Try to find one-time actions that can automate your habits, eliminating the need to consciously think about them again.
ONE TIME ACTIONS THAT LOCK IN GOOD HABITS
Nutrition
- Buy a water filter to clean your drinking water.
- Use smaller plates to reduce caloric intake.
- Instead of buying unhealthy groceries from the store, subscribe to a healthy food delivery service.
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.
- Ask a friend or spouse to set a code that you don’t know on your social media apps that restricts you to only 10 minutes of scrolling per day.
- 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.
WHY IT MATTERS: a single choice can deliver returns again and again
When the effort required to act on your desires becomes effectively zero, you can find yourself slipping into whatever impulse arises at the moment. Naturally, this can be a double-edged sword. It's crucial to make your productive habits easier to maintain, while increasing the difficulty and friction of your unproductive ones.
Automation, when working in your favor, can make your good habits inevitable and your bad habits impossible. It serves as the ultimate method to secure future behavior, instead of depending on willpower in the moment.
more tomorrow,
Hunter
more tomorrow,
Hunter