If your gym was inside your home, would you struggle to work out? If your phone wasn’t next to your bed, would you still check Twitter as soon as you wake up? If all of your friends started a run club, would you find it hard to get started running? The standard advice is simply to “try harder,” but that ignores how our environment shapes our behavior far more powerfully than willpower ever could.

Changing behaviors is hard. I think most people try too hard to use their willpower, which is extremely difficult. More importantly, it’s somewhat ineffective.

An easier and more effective way to do this is to modify your environment until your new mode of being is simply easier than the one you’re trying to avoid. 

Examples

• At the beginning of the pandemic, my gym closed, so I purchased a barbell & plates and stashed them under my bed. I’ve gotten ~5x as many workouts done since purchasing it than I would’ve going to the gym. There’s really no excuse you can have about working out when all the equipment is right in your home.
• I used to struggle with writing because I spent too much time browsing internet crap, so I purchased a typewriter because you can’t switch tabs on it.
• I used to take bad photos because I would take them too fast, so I purchased myself a film camera in order to slow down and understand how exactly to take a good photo. My cost per photo is ~$1 all inclusive, so there’s a big incentive to get it right.
• In order to cut down on my sugar intake, I simply don’t buy sweets. It’s easier to exercise willpower at the store than at home. 
• I purchased a whiteboard to track how many squats I do. Since it’s super visible, it’s easy to remember to do that.
• On the other hand, when I tried to lose weight by just “eating less” and “trying to lose weight” — I didn’t drop a single pound.

Other examples that I personally don’t implement —

From this thread by @samswoora

• Keeping a clock in view to ensure you don’t lose track of time
• Locking your phone away
• Working in a specific spot that triggers productivity for you

From this post by Parker Conley

• Timeblocking socially by using Focusmate, a virtual coworking site
• Blocking apps you don’t want to use at certain times of day

Theory

Willpower is overrated. It’s useful, but you don’t want to rely on it over the long run. You want systems that you set up that require less willpower to operate than if you were just powering through. Systems are leverage — a way to multiply your scarce willpower. Set yourself up so that tasks are easier in the future.

People, when I present the ideas from this essay, tend to react by saying that this is cheating. I have a hunch that people want the feeling of difficulty more than they want to see results. It’s a bit like cargo culting and mixing up causality. If it feels hard, it must be working, right? In my life at least, if something is difficult regularly, that means I’m doing it wrong and the habit won’t last. I recommend putting some effort into structuring life intentionally to fit stated goals, and in my opinion this will give a much higher chance of success in the long run.

I think part of the reason why people enjoy using their willpower to change behavior is because you have the sensation of accomplishing a lot. The feeling of struggle and sacrifice gives you feedback that something’s happening. That exact feeling that makes you feel progress makes it significantly harder for you to stick with that new lifestyle.

Trying to change your behavior by eliminating things is strictly inferior to working on increasing the behavior you want. Your positive behaviors will then take over the negative behaviors simply due to time spent. It’s important to focus on what you want to see more of.

It’s like the old dictum: Don’t think about polar bears. It’s quite difficult to reduce something by focusing on it. Most people approach behavior change from a negative perspective — I don’t want to do this. It’s much easier to substitute behavior with something positive.

How do I implement this?

Defaults

Building up your intuition on how defaults influence behavior is valuable even if you don’t want to change anything about your life. Through this, you develop a better understanding of why certain things feel easier than others. You can also see the effects of defaults in others. An offbeat way in which this is true is with zoning and land use. The way cities are laid out has a massive effect on how people interact with each other and the environment. By observing what happens automatically through design (be it intentional or not), you develop a lens through which to view the world.

Defaults are incredibly powerful — I think this is the strongest concept in environment design. What is the default is what’ll tend to happen most of the time. One classic example is the 401k opt-in. A research study compared enrolling people in a 401k by default against having them enroll by choice. Overall participation in the 401k rose from 61% to 86%! Which is huge, for such a small intervention. This is, for obvious reasons, massively abused by people trying to sell you things. 

