Set Up Your Environment to Make Good Actions Easy

“Good habits are worth being fanatical about.”_John Irving

Today, I want to share a strategy on how we can make good habits easier to install and bad habits a little difficult to indulge. 

This simple strategy involves the use of friction as a means to an end.  By its use, we eliminate existing friction to give good behaviours a clear smooth passage but we create additional friction to hinder the growth of weakening bad habits. 

On the importance of habits and the reason for diligence about the subject, an American psychologist, Williams James once wrote as follows: 

“We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague.

The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.”

So if we want to make good habits easy, all we need to start with is: reduce the friction on the path of purpose by removing anything that can get in the way of our best intentions. 

By the same token, if we want to stop doing something less desirable, all we need to start with is: increase the friction on the path of purpose by enabling our resistance to self-destructive behaviours.

All mortals need dependable supports in their moments of weakness. That is why a carefully designed environment is necessary, even for the strongest amongst us. 

In this direction, James Clear, the author of 'Atomic Habits' writes: 

“The people who exhibit the most self-control are not actually those who have superhuman willpower; they’re the people who are tempted the least.” 

For such people, if they don’t want to watch much television, they don’t rely on raw willpower to prevent the formation of a low-value habit; instead they proactively unplug the TV and keep its cabinet locked.

The silent but essential insight here is this: as imperative as doing the right thing now is, doing the right thing, the next time is far more important.

This is because habit is basically defined as repeated performance. What we do once or once in a while doesn’t count for much in the context of habits. Habits are about what we do every single time. 

Repetition is the essence of habits, and for many people, frictions determine the fate of not just the present action but that of the next series of actions.

When we set up our environment for a meaningful purpose, we are priming it to make desirable behaviours the default behaviours. In other words, by removing obstructive frictions, we are making good actions, the easy actions to do.

For example:  If we want to make reading a habit, instead of putting TV set in multiple rooms in our house, we should put stacks of books in multiple rooms in our house.

This kind of setup gives regular study a clear smooth passage.

It is so because—too often—what we are surrounded by, can make a difference in the kind of behaviour we actually engage in, as the Stanford professor BJ Fogg writes:

 “If you pick the right (small) behaviour and sequence it right, then you won’t have to motivate yourself to have it grow. It will just happen naturally, like a good seed planted in a good spot.”

Now, whatever it is that we may want to achieve, we just need to proactively design an environment where the undesirable actions become the ones that are difficult to take on, while the necessary actions are proactively made easy to do.

Understand that when we harness the discipline to design an environment that enables a specific, meaningful aim, then our preferred habits will happen almost effortlessly. 

Therefore, set up your environment to make good actions easy, going forward.