Here is today’s Game and what’s going on.
Here is what I discovered today in our Dadly Daily Declaration readings from Chapter 14 of Atomic Habits by James Clear. The title of this chapter is “How to Make Good Habits Inevitable and Bad Habits Impossible”
Today’s reading finishes the discussion about the Third Law of Behavior Change: Make It Easy. Here are a few highlights from today’s readings:
- Sometimes success is less about making good habits easy and more about. making bad habits hard. If you find yourself continually struggling to follow through on your plans, you can make your bad habits more difficult by creating what psychologists a commitment device.
- A commitment device is a choice you make int he present that controls your actions in the future. It is a way to lock in future behavior, bind you to good habits, and restrict you from bad ones.
- There are many ways to create a commitment device.
- You can reduce overeating by purchasing food in individual packages rather than in bulk size.
- You can voluntarily ask to be added to the banned list at casinos and online poker sites to prevent future gambling sprees.
- Commitment devices are useful because they enable you to take advantage of good intentions before you can fall victim to temptation.
- The key is to change the task such that it requires more work to get out of the good habit than to get started on it.
- If you’re feeling motivated to get in shape, schedule a yoga session and pay ahead of time.
- If you’re excited bout the business you want to start, email an entrepreneur you respect and set up a consulting call. When the time comes to act, the only way to bail is to cancel the meeting, which requires effort and may cost money.
- Commitment devices increase the odds that you’ll do the right thing int he future by making bad habits difficult in the present.
- One way to make good habits inevitable and bad habits impossible is to use technology to automate those god habits. This is particularly useful for behaviors that happens too infrequently to become habitual. Things you have to do monthly or yearly are never repeated frequently enough to become a habit.
- When you automate as much as 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.
- When working in your favor, automation can make your good habits inevitable and your bad habits impossible.
Those gems lead us to today’s Dadly Daily Declaration:
The best way to break a bad habit is to make it impractical to do. Increase the friction until you don’t even have the option to act.
Some actions pay off again and again. Onetime choices require a little bit of effort up front but create increasing value over time. A single choice can deliver returns again and again.
