Building Habits

Building Habits designs one habit properly and attaches it to something you already do. You name the cue, the routine, and the reward, and you rate how confident you are that it will stick. The stacking format is the useful part. 'After I pour my coffee, I will write my three priorities.' The existing behaviour of pouring your coffee becomes the trigger, so you're not relying on remembering anything. You already pour your coffee. The method originated with BJ Fogg at Stanford, whose Tiny Habits work pairs a very small new behaviour with an established one, and it reached a much wider audience through James Clear's Atomic Habits in 2018. Two things people get wrong. They make the habit too big. So 'after I pour my coffee, I will do 40 minutes of admin every day' is probably going to turn into a failure. Make it embarrassingly small to begin with. And secondly, people pick vague cues. 'In the morning' is not a cue. 'After I put my keys on the table' is. The confidence rating is worth revisiting rather than setting just once. If it's dropping, the habit is too big and the cue is wrong, and you can fix either in a couple of minutes. One habit at a time. Every habit you name here appears in your Habit Tracker for your daily ticking.