Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything(28)
After attending my two-day boot camp, Molly knew this was a Behavior Design problem, not a character flaw or a matter of willpower. Instead of getting down on herself about skipping out on a Sunday in the kitchen with her future husband, she started thinking more strategically about how she could make meal prep easier. She joked that since meal prep was so fun for him maybe he could just do hers as well. She said that suggestion got her a raised eyebrow and a hearty laugh but not much else.
One day Molly went to a friend’s house and watched her use an unfamiliar device with a flat frame and an adjustable blade. Her friend sliced an entire carrot into a salad bowl in about ten seconds with no wobbly cutting board and no dull knife. This seemed like magic to Molly. She asked her friend, “Wow! What is that thing?” It was a mandoline—the first of many time-saving kitchen tools that Molly would later acquire (warning: mandoline slicers are great but also dangerous—be careful). Using her future husband as a resource and key tools like her handy mandoline, Molly reduced her Sunday food prep time from five hours to two and a half. Now she mandolines carrots, cucumbers, and peppers into Tupperware containers lined up for each day of the week. Cutting the time in half and making the process more enjoyable was all she needed to move her above the Action Line.
Months after she redesigned her behavior, Molly and Ryan were consistently prepping ten meals per week, which covered all their lunches and dinners on workdays. Ditching decision fatigue meant Molly could make room during her day for exercise, which helped her increase her energy and overall wellness even more. She found herself better able to keep up with Ryan on their trail runs, and she even proposed that they keep their healthy eating going while on vacation. The night before their honeymoon, Molly dragged Ryan to the bulk section of the supermarket to stock up on nuts and blueberries for the plane ride. A year later, she told me she is happier, more energetic, and more productive than ever before. Most important, she now asks, “How can I make this easier?” when she lacks the motivation to do something she wants to do.
Not everyone should buy a mandoline or fancy kitchen equipment to make their behavior easier to do, but in Molly’s case, she had experimented with other ways (buying precooked food, prepping meals every evening) and nothing had worked. She knew tools and resources were one Behavior Design strategy that she hadn’t tried, so she went for it. By cutting her time in half, she crossed the line from too hard to easy to do. In the end, I’d say that a flexible, experimental mindset for problem-solving was perhaps Molly’s most handy tool of all.
EASY-TO-DO ANALYSIS
Meal Prep Habit—What is making this behavior hard to do?
The problem: The weakest links in Molly’s Ability Chain were time (five hours was too much) and physical effort (chopping and cutting with bad equipment is laborious).
Meal Prep Habit—How can I make this behavior easier to do?
The solution: Molly used tools to help her eliminate the time and physical effort factors that were hampering her ability to act. She also leaned on Ryan as a resource to guide her in what to prepare for the week and how to do it.
3. MAKE THE BEHAVIOR TINY
Making a behavior radically tiny is the cornerstone of the Tiny Habits method for a reason—it’s a foolproof way to make something easier to do, which means it’s often a good place to start regardless of your motivation levels.
We have already looked at several examples of how to make things tiny. They fall into two categories: Starter Step and Scaling Back.
Starter Step
This is exactly what it sounds like: one small move toward the desired behavior. If you want to make a habit out of walking three miles every day, your Starter Step might be putting your walking shoes on. That Starter Step becomes your Tiny Behavior and the only action you need to do at the start of your new habit. The objective here is to begin with a crucial step in the process of doing the desired behavior. Tell yourself: I don’t have to walk. I just have to make sure I put on my shoes each day.
Putting those shoes on will shift your perception. Walking suddenly won’t seem so hard. Most days you’ll head out the door and take a spin around the block after putting your shoes on. This is one way Starter Steps can turn into bigger habits. However, I want to share an important part of the Tiny Habits mindset: Do not raise the bar prematurely. Don’t rush to make the behavior bigger. It’s always okay to not walk after putting on your shoes if that’s all you want to do for the day. By keeping the bar low, you keep the habit alive. You’ll ensure that you’re always capable of doing the behavior no matter how your motivation fluctuates.
One of Sarika’s biggest victories was cooking herself breakfast. This was a task that she had felt was both insurmountable and defeating. People cooked breakfast every day; why did this feel so hard for her to do? After taking a Tiny Habits course and learning about Starter Steps, Sarika was determined to play around with habits to see if she could design her way out of the problem. So Sarika decided that she’d turn the stovetop burner on first thing in the morning. That was her new habit. Oh, so tiny. It was a Starter Step to cooking breakfast. And that’s all she did the first few days. She’d leave the burner on for a few seconds, then turn it off. But she soon built on that Starter Step and put a pot on top of the burner. Then once the pot was there, she thought, Why not boil water for porridge? Once the water was boiling, it seemed silly not to put the porridge in, and she wound up making herself breakfast most days, amazed at how much easier it felt than what she’d built it up to be in her head. But if she ever felt rushed or distracted, it was okay if she just turned the burner on and off because the Starter Step is the behavior that needs to become hardwired into her routine.