suitable anchors (usually this is because you only want to do the full practice on some days of the week, while the majority of anchors occurs at least once a day).

However, that's where the power of spearheads shines again – you can simply pick a daily anchor and perform just the scaled-down version of the practice on the off-days. This way, the anchor won't get corrupted as a prompt, while the spearhead will still nudge you toward the full practice on the days when you actually want to perform it.

Habit iteration

After you've chosen an anchor, the next step is simply specifying the anchor and setting an intention to always follow it up with a given habit. "After I go to the bathroom, I will do 2 pushups." "After I return from lunch, I will take supplements." "Whenever I feel I want to distract myself, I will take a deep breath and remember my goals". Be as clear as possible about both the prompt and the action, to preclude any need to think in the moment.

Then, you want to write down the formulation of your intended habit and create a meta-practice of reviewing whether some of your habits need redesign.

In the ideal scenario, you already have daily and weekly review processes established – in that case, you can simply add reviewing your habits as a short extra step. If you don't yet have any such process in place, I really urge you to give it a try.

There's a reason why regular reviews are essential parts of virtually every productivity, learning, and continuous improvement framework out there, both for individuals and organizations – the feedback and insight such reviews afford are invaluable and irreplaceable.

Though creating such a process adds some friction up-front and maintaining it can be seen as some overhead, it's very much worth the effort. Plus, all that we've covered so far about habit design naturally applies here as well – you start with a minimalistic version of the review and focus only on that in the beginning.

For example, you could just review your habit intentions every evening, and give yourself a summary grade, something that wouldn't take more than 60 seconds (as I already mentioned, habit trackers can prove useful here, giving you a quick overview of your habits and usually also a way of tracking your consistency over time.).

When you feel like it, you can start expanding this into writing down quick notes on how you can improve the habits that you're not consistent in. Soon you'll see the value such reviews provide, and they will become an enjoyable grounding practice.

It probably sounds like a lot, but it's not complicated – just pick an anchor that fits the habit you're building, clearly articulate the intention to follow it up with the habit, and write this down, so you can review and redesign the habit formulation.

If you can do that, you'll be building better habits like nobody's business. If you can also apply one final secret, that is.

The final puzzle piece

This secret helps you overcome one final challenge – actually turning the anchor into a prompt, i.e. making sure that the anchor will automatically remind you of the habit you're working on.

It was this little trick that really unlocked the power of habits for me, so I cannot understate its value. It's what turned habit design from a cool theory into a valuable method. So please excuse the teasing and cue drumroll – the secret is...

Rewards.

Too much, too late

However, not all rewards are created equal. You have experienced this for yourself all your life – behaviors offering instant gratification are easy to repeat, while those with delayed rewards are more difficult (especially if the behavior itself is effortful). In other words, the timing of rewards is everything.

So much for recapping the obvious. And yet, when most people try to come up with rewards to infuse more joy into their routines, they settle on a favorite snack in the evening or a fun Friday night.

While these do qualify as rewards and certainly have their place, the delay they introduce between the action and reinforcement undermines their usefulness for wiring in new habits.

Moreover, such rewards are disproportionately large compared to habits that should be almost effortless, which might make you focus too much on the reward and undermine any intrinsic motivation you have for the behavior, thus making it even less enjoyable.

Instead, what you need is a way to celebrate that's available anywhere and anytime, and similar in scale to the habit itself. And that's what cheering is about.

Tiny actions, giant impact

These are micro-celebrations that don't take more than a few seconds, ranging from a victory dance to just shouting "Yes!" in your head, and they all have a very simple goal – to make you feel successful.

To make you feel like you just accomplished something meaningful... because you DID. I know it can be difficult to feel any pride about something that took hardly any effort, but habits are not the end, they're the beginning. The highest goals and wildest dreams you might have, they all revolve around various routines that you repeat consistently. And all practices start with habits.

So don't sell yourself short when you successfully perform a habit and cheer with full force, because it wasn't a short action that you just performed, it was another step on your way to who you want to become, and nothing's more worth celebrating than that.

That's why it's so important to articulate the impact that you achieving your goals would have – it infuses meaning into the tiniest actions you do, and reminds you that they might be tiny in scale, but definitely not in value.

So cheer after every successful habit, because that's how you turn anchors into prompts, prompts into habits, habits into practices, practices into character.

And as Heraclitus said, character is destiny.

Pick your cheer

As for which way of cheering you should choose, it's pretty much up to you – how do you spontaneously cheer when something great happens?

For example, imagine that you recently took an admissions exam or interviewed for your dream job. After some time, an email arrives in your inbox with the results inside. With some trepidation, you click it open, scan to find the result... and you did it! You aced it and got your dream placement!

What would be your reaction? Whether it's fists flying into the air, an image of your partner praising you or anything else, that's your natural way of cheering, so that's how you should start celebrating your habits.

Of course, you can change it up when you want – as long as the cheer evokes a feeling of accomplishment, you're good. You should also pick a more covert way of cheering for habits taking place in environments where overt cheering would feel inappropriate for you, but that can be as simple as imagining what you'd do in private, or a small gesture like clenching your fist.

When to cheer

Once you choose your cheer, you can start wiring the habits in. Especially in the beginning, two additional opportunities for cheering come in very handy – the first is after simulating the habit in your imagination, the second is anytime after you remember your intention to follow the anchor with the habit.

So, once you’ve designed the habit, imagine performing it a couple times and cheer after each time just as you would after the real thing. Then start cheering after every time you remember the habit, and especially after every time you actually perform it. If you find the anchor is still not a reliable prompt, imagine a couple more simulations.

You can also add a short morning practice of reviewing your habit formulations and re-articulating your commitment to them. I promise that if you do that, the anchor will become a true prompt in no time.

Over time, once a habit is established, you can also experiment with randomizing your rewards – instead of cheering after every time you remember or perform the habit, roll a die or flip a coin (or ask Siri to do that for you) and only cheer if you get heads or 4+.

This introduces some randomization, which helps to preserve the motivational power of cheering the given habit. It's not necessary though, as by the time any loss of cheering potency might occur, the habit should be firmly established. So if this gamification element would feel too complicated, don't worry about it and just cheer at every opportunity.

After all, it's not just a habit that you're celebrating, it's a step towards becoming who you want to be, and that's always worth a cheer.

Reflection

This article took WAAAY longer to write than it should. It could probably be improved a lot if I cut the length by half, but that would take additional time, and I couldn’t justify that.

At this point, I really want to focus fully on Notion content. I will also need to become much more efficient with that because the goal is a longer-form post every week and a short-form one every day.

That will require me to become much more efficient with writing, and that will likely require more structure for the whole process. Let’s see how it goes.

And that’s it, thanks so much for reading!

Let me know what you think, what caught your attention, or when I was rambling too much, and I’ll see you here next time (which should be next week).

Cheers!

Chris