It's Sunday. September 20th.
Katy Milkman gave gym-goers audiobooks they could only listen to at the gym. Attendance went up and stayed up — not through discipline, through making the boring thing the only route to the wanted thing.
It works because it changes what you're deciding. You're no longer choosing whether to do the admin. You're choosing whether to have the coffee.
Pick something you genuinely look forward to and make it exclusive:
There is a second-order effect worth knowing. After a few weeks the wanted thing starts to feel like it belongs to the task, and the task stops feeling like the price of it. People describe eventually looking forward to the admin, which sounds absurd and is well documented.
It fails in exactly one way: you break the exclusivity once, and then again, and within a fortnight you have the podcast and no longer have the habit.
"[good podcast / specific coffee / that show] — only while I do [task]."
The rule only holds if it's actually exclusive. That's the difficult part, and it's the only part that matters.
Kevin | TodayIsTheDay
