Embrace the Habit Stack Attack

Photo by Lindsay Henwood on Unsplash

I’ve been a habit junkie for quite some time devouring the writings of B.J. Fogg, Charles Duhigg, and others to get better at getting better all with the goal of creating powerful habits. I would identify habits I wanted to create and then diligently work to identify the cue and reward that I could settle my new habit into and nurture daily.

There are a lot of tools that you can use to start building your habits. I tried habit trackers, reminders on my calendar or through apps, and all sorts of other approaches to start getting my habits to be a regular occurrence. I would do good for a few days and then, without warning, would fall off the bandwagon. I would then go back and revisit how I could better structure my habits so that I could stick with them. This became a vicious cycle of trying over and over without much progress.

Habit trackers are appealing because of their visual nature. They can be simple rows with the tasks that you want to achieve and the columns are each day of the month that you do that task. They are a great tool to see overall trends with your habits such as what days of the week might be difficult for you or how changing when you did the habit was helpful. I especially like to use them as part of my weekly wrap up as I reflect on what I learned and what things I need to adjust or explore further.

Photo by My Life Journal on Unsplash

Calendar reminders are a good nudge to remind you when you have a habit coming up that can be scheduled — taking time to read, working out, etc. I use my digital calendar on google as I can have it across multiple devices and have it push out the reminders to me.

Apps can also be helpful and a quick search of the Apple store or Google Play will give you endless apps to help you keep your goals on track. Some end up feeling more like to-do lists than actual trackers. It is definitely a trial-and-error process but I would highly recommend Strides and To Do Goal Tracker, Tasks List.

The Most Powerful Tool You Can Use — The Habit Stack

Despite the tech interventions and the beautiful trackers, it wasn’t until I learned about habit stacking that my habits really started to gain traction. Habit stacking is a term coined by James Clear where you begin to build new habits by building them on top of habits that already exist. This is based on a psychological behavior called implementation intentions (coined by Peter M. Gollwitzer). With implementation intentions, you setup your goal-directed activity (the desired habit) to follow a critical activity. Put another way, when you do x activity, y habit follows.

This habit stack inserts drinking a glass of water in between brushing my teeth and washing my face.

Using this approach, I have been able to rapidly increase the number of habits that I have incorporated into my daily life. For example, I wanted to build the habits of drinking more water and spending 10–15 minutes journaling in the morning. I then looked at some of the habits that I already do in the morning — getting up, brushing teeth, getting dressed, and making coffee. When I got up and when I got dressed fluctuated for me so I picked brushing teeth and making coffee as the habits that I would use to anchor my new habits.

With this approach, I drink a glass of water after I brush my teeth, another glass as my coffee is brewing, and I spend my 10–15 minutes writing as I drink my coffee. This has worked so well that there is rarely a morning when I don’t follow through on these newly built habits.

Here you can see where I inserted water drinking and journaling into tasks I always do.

I am doing the same now with my writing habit. I knew I needed to on a relatively consistent basis work on my writing but that it couldn’t always be in the morning or evening. During the day was always a toss-up, but I felt that if I could anchor to either a morning or evening behavior I could build a practice of writing every day.

So now, on weekend mornings when I don’t have work I follow up journaling with engaging in my daily writing habit. If I don’t get to writing in the morning, then I pick it up directly after the end of my workday when I am reviewing my schedule for the next day.

Habit Stacking Tips

If you are wanting to get started with habit stacking it is an easy as 1–2–3:

1. Identify the existing habits that you always do without fail. These should be things that you rarely think about but naturally do as part of your day.
2. Identify a new habit you want to build. These should be simple, discrete tasks that take minimal time to complete.
3. Add the new habit to the existing habit. Logically insert the item into your habit stack. Avoid anything that causes you to backtrack from one room to another or is disruptive from a flow perspective.

With that, you are ready to try habit stacking!

If you’re new here…

We are on a journey to helping you Become the CEO of You so that you can become the best version of yourself. Over the course of the month, we’ll cover knowing yourself, creating goals, adopting mindsets, embracing habits, and practicing self-care. You can find all the posts in our publication Living to Learn. You can also find my random musings on my personal page here.