Routines and habit stacking
- Experiments with habit stacking
- Looking for more habit stacking opportunities
- Research on habit stacking
- Double habit stacking
- Habit stacking at work with tech comm
- Meetings as routines
- Easy stacking and hard stacking
- Conclusion
Experiments with habit stacking
In reflecting on other goals I’ve had, I thought about why I’ve been so successful in biking to work. This is one effort that started out as a goal, which over the past dozen years has become a routine. In part, it’s become I incorporated my bike ride into a larger routine of commuting to work. (Granted, it’s note a huge ride — currently about 6.5 miles each way, so about 35 minutes of moderate pedaling, with hardly any hills, but it’s something!) I always go to work, so I fit my bike ride into that routine and it just becomes part of my normal everyday activities.
Building on that bike ride, I decided to stack another habit: an early morning fitness class. (I’m spoiled because Google provides these classes right at my work, but even if not, there are plenty of fitness centers offering similar classes.) When I arrive at work, at about 8am, I attend a fitness class (e.g., “Body strengthening” or “Body conditioning”) for 50 minutes. I’d always thought these classes weren’t for me, but I was wrong. Turns out I love them. The variety of physical activities is so diverse, there’s no hard wear and tear on any specific body part. Plus I love the variety of activities from the instructors — almost every class, there’s at least one activity I’ve never done before. I started my first class a couple of months ago and probably average 3-4 per week.
This consistency surprised me because I thought my interest and participation would fizzle out. But it hasn’t because I incorporated the class directly after my bike-to-work routine. When I roll into work, I’m already a bit sweaty and warmed up, so it’s a perfect transition into the class.
Looking for more habit stacking opportunities
I started to get more excited about habit stacking and looked for other ways to integrate goals into existing routines. I decided to apply the technique to a pesky chore at home: scooping the cat litter box. Somehow I ended up being the cat litter clean-up person at my house, probably because trash is one of my chores. Previously, I cleaned the litter box at random times. But following the principles of habit stacking, I decided to always change the cat litter at the same time I gather the trash. I always put the trash out on Tuesdays, and I generally gather the trash up on the weekend in preparation for trash day. Now I also change the cat litter at the same time. It’s just another receptacle I empty as part of gathering the trash.
By incorporating this activity during another activity that’s already a routine, I was able to piggyback onto the existing success of the other activity’s regularity. Now the cat litter issue is a solved problem around my house. (BTW, we have a single Popur litter box in a closet with the door open, and it works beautifully. I change the waste tray once a week and add a few new scoops of Fresh Step litter, which arrives on an Amazon subscribe cycle monthly. I realize the automatic litter box makes this chore almost trivial, but still, I’m the only one at my house who will empty it.)
Research on habit stacking
Habit stacking isn’t my own technique but is part of a larger idea of incrementalism. Steve Scott talks about it in his book Habit Stacking: 127 Small Changes to Improve your Health, Wealth, and Happiness. In an interview on Forbes, Scott explains how simple it is to stack habits: “One thing I never miss in the morning is coffee,” he says,” so I put my vitamins and water next to the coffee machine so I never forget to take them.” (Could ‘Habit Stacking’ Be The Key To Better Results?)
James Clear, author of the bestselling book Atomic Habits, also talks about habit stacking. In chapter 4, excerpted in “How to Build New Habits by Taking Advantage of Old Ones,” he explains:
Habit stacking is a special form of an implementation intention. Rather than pairing your new habit with a particular time and location, you pair it with a current habit. This method, which was created by BJ Fogg as part of his Tiny Habits program, can be used to design an obvious cue for nearly any habit.
By implementation intention, Clear means that carving out a clear plan for when you’re going to implement the intention/goal. For example, after X trigger, I will do Y goal. He says this is more powerful than motivation (wanting to do the goal) alone.
Basically, to integrate your habit stacking approach, follow these steps:
- Identify the new habits you want to incorporate.
- Identify the existing routines you have in your day.
- Decide how to pack the new habits around the existing routines.
Double habit stacking
Fueled by the success of habit stacking, I looked for ways to stack even more habits. Recently I’ve been doing physical therapy (still trying to address my pesky calf strains). But doing those PT exercises isn’t always so convenient. As a result, I decided to stack the PT exercises after my early morning fitness class. It turns out that doing those PT exercises after I’m already warmed up is much easier because my muscles are more pliable and responsive. I’m already in the gym, with equipment all around me. This serves as a clear trigger that sets in motion the new habit.
The only problems with this approach are the following:
- On the weekends, when I don’t have the fitness classes, the trigger isn’t there and it’s much harder to do the PT exercises.
- Some of the exercises require specialized equipment, like a wobble board, that isn’t available in the fitness gym.
Even so, stacking the PT exercises on top of the fitness class, which is stacked on the bike ride, which is stacked on the commute to work is working out well.
