Make good habits effortless

Remove as much friction as possible

I know it’s important to wear sunscreen. I just had a chunk of skin taken off my shoulder thanks to a problematic mole. I want my kids to wear sunscreen. I don’t want them to be getting chunks cut off their shoulders 30 years from now either!

But knowing that something is wise tends not to be enough to make us do it. If so, we’d all be physically fit and have fatter bank accounts. The key to making a good habit happen is to make it as easy as possible.

No waiting time

So with sunscreen, we don’t just have spray bottles sitting in the mudroom. Two of them have migrated out to the porch so that no one needs to carry them out there when heading out. Why two? That generally tends to be the number of people who are putting sunscreen on simultaneously, and this way no one has to wait. Needing to wait adds friction and increases the chances that someone says screw it.

(Is this “decorating with cereal boxes” — as I complained about in a recent post? Oh well!)

Of course that’s fine for heading out to the car, but we have a backyard pool. People tend to exit via a different door to get there. So now there is spray on the front porch too. The goal is to make putting on sunscreen close to effortless. Because when things are close to effortless, people actually do them.

Effort undermines things

So it goes for everything. If you want to read more, you need something good to read with you at all times. If you want to save more, you need to set up automatic transfers so the money goes into a savings or brokerage account without you even seeing it. If you want to eat more fruit you can put a bowl of something snack-able (berries, grapes) right in front of you while you’re working or watching TV so your mindless snacking is healthy.

It’s not that tiny bits of effort are so much in themselves. Most of us are capable of going to the fridge and pulling out some fruit if we’re hungry. But even tiny bits of effort undermine a great many things. That’s why we spend so much time scrolling around online, instead of doing things we’d actually prefer with our leisure time. Scrolling is effortless. If you want good habits to compete with the less good ones, figuring out how to make them as effortless as possible is really the only way to give them a fighting shot.