Articles Categorised with "Habit Building"

• 04-03-2024

  162 - Laziness is exhaustion

  A client of mine who’s a clinician recently told me she feels happy any time her first patient of the day (8am slot) cancels, but right after she feels guilty for feeling good about not working....

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• 07-08-2023

  87 - Habit-building 15: Cashing out > Cashing in

  I’ve been facing a challenge that you may be familiar with. The question of whether or not to stop mid-flow. ...

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• 04-08-2023

  86 - Habit-building 14: Building a habit MVP

  Product managers and designers are obsessed with reducing friction for users. It’s not unusual to find them laboring over the smallest detail, like the placement of a text field or the number of clicks to checkout. While to the untrained eye it may seem like making a mountain out of a molehill, the golden rule for any habit-forming product is to make it easy for users. ...

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• 01-08-2023

  85 - Habit-building 13: The power of a motivation ritual and how TikTok does it

  There’s a TikTok commercial doing the rounds. You may have seen it. It’s called Mystery Apartment Girl. ...

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• 29-07-2023

  84 - Habit-building 12: Habits at scale is culture

  Imagine yourself, young and nervous. You’ve gathered the courage to sidle up to your mother and tell her that you’ve decided to drop out of college to start a T-shirt company. As you try and stitch the words right, your grandmother walks in and chimes “Like mother, like daughter.” Newsflash: Your mother had dropped out of school to start something on her own. Suddenly, a weight is off you. ...

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• 26-07-2023

  83 - Habit-building 11: Building habits by hooking up with a crew

  My mother believed kite flying to be a dangerous sport. She would go back years to recount all neighborhood accidents when kids, chasing kites, had fallen off rooftops. She also made this clear to my friends. I was thus forced to fly kites by myself on the sly. For those unfamiliar, kite flying needs prep (coating thread with powdered glass) and shared knowledge to succeed (kite-cutting, reeling in). ...

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• 23-07-2023

  82 - Habit-building 10: How to make a habit attractive

  What is common to Pepsodent, Febreze, and Dettol? ...

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• 20-07-2023

  81 - Habit-building 9: Design your environment for good habits

  Between my wife and I, we have a top priority. Make the milk sipper disappear. We agree that’s the only way for us to maintain a semblance of mealtimes for our 20-month-old toddler. The alternative is to have the day disrupted several times by the chirp of “Milk! Milk!” because of the sight of a stray milk sipper. ...

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• 17-07-2023

  80 - Habit-building 8: A surefire way of starting a habit that will last

  I’ve decided to start eating healthy several times in my life. Any success has only lasted a short period. And then, like a rubber band, I’ve snapped right back. This is called regression to the mean but you don’t need to know that to get what I’m talking about. Because we’ve all been there. ...

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• 14-07-2023

  79 - Habit-building 7: Have you noticed your cue?

  One doesn’t need to be a hypnotist today to convince anyone of the need to brush their teeth. But in the early 1900s, even such a person wasn’t enough. ...

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• 11-07-2023

  78 - Habit-building 6: Hacking the habit loop

  Every action has a cost and a benefit. You would think that you do something only if the benefit is more than the cost. But I will argue that you’re likely to do something, perhaps consistently too, even when the costs outweigh the benefits. By simply having the benefits first, you can be made to do something that is of net negative value. ...

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• 08-07-2023

  77 - Habit-building 5: Understanding the habit loop

  You now identify yourself as the person you want to be. With that as the kickstarter for the ‘New Me’ campaign, you start canvassing votes. Every action or behavior aligned with the ‘New Me’ is a vote you need. But with voting we know that even with the best intentions, it is too easy to forget or procrastinate. How do you stop yourself from flaking out? ...

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• 05-07-2023

  76 - Habit-building 4: Identity is the root; behavior, the flower

  How we see things affects how we feel about things and how we feel about things shapes how we act. ...

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• 02-07-2023

  75 - Habit-building 3: Use fresh starts to change your identity

  We tend to repeat any routine that makes us happy. Problem is lots of things feel short-term blissful while being long-term harmful. ...

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• 29-06-2023

  74 - Habit-Building 2: What’s your internal flywheel?

  There’s a fundamental problem with how we approach habit-building. This problem arguably is the biggest reason for our failure to meaningfully change. The problem is this: we try to change what we do without first changing who we are. ...

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• 26-06-2023

  73 - Habit-Building 1: If you want to build a lasting habit, ask yourself: ‘Who am I voting to power?’

  I had good grades through school. Freshman year and they started falling. ‘I’m smart,’ I reassured myself. I waited for things to change. ...

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• 30-04-2023

  54 - Why do we tend to go with the tried and tested for big decisions?

  We often hawk ourselves like potatoes when it matters. Even when we’re zucchini or asparagus or anything but a potato. Why? ...

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