Environment design - Impact on Focus and Habits

People are not the product of habits, they are the product of environments. According to Stanford psychologist and behavior expert BJFogg, design beats will-power. Design is about how you have set things up. Most people have not designed their environment for flow. Instead, most people’s environment and life have been set up for continual distraction, which is the opposite of flow. Flow is something that must be designed for.

Engineer your environment

“We can really thrive when we work to understand how our environment impacts our habits and derailers. We’d like to think we make decisions rationally, but research shows that more often than not, we don’t. Making micro-decisions about your environment can set you up for success. Over the years, I’ve found these changes can be hard to make at first, but they’re worth the pay off. Let’s say you need time for strategy work and deep thinking. Log off email or Slack, silence your phone, and put it in the other room. Or if you know you have a tendency toward perfectionism, create deadlines so you’re accountable for turning in 60 percent of the work, then 80 percent, and so on. Ultimately, we choose to be our own best friend or our own worst enemy.”

–Kerry Goyette, author of “The Non-Obvious Guide to Emotional Intelligence,” a Forbes Best Business Book, and president of Aperio Consulting Group, whose clients have included Shell Oil and the Houston Texans

One of the most effective ways to reduce friction associated with your