Weaponizing laziness: constructing obstacles to bad habits

Scott H. Young’s new article, How to Build Habits of Moderation, presents an interesting contradiction. Generally, it’s easier to have what James Clear calls a bright-line habit, like going fully vegetarian instead of eating vegetarian most of the time, since that reduces willpower when considering what to do. (Reduces ambiguity.) But it’s also generally really hard to quit a habit cold-turkey, like not going on distracting websites at all. What’s behind this contradiction?

Scott doesn’t give us a bright-line answer, but he says that it has something to do with that most habits don’t need to be quit cold-turkey. We can, for example, have fast food once in a while, and that’s fine.

So, Scott argues that we should aim to have moderation in our habits, and that for bad habits, we should add obstacles to prevent us from doing that thing. For example, having a timer on the TV so that it can only be turned on during certain hours of the day. Even though we can unplug the TV from the pesky timer and then plug it into an open outlet, that adds an obstacle that we don’t want to take.

What I like about putting obstacles on habits — evident from products like the kSafe — is that they use your desire to not do work against you. When you set up an obstacle, present-you assumes (probably correctly) that future-you doesn’t want to do work. When future-you wants to watch TV to waste time, it might see the need to go to the TV, unplug it, and plug it into an open outlet as work — perhaps enough work to make you consider not watching TV after all.

What this means is that we can hopefully understand future-you’s desire to not do work and construct appropriately high barriers, effectively, well, weaponizing laziness.

What would be interesting is to see if this is quantifiable or comparable, that is, to study how well different obstacles match up with different habits, and what magnitude of an obstacle is necessary to overpower a certain habit. Maybe it’s a spectrum: not having any obstacles is a 0 on the obstacle scale, having a power outlet timer might be a 4, and kSafe, which doesn’t allow you to get, say, the television remote before the safe opens unless you smash the container, might be a 10.