Make Good Habits Easier Than Bad Habits

When a good habit is difficult and a bad habit is convenient, willpower has to fight the same battle over and over.

There's another option: change the environment.

Instead of asking how to become stronger, you can ask how to make the better choice easier and the worse choice harder.

That's the idea behind this lesson. I use two ordinary examples from my life - candy and deep work - to show how much the environment around an action can change whether that action happens.

I don't keep candy in the house because I know I shouldn't eat it. If I want it, I have to create enough effort to leave the house and go buy it. For deep work, I do the opposite. I remove distractions, close the door, silence my phone, and make focused work easier to start.

The principle is simple: reduce friction for the actions you want more of and increase friction for the actions you want less of. You don't have to eliminate willpower, but you can stop requiring it for every good decision.

In This Lesson

·        Why becoming smarter can work better than trying to become stronger

·        How your environment can make good or bad habits easier

·        Why I stopped keeping candy in the house

·        How I create a distraction-free environment for deep work

·        Why different kinds of work need different environments

·        How I schedule important work when I'm mentally sharpest

·        How to increase friction for bad habits and reduce it for good habits

·        Why success often comes from making better choices more convenient

Watch the video or read the complete transcript below.

Make Good Habits Easier Than Bad Habits

(Transcript edited for clarity.)

Hi, I'm Wes.

Hi, welcome to Make Good Habits Easier Than Bad Habits. I'm going to talk a little bit about habits today. I'm Wes. Thanks for being with me.

I'm going to talk about habits, but I'm not going to give you the same habit thing that you can find in a lot of self-help books and things like that.

If you're interested in that, the prevailing theory is that if you do something 21 days in a row, then it becomes a habit. Then you build another habit the next 21 days, and you can change your life umpteen ways in a year.

That's fine if you work that way, but I'll tell you I've done plenty of things 21 days in a row that didn't become habits because I didn't want to do them in the first place.

Anyway, that's not what we're going to talk about today.

We're going to talk about ways to make your life easier. That's what I mean when I say make good habits easier than bad habits.

Most people try to become stronger. Raise your hand. I've spent most of my life trying to become stronger - more willpower, more motivation, more this, more that. Stronger.

It's often easier to become smarter.

I would say more than often it's easier to become smarter.

I recently did a show about making decisions and decision fatigue, and this has something to do with that too.

Instead of continuing to beat your head against the wall, become smarter. Ask better questions. Figure out the better question.

That all ties together here.

Design your environment so the right choice becomes the easy choice.

Let's talk about the hard and easy, and how you can intentionally create an environment where the right choice, or the best choice, is easy instead of the wrong choice being easy.

The easiest place to give an example from my life - and I've got a couple different ones here - is that I can't eat candy.

I'm a diabetic. I've got sugar problems. I like to eat candy, but I can't.

I can't eat candy anymore.

You know how I changed my habits about eating candy? I stopped buying candy.

There's no candy in my house that I can eat.

That's an example of not relying on willpower. I didn't rely on making that tough decision. I intentionally changed my environment so that the easy choice was not eating the candy.

Now, if I want to eat candy, I have to get ready. I have to get in the car. I have to drive to town, and I have to buy the candy.

That's not easy, right?

The easy choice is knowing this is going to pass. I know I want the candy, but there's literally none here because I made it easy not to get candy. I made it hard to get candy.

That's one example of making the good habits easier than the bad habits.

Here's another one: my work environment.

I've worked in a lot of different work environments over the years.

I found my best work environment. I work mostly from home now, in a home office. I actually have two home offices.

In my environment, I found that if I need to do deep work, which means I need to stay focused with no distractions, I need to make that easier than having distractions.

How do you do that? You remove yourself from the distractions.

If I've got to do deep work, I go into a place where only I am - an office for me - and close the door.

Before I do that, I tell anyone else in the house that I'm going to be in the office and I'm going to be doing deep work.

