How Can You Design Your Own Environment for Success?
“During the energy crisis and oil embargo of the 1970s, Dutch researchers began to pay close attention to the country’s energy usage. In one suburb near Amsterdam, they found that some homeowners used 30 % less energy than their neighbours - despite the homes being of similar size and getting electricity for the same price.

It turned out the houses in this neighbourhood were nearly identical except for one feature: the location of the electrical meter. Some had one in the basement. Others had the electrical meter upstairs in the main hallway. As you may guess, the homes with the meter upstairs in the main hallway used less electricity. When their energy use was obvious and easy to track, people changed their behavior.”

Lesson from the story:

Every habit is initiated by a cue, and we are more likely to notice cues that stand out. Make the cues of good habits obvious in your environment.

A personal story by James Clear to elucidate this point further:

“I used to buy apples from the store, put them in the crisper in the bottom of the refrigerator, and forget all about them. By the time I remembered apples would have gone bad. I never saw them, so I never ate them. Eventually, I took my own advice and redesigned my environment. I bought a large display bowl and placed it in the middle of the kitchen counter. The next time I bought apples, that was where they went - out in the open where I could see them. Almost like magic, I began eating a few apples each day simply because they were obvious rather than out of sight”

Here are a few ways you can redesign your environment and make the cues for your preferred habits more obvious:

If you want to drink more water, fill up a few water bottles each morning and place them in common locations around the house.

If you want to practice guitar more frequently, place your guitar stand in the middle of the living room.

The opposite also works for e.g

It’s easy not to take your vitamin when they are out of sight in the pantry.

It’s easy not to read a book when the bookshelf is in the corner of the guest room.

Conclusion: If we want to make a habit, a big part of our life, we have to make the cue a big part of our environment. Environment design is powerful not only because it influences how we engage with the world but also because we rarely do it. Most people live in a world others have created for them. But we can alter the spaces where we live and work to increase our exposure to positive cues and reduce our exposure to negative ones. Environment design allows us to take back control and become the architect of our life.

In the beautiful words of James Clear, “Be the designer of your world and not merely the consumer of it.”

#myreflections #anideaaday #environment #cues #atomichabits