Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything(34)
This prompt is anything in your environment that cues you to take action: sticky notes, app notifications, your phone ringing, a colleague reminding you to join a meeting.
You can learn to design these Context Prompts effectively. If I had entered our dinner appointment on my calendar with a pop-up reminder, Denny and I would have shown up on our neighbors’ doorstep at six p.m. with a fresh salad. Creating this Context Prompt would have taken me about twenty seconds. But if I had put “Go to Wanda and Bob’s for dinner” on my to-do list, that design would have probably failed because I don’t look at my to-do list when I’m deep into a project.
Effective design of Context Prompts is a skill. And learning this skill takes practice.
About ten years ago, I realized that there were certain behaviors I needed to do only once a week: water plants, pay bills, and restart my computers. I first tried setting alarms on my phone. At ten a.m. on Saturday, the alarm to water plants would go off. Fine. But sometimes I was at the grocery store, so my ability to do the task was zero. I was below the Action Line. Sometimes an alarm would go off for a task that I had already done for the week, so that prompt wasted a bit of my time.
I searched for a solution to this problem and found my answer. I wrote each weekend task on a small plastic sticky about half the size of your typical Post-it. I placed all the stickers on a laminated page that was labeled WEEKEND TASKS. Now my typical routine on Saturday mornings is to get out the laminated sheet and put it on the kitchen counter. Simple. This sheet becomes my checklist for the weekend. As I do each task, I move the sticker to the back of the sheet so I see only the tasks I haven’t completed. On Sunday, when I finish the final task, I flip the laminated page over, put the final sticker on the page (victoriously!), and store my laminated sheet of tasks for the next weekend. My weekend checklist was a game changer for me. I finally could reliably do tasks like clean the fridge and water my houseplants.
There are times you will need to design a Context Prompt for yourself or others. This kind of prompt is best suited for a one-time behavior (like making a doctor’s appointment), yet it’s not a great way to create a habit. When I teach industry innovators, I ask them to share their most effective Context Prompts. Some are common and obvious. Others are surprising. Here are a few of them.
Put your ring on the wrong finger.
Send yourself a text message.
Write on your bathroom mirror with a dry-erase marker.
Rearrange furniture so something is oddly out of place.
Set an alarm on your voice assistant.
Put a reminder note inside the fridge.
Ask your child to remind you.
Stick a Post-it on the screen of your mobile phone.
Context Prompts can be useful and effective at times, but they can be stressful. Managing our prompt landscape effectively is one of the biggest challenges in our modern lives. When you set up too many Context Prompts, they can actually have the opposite effect—you become desensitized and fail to heed the prompt. You end up not hearing notification dings and not seeing sticky notes. It’s like living next to train tracks—at first the noise of a train is deafening, then . . . what train?
I have a huge whiteboard in my home office listing dozens of tasks that are organized by project and coded in different colors. It’s . . . a lot. In order to manage this visual and psychological avalanche, I cover up the prompts for the tasks I’m not doing with a movable curtain so I see only the prompts for what I need to do that day. I’ve learned that covering up all the other prompts makes me calmer—and more focused.
If you’ve created a Context Prompt and it’s not working, you are not doing anything wrong. You probably don’t lack motivation or willpower. Do yourself a favor—don’t blame yourself. Redesign the prompt instead. Find what prompt works for you.
In today’s world, many of our Context Prompts are created by other people or organizations. We get e-mails asking us to do favors. Our digital wristwatch tells us to stand up. A red dot appears on app icons when we get a new message.
The classic prompts we grew up with are relatively easy to manage: We put junk mail in the recycling bin, and we remove ourselves from mailing lists. We change the channel during an infomercial. We tape DO NOT DISTURB on our office door.
However, the prompts coming from digital technology are harder to manage. LinkedIn has invested a lot of time and money to tell you that 233 people have looked at your profile this week and that you should click to see who they were. Do you want to remove that prompt? Maybe. Maybe not. After all, you’re curious and the attention is flattering. Spam is a clearer issue. It continues to steal our time every day.
Other than getting off the grid, we may never find a perfect way to stop unwanted prompts from companies with business models that depend on us to click, read, watch, rate, share, or react. This is a difficult problem that pits our human frailties against brilliant designers and powerful computer algorithms.
That said, you can find ways to calm your Context Prompts. I urge you to invest a little effort now to save yourself time and energy later. Sometimes it’s simple and fast. An industry innovator recently sent a text message to my mobile phone asking for a business favor: He wanted me to make a presentation to his team. I liked his proposal, and I knew I’d likely say yes. But he asked me using the wrong channel. I texted him back: “Hello! I want to respond to you, but please send me this request in an e-mail. (I use texting only for family and friends.) Thank you!” The next morning I saw his reply via e-mail: “Sorry. I’ll use e-mail from now on.” In about thirty seconds, I had saved myself from dozens of future prompts on my mobile phone that would interrupt and distract me.