Fortunately, you can reclaim this from Big Corpo, no purchase required. Design things so that they happen by default. For example, place healthy snacks near your work desk if you struggle with snacking (Google did this at their cafeterias). Place celery right by your desk, and put cookies in the top cabinet. Now, of course, you’ll still eat the cookies. But in aggregate, over the whole year, you’ll eat a lot less cookies and a hell of a lot more celery than you otherwise would have.

Peer Pressure

Changing your social environment is exceptionally powerful — it’s an accelerant to how people learn things. The best way to change your behavior is to make some new friends that’re doing the thing you want to do. The Mundanity of Excellence is a paper about the differences in performance between regular swimmers and Olympic level swimmers — there’s quite a lot there, but for me the useful takeaway was that the key difference is social circle. Elite swimmers weren’t doing radically different training, they were simply immersed in environments where proper technique was what everyone around them did, and where the expectations were higher. If you join a group of people who are good at something, you will inevitably get better. You can modify your environment until you can’t help but get better.

There are other ways to use social pressure. My friend Parker uses Focusmate, which is a way to get enough motivation to do your work by coworking with someone else virtually. Another idea is to set up an event where you are encouraged to do the thing you’re struggling to get to. 

Friction

You can also add friction, though it’s less powerful than other techniques. Generally speaking, focusing on what you want to see more of is the best method. Having said that, there are situations where substituting habits isn’t possible, and you need to aim for some harm reduction. My canonical example is adding Opal and ColdTurkey app blockers to add minor friction when visiting time wasting sites — an easy win.

As an aside, I really like Opal. It’s silly to say, but the pleasant UI made it sticky in a way that other blocker apps weren’t. The little glowing opal orb really works on me, as do the pleasant images that flash when you’re taking a break. Nicely made app — the free tier is quite good.

You can also change the visibility of objects. If you struggle to remember something, put it right in the middle of your floor. When I want to work out, I’ll put my barbell in the middle of the floor where I have to step over it all the time in order to force myself to work out. Is it a tripping hazard? Absolutely, yes, but because of that I’m reminded that I need to work out. Similarly, if you want to avoid doing something, feel free to hide it such that it’s not in your field of view. You can do this with digital stuff. When I wanted to game less, I just deleted all of my icons for the games I had installed. I still gamed, but at a much reduced frequency.

An offbeat example of incorporating friction is when I bought a film camera in order to slow down and improve my photography. I used to take photos super fast and they would come out pretty bad. Buying a film camera, which requires manual focus and aperture adjustment, slowed down my shooting.

A special subset of friction is downgrading your tech to make it harder to get distracted. Matt Might’s article inspired this, with his description of ordering paper newspapers. It’s easier to get your reading in when it’s not on a screen. I implemented this with my typewriter — it’s hard to switch tabs to social media on a typewriter.

Handling Annoyance 

If something is convenient, you’ll do it more often. Try making more things convenient! Reduce artificial scarcities to encourage certain behaviors. When we got our cat, I would get so annoyed at needing to grab the whole vacuum out of the closet in order to clean up a mess he’d made with his kibble. We purchased a small handheld vacuum, life became significantly easier, and our house got cleaner. 

Beware, this can become an excuse for purchasing products aspirationally, as magical totems to change behavior. I try to buy based on a specific need, rather than a vague sense of “if I have it around, I’ll definitely use it then”.

Innate Enjoyment

This could be an essay by itself, but I wanted to at least gesture at this idea. Pay attention to your vibes. If you don’t like working out at your gym, you probably won’t go that often — consider switching gyms. If the vibes are good, you’ll enjoy yourself more overall.

Conclusion

Here are some good questions to ask yourself —

What gets done? 

What seems harder than it should be? 

What seems too easy?

What seems to happen unbidden, where you catch yourself doing it without even paying attention to it?