How Our Environment Affects Our Behavior And Productivity
Let’s say there are two people who are trying to cut down their sugar intake. While both of them are working at their desks, person A has just a water bottle on his desk. On the other hand, person B has a tin of cookies on his desk. Who among them would be likely to eat cookies even though they planned not to? Person B, right? Why? More often than not, how long we stick to our habits and behavior depends not on our willpower or resistance but on our environment.
Sure, hard work, talent, resistance; all these matter. But in many cases, our environment matters more. Think about it. How easy would it be to stick to good habits and behaviors if they were the default response to the environment you’re in? Wouldn’t not having that tin of cookies on your desk be a lot easier than trying and motivating yourself not to pick that tin of cookies every time you look at it?
How your environment impacts you?
Our choices aren’t always dictated by willpower and beliefs. Sometimes we fall prey to certain choices and decisions because of the environmental cues around us. These environmental cues are the objects and people in our surrounding that trigger certain desires and thoughts that act us to behave in a particular way. For example, the plates you have at home are large so you tend to fill them up with more food than you require. So, even if you wake up in the morning and think to yourself, “I won’t eat too much today,” you’re bound to fall into the same pattern because these environmental cues become our reference guides that dictate how we should act and respond.
When we have to perform a habit out of the ordinary that serves no immediate effort, it ends up taking a lot of our willpower. So, many a time, we gravitate back to our routine habits even when we know they are detrimental to us. But there’s a way out. Let’s take a look at three ways you can design an environment that helps make it easy for you to switch to better habits and behavior.
Ways to design an environment that promotes good habits
Build or reduce friction
You can tweak your environment to make certain tasks easier or harder to do. Stanford psychologist B.J. Fogg agrees when he says, “Don’t focus your motivation on doing behavior X. Instead, focus on making behavior X easy to do.” How can you do this? Suppose you want to spend an hour at the gym every day. Instead of picking a gym that is miles away from your place, pick one that is on the way home from work. By designing your habits to fit in the flow of your current patterns, you’re more likely to stick with them.
Similarly, if you want to cut back on something, build friction. For example, you can cut back on consuming unhealthy foods by making sure they’re not stored in visible places or not buying them altogether. Just those extra steps you’d have to take to consume them would deter you from acting on that desire.
Automate good decisions
Design an environment that helps automate good decisions for you. For example, buy groceries in advance so that you can prepare a healthy meal and not opt for a takeaway. Use tools to block social media sites while working so that you don’t have to use your willpower, again and again, to stop scrolling through Instagram. Put your floss near your toothbrush instead of it lying around in the cabinet so that you are reminded to floss while you’re brushing your teeth in the night.
Task association
Task association is the process of strictly associating an outlet with a specified task. For example, when you’re at your work desk, use that place for your work activities only. You can even pick a location outside your home where you can get your work done. For example, some people prefer going to their nearest coffee shop to get an important project report done or to work on an article. That place then becomes associated with working. When you start doing this with all of your activities, you make your environment work for you instead of against you.
Now that you know how important a role your environment plays when it comes to productivity, what things will you change to skyrocket your productivity?
Let me get you started with one. Brutask, a simple and effective to-do list will help you remember all of your good habits and the actions you need to take to turn them into your routine.
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