Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything(21)

The purpose of a Focus Map is to match yourself with easy behaviors that you want to do and that are effective in getting you to your aspiration. When you start with the easiest, most motivating thing, you can ladder up naturally to bigger behaviors—perhaps eventually eating blueberries in your oatmeal.

In Behavior Design we match ourselves with new habits we can do even when we are at our most hurried, unmotivated, and beautifully imperfect. If you can imagine yourself doing the behavior on your hardest day of the week, it’s probably a good match. It’s probably a Golden Behavior.





Finding Your Golden Behaviors Easily


When I first started researching and experimenting with Behavior Matching, I bought a lot of index cards. With practice, I learned to Magic Wand a Swarm of Behaviors very quickly. I’d set a timer for five minutes and see if I could write down twenty-five behaviors on the cards. (Easier than you think.) Then I’d sort the behavior cards and plot them on a Focus Map on the kitchen counter. It was like solving puzzles. My Behavior Design process always started with an abstraction—either an aspiration or outcome. About twenty minutes later, after taking the steps in Behavior Design, I would discover specific behaviors that I could readily turn into a reality. Twenty minutes and I was done.

I still do this all the time. It’s so fast and effective.

I’m going to walk you through an early Focus Map that worked for me. It came at a time when I was pretty stressed by having to organize a big conference at Stanford, and I wasn’t sleeping well. I wasn’t my usual optimistic self, and I was seriously worried about the conference being a disaster.

But I felt that getting more sleep would help me be optimistic and get more done. With that as my aspiration, I sat at my kitchen counter with my favorite black Sharpie and a stack of index cards. I started Magic Wanding behaviors that would help me get better sleep.

Put phone on airplane mode after seven p.m.



Eat dinner an hour earlier



Turn on my white-noise machine each night



Install blackout blinds



Purchase better bedding



Do a fifteen-minute wind-down ritual in the evening



Make a list of all my anxieties before bed



Put Millie in her crate at night





This was about a quarter of the behaviors I came up with, but you get the idea.

With a stack of potential behaviors in hand, I started placing them on my Focus Map according to impact. The ones that I knew would have lots of impact were putting my phone on airplane mode, turning on the white-noise machine at night, and installing blackout blinds, so I put them close to the high-impact end of the spectrum. I also knew that putting Millie in her crate would definitely make a difference because the older she gets the more she wanders at night. Eating dinner earlier would mean that I was able to go to bed earlier, but I wasn’t sure that I would be able to fall asleep earlier. So I put this behavior in the middle of the spectrum. Making a list of my anxieties seemed like it might work, but I wasn’t sure.

I then moved on to round two and asked myself if I could get myself to do each behavior.

I knew right away that eating dinner earlier was too hard to do, so I put that all the way to the left. But installing blackout blinds was an easy one-time behavior (because I could hire someone to do it). I put that all the way to the right. Same with the white-noise machine—it would be easy for me to switch on each night. Turning my phone to airplane mode would take multiple steps (turn on the phone, swipe up, etc.), so I edited the card: “Put my phone on silent mode.” Easier. And then that card went way to the right along with the card for putting Millie in her crate every night.

When you complete a Focus Map, you’ll have behaviors distributed on the chart. It might look like this.





This whole process of Focus Mapping took only a few minutes, and suddenly I had my Golden Behaviors: a one-time behavior (installing blackout shades) and three behaviors I could turn into habits (putting my phone on silent, turning on my white-noise machine, and crating Millie).

The last step in the Focus Mapping method is to select which behaviors you will design for. What’s in and what’s out? You will almost always select a handful of behaviors that are in the upper-right corner. You design for these Golden Behaviors, and you forget the rest.





When I saw my Golden Behaviors in the upper right-hand corner, what struck me was not the speed of my process but how right it felt. For weeks I had been thinking about how I could get better sleep, and this problem seemed overwhelming. In the modern world, sleep is hard sometimes. But by moving from the aspiration to the practical, I suddenly had concrete, easy behaviors I could do. They weren’t terribly creative or wildly inventive, but they were mine. I knew I could do them—me, BJ, in my real life. When I looked at my Golden Behaviors, I felt something like recognition. I thought, Of course I can do that, and Why didn’t I think of that before?

I’m not alone in reacting this way to the matching process. Whenever I do Focus Mapping with students and clients, there are plenty of aha moments.

After completing my one-time behavior and locking in my new sleep habits, I saw a huge improvement in my sleep after a week or so. Before this, I had slept terribly most nights when I was worrying about the conference. I hated going to bed—it felt like gearing up for a battle. But I was able to change that. I got more sleep, I regained my optimism, and I completed what seemed like a bajillion tasks to make the conference a success. I have my Focus Map—and the Behavior Design process—to thank.