So unless the house is burning down or somebody's dying, please try not to distract me.

I shut the door. I turn the ringer off on my phone.

If I'm working on the computer, fine. But if I'm not working on the computer, I close it because it's a distraction.

Then I do my deep work.

I removed all the distractions from my environment, and I did that very intentionally.

I also sometimes work in the living room. Sometimes the TV's on. I'm usually not watching a lot of TV.

Sometimes my wife's watching TV, and that's fine.

But the type of work I do in there doesn't require deep thinking or deep work.

I can do lots of work in that environment, but I can't do deep-thinking work in that environment.

The first thing was that I had to learn the difference between deep work, deep-thinking work, and work I could do without deep thinking.

It's the same thing as far as the way I schedule my workday.

Every day, I have one or two key things that are priorities. I have to get them done today, which is good. That's how I operate best.

I also have an entire list of things that I'd like to get done today that aren't as important.

I know that the later it gets in the evening, the less sharp I am mentally for work.

So I make sure that I get the priorities done earlier in the day when I'm sharp, when I can make good decisions, and when I can do deep work.

I also know that some of the things lower on my list I can work on later in the evening if I have time, or I want to, or even at night, because they're not as important as the key work.

Again, it's intentional.

I'm intentionally ordering things to make the hardest things happen when I'm the most mentally on. Does that make sense?

Environment beats intention.

It doesn't matter that you know it's important. It doesn't matter if your intentions are good.

If you put yourself in the wrong environment, it makes it more challenging.

Remember the title of this: Make Good Habits Easier Than Bad Habits.

Your environment has a lot to do with this.

That's what I'm talking about when I say that when I have to do deep work, I go into the office, shut the door, turn the ringer off on my phone, and close the computer if I'm not working on the computer.

That's intentional environment design.

Next, increase friction for bad habits.

Remember what I told you about the candy? I want to eat the candy. There's a lot of friction for me to get the candy.

The candy is a bad habit. There's no doubt. That's not in question. Candy's a bad habit.

What have I done? I've increased the friction to get the candy.

I told you, if I want candy, I've got to get up. I've got to get ready. I've got to go out, get in the car, drive to town, and buy the candy.

There's a lot of friction there.

There's a lot less friction for me not to go get the candy. There's a lot less friction for me not to eat the candy and not go do anything, right?

On the opposite side of that, reduce the friction for good habits.

Back to the example I gave you. When I have to do deep-thought work, what do I do? I reduce as much friction as possible.

I don't do deep work while the TV's on, or while somebody's running around, or somebody's cooking, or whatever.

That's not the environment that has the least friction for my most important work or the good habits.

So all this really leads to this question: Are you designing your life to make success convenient?

Are you making success easier or harder for yourself?

If the wrong choice is easier than the right one, redesign your environment so the right choice, or the better choice, is easier than the wrong choice.

It sounds simple, but first you've got to look at what you need to do, look at the habits you have - good and bad - and recognize what they are.

Then intentionally design your life. Put systems in your life. Put frameworks in your life that make it easier, with less friction, to do the good habits and create more friction for the bad habits.

Success often comes from making good choices easier, not from becoming stronger.

Don't think you've got to get stronger.

You can try. Getting stronger is good. Getting strong isn't a bad thing.

But why keep hitting your head against the wall?

There's a wall over there. That's why I looked over there.

Don't keep banging your head against the wall.

Instead, intentionally design things so that your good habits have less friction than the bad habits.

So again, make it easy.

Make good habits easier than bad habits.

I'm Wes. Thanks for being with me. Subscribe, follow, and I'll see you soon.

·        Choose one habit you want to make easier.

·        Identify the friction currently making that habit harder to start or repeat.

·        Remove one unnecessary obstacle from the environment.

·        Choose one habit you want less of and add one point of friction.

·        Pay attention to when and where you do your best work, then protect that environment.

·        Keep adjusting until the better choice becomes the easier choice.

What's Next?

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