Managing your habits can feel impossible, what if it was easy?
A study from the University of Scranton found that 23% of New Year’s Resolutions fail within one week, and 81% fail within two years. This is simple data to support what we all know and feel: changing habits is incredibly hard. It is a baffling experience to be doing something that you know you don’t want to be doing. Months of trying and failing to eat out less for lunch made this intimately familiar to me. One day I stumbled on the solution hiding in plain sight. In just ten minutes it changed my habits and I haven’t looked back since.
I was consistently spending $20–30 dollars per week on lunches despite my “best efforts” to keep that number to $0. I would meal prep for the week, run out of meal prep in a few days, and then resort to eating out the remainder of the week. The easy solutions of making more food or cooking another round of meal prep during the week didn’t stick. If I failed to make food, eating a delicious bagel sandwich from the local coffee shop was my only consequence. After lunch, the joy of the bagel sandwich would leave, and all I would have is the bitter taste of a missed goal.
Accidental Best Practices
After sharing my dilemma with a teammate, I discovered he was in a similar position. He, too, was eating out for lunch every single day despite not wanting to. He proposed a competition: whoever ate out the most in a month (the loser) bought whoever ate out the least (the winner) something that would make cooking at home more fun — a knife sharpening service, spices, coffee, etc.
It took us ten minutes to hash out the details, and the impact was immediate. In the first month my teammate went from spending $250 on lunch to $40, followed by just $17 the month after. Since we started the competition I haven’t spent more than $15 on lunch in any given month, which is nearly a 4x reduction in my expense. I had spent months trying to achieve the same outcomes without success, but this competition flipped a switch.
Our little competition had such an impact because we unconsciously followed every recommendation a behavior change expert would make. We made a public commitment that all of our co-workers are aware of, connected it to emotions (such as pride) by making it a competition, focused on the process instead of the outcome, and wrote down the results. In addition, we made it specific, measurable, and time boxed.
You might be thinking, “Of course that works! There are literally tons of books and experts that recommend just that type of strategy,” and you would be right. There is absolutely nothing special about the competition we set up.
If you read The Power of Habits by Charles Duhigg and Atomic Habits by James Clear, you will know all you need to know about creating successful habits. But the knowledge won’t help you if you don’t actually use it. I read both of them months before I wanted to eat out less, and I still failed to change my lunch habit because I didn’t follow the instructions.
Forming Habits is Like Baking a Cake
Self-improvement books are easy to understand — a lot of them could be summarized in a pamphlet. However, their digestibility masks the most important part. These books are actually cookbooks and their pamphlets are recipes that need to be followed.
Imagine you are following a recipe for a cake and decide you want to skip out on adding eggs. You shouldn’t be surprised at all when the cake falls apart. In The Power of Habits, Duhigg explains that the easiest way to implement a new habit is to write down the plan to implement it. Trying to form a new habit without this is like baking a cake without the egg: it’s simply not going to work.
Prior to the competition with my teammate, I had never done any of the analysis or planning that Duhigg and Clear recommend. I was skipping all of the essential ingredients of habit change and simply trying to will myself to eat out less. Of course I was failing!
The Perks of Following Habit-Recipes
The competition forced me to do all of the things that the experts recommend. When I started following the recipes, I magically formed new habits. I now eat out for lunch about 5% of work days, down from ~50% previously. That change will save me ~$1,000 per year. All it took was ten minutes of truly following expert advice.
The idea that it’s worth it to listen to experts and following their advice is so self-evident that it shouldn’t need to be said. But for me, taking the time to do it made all the difference. Reflect on your past goals — have you ever written on paper your plan to achieve them? If not, it’s worth giving it a shot. For the next goal you set, pick your favorite habit-forming expert and follow every single step in their recipe. If you do it for a New Year’s Resolution, you will be in the 19% who make the new habit stick.
About Me: I’m a Product Experience Manager on the Fusion team at Optum. I get the opportunity to help teams across our massive organization solve complex problems related to business strategy, experience design, and product development. You can reach me on LinkedIn.
A Fusion publication. We are employees of UHG and these views are our own and not those of the company nor its affiliates.
