Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything(32)
One person who learned to design prompts effectively was my friend and colleague Amy, whose decision to go tiny was detailed in the beginning of this book. About seven years ago, Amy was busy caring for her three kids and trying to grow her business as a freelance educational-media writer. She loved her work developing patient-education materials for doctors and hospitals, but she wasn’t doing the necessary behaviors to grow her business. Usually an optimist, Amy found that she was overwhelmed by worry about the future. She wasn’t sleeping well and carried a sense of foreboding that she couldn’t shake. Every business owner worries about keeping on top of things, but Amy’s dread was driven by something far worse than falling behind or losing clients—her real fear was losing her kids.
Amy and her husband hadn’t been happy for years, but things had become unbearable lately. The fighting had escalated, and she knew it wasn’t a healthy environment for her kids. She wanted to get out, and she suspected that he did, too. Separating their lives would be painful, but more worrisome to Amy was what would come next. For years, she had chosen to focus on her husband’s good qualities—he was quick to laugh and generous, and he always supported her professionally. But now she felt backed into a corner with no healthy way to resolve the hostility, contempt, and growing lack of transparency between them. These were sides of her husband that she hadn’t wanted to see that now kept her up at night. Divorce can bring out the worst in people, and she feared what he might do if she got on the wrong side of him. Amy sensed that she was about to be on the very wrong side of him. She knew that there was a real possibility that her husband would bring their kids into the fight, and without a solid income, Amy faced the threat that she might lose custody of them.
More than anything else, Amy loved her kids. The idea of not being always available for them was shattering. But if she couldn’t make ends meet financially, her worst fears could be realized. Amy worried that her husband might resort to using every move available and that she would be stripped of her options and stuck in a never-ending conflict with the children in the middle. The only thing she could think to do was hire a lawyer and get her finances in order before beginning divorce proceedings. But she was stuck on how to create more business.
The anxiety over her crumbling marriage and the day-to-day stress of raising three kids made it difficult for Amy to concentrate. She had every reason in the world to knock things off her to-do list—return phone calls, hustle for work, and write her butt off—but she couldn’t get herself to take action on things that mattered. She’d try to get down to business every morning, but on most days Amy would end up folding clothes, cleaning the kitchen, or rewriting and reordering her to-do list instead of taking actions that would bring income to support her family. She would do a few tasks on her list, but they were usually easy and not very essential. She was either overthinking or underacting, but either way she wasn’t getting the work done. She wasn’t putting money in the bank and getting any closer to securing a future with her kids.
After learning about Behavior Design and Tiny Habits, Amy discovered her solution: Every day she would write down one thing—the most important thing—that she needed to get done that day on a Post-it. That was it. That would be her new habit. Amy felt confident and optimistic that she could do this each day. After all, she didn’t actually have to do the item on the Post-it; she just had to write it down. Simple. Ability was dialed in. But what made this habit a success wasn’t motivation or ability; it was designing a good prompt.
For some habits, it’s all about finding out where a new habit fits into your day.
Where a habit is located in your daily routine can make the difference between action and inaction, success and failure. Fortunately for Amy, she got it right on the first try; she planted her new habit seed in just the right spot.
Here’s how it worked: Amy would drop her daughter Rachel off at kindergarten every morning, and Rachel would wave good-bye and shut the car door. The door shutting was Amy’s prompt. She would immediately drive to a nearby parking space at the school, then she’d do her habit—writing down her most important task on a Post-it. Once she was done, Amy would stick the note to her dashboard, clap once for herself, and say, “Done!”
After the first week of doing her new habit, Amy said it felt effortless and automatic. She had found a natural place for it in her routine. Until she dropped off her daughter, Amy was thinking about what everyone needed to get out the door. Because she made her Post-it habit the first work-related thing she did, there was no time to overthink or get distracted. She also did herself a favor by designing this Starter Step to be laser-focused. Car door shuts. Mindset switches to business mode: Park the car and figure out the most important thing to do today and write it down. Finito. (And hooray!) It easily became part of her morning because she had anchored it to something that was already part of her routine. She didn’t need a text alert or a calendar notification to tell her to take Rachel to school, which meant she didn’t need an artificial reminder to write her Post-it. Amy designed a solid prompt, so the new habit formed naturally.
Amy was delighted by the clarity this simple habit lent to her day. Yes, this was a small action, she knew that, but her feelings of focus and success snowballed into much bigger actions. She created other habits that built on that first one. When she got home from dropping off Rachel, Amy would go immediately to her office and put the Post-it on the wall in front of her desk.