Here’s one more habit I’ve been trying to stack. I’ve been wanting to do a 10-minute meditation from the Calm app each day, but I never seem to fit this into my day once I get going with doc tasks and meetings. I realized that I have a 10-minute window of time after arriving at work on my bike and when the fitness class starts. I started doing a meditation during that little window of time.
Habit stacking at work with tech comm
What other habits could I stack? I looked for opportunities to stack some better work habits into the routine of my day. In looking for work routines, I realized that actually, the lack of routines at work is part of the problem: there aren’t many routines. I have a long list of doc bugs to address, and big open chunks of time. Somehow this makes completing the bugs more difficult.
To understand how open chunks of time is problematic, consider this opposite. In contrast to the open chunks of time in the corporate environment, students at school have a strict routine. For my kids, school starts at 7:30 am until 2:30pm. During that time, the classes are divided into specific, regimented hours. Homework is given with clear due dates and expectations. This routine provides opportunities to work on each of these subjects and help students get through enormous milestones of learning by the year’s end.
Imagine if instead of a class schedule, school simply involved various tests that students had to take. The tests didn’t have any clear due dates, for the most part. Students just had to figure out the material—reading on their own at their own pace—and then take the tests whenever they’re ready in order to move to the next grade. That’s kind of what my work is like. Thank goodness I have regular feature releases to create some form of deadlines for some of the doc work. Those tasks with deadlines are the easier ones. The ones that aren’t associated with any deadlines at all are the hardest.
I haven’t incorporated a “class schedule” into my workday. But I did try something. I habit-stacked a 90-minute pomodoro after my morning coffee (a decaf cortado), which I usually drink at around 9:30 am. This time period hooks into my most productive period of the day: the morning. During this pomodoro, I shut off chat, email, and text messages and try to focus immersively on a task. If I can do a few of these pomodoros a day, I’m much more productive. I wrote about these pomodoros in a previous post here: Techniques for deep work from Cal Newport.
I decided to stack a second 90-minute pomodoro in the afternoon, at around 2pm, when I get my second decaf cortado of the day. On Friday, I was able to complete a doc draft that I’d be working on off and on for a month without completion. (Whether reviewers will approve it is still TBD.)
Habit-stacking around getting coffee is somewhat weak, in my opinion. I’m not that regimented in getting coffee that I always get the coffee at 9:30am and 2:00pm, but this is what I’m working with in terms of routines at work.
Meetings as routines
Probably the most common approach to enforcing a routine at work is through meetings. Teams usually have weekly meetings. Some teams have specialized working meetings where they triage and plan bugs in the queue. Or the meetings might serve as a reporting mechanism for work completion. These regular meetings could also be used as the structure for routines.
For example, I have biweekly prompt engineering study group meetings. For this meeting, I had the goal of adding a new prompt engineering topic to my course. I envisioned a new topic added to that series every two weeks. The problem is that the meeting didn’t include any trigger for actually preparing the content, only publishing it and leading the study group. As a result, it didn’t work so well. I’m still trying to figure out how to habit stack that goal. In general, I’m less inclined to view meetings as a trigger for action.
Easy stacking and hard stacking
These habits are time-based activities, but what if I want to develop the habit of noticing and of listening? These aren’t something I can usually knock out during a specific interval of time. Or suppose I wanted to build a character trait of some kind, like patience. Developing these habits might require a different kind of trigger, one that I haven’t yet figured out.
One habit I’m struggling to integrate is writing more regularly. I seemed to have lost a dedicated time and space for writing blog posts. I’m still looking at my existing routines and figuring out where and how this writing activity might fit. Sometimes I’m simply not in the mood to write, while other times my mind is spilling over with ideas but I’m busy doing something else.
Another habit might be to fix bugs and make other updates to my API doc course. That course is a challenge to keep up to date, and I’ve fallen pretty far behind in making some needed updates. In short, despite my initial successes with habit stacking, I have plenty more to figure out, and it’s not as simple as it sounds.
One thing I’m wary of is habit-stacking my entire day. I want to maintain flexibility to allow me to address unknown issues as well as to keep some spontaneity and freeform in my behavior. I don’t want to become a cog in a machine, always turning the same direction and never veering off course. This mentality often leaves me feeling resentful when other people require my attention in ways that deter me from my routine, which isn’t healthy.
Conclusion
Habit stacking is a powerful technique for implementing goals that seems to work. The idea of piggybacking onto existing routines and using them as triggers for the new goal seems to result in higher success rates than other techniques. However, there’s still much to figure out and strategize when it comes to implementing intentions.
About Tom Johnson
I'm an API technical writer based in the Seattle area. On this blog, I write about topics related to technical writing and communication — such as software documentation, API documentation, AI, information architecture, content strategy, writing processes, plain language, tech comm careers, and more. Check out my API documentation course if you're looking for more info about documenting APIs. Or see my posts on AI and AI course section for more on the latest in AI and tech comm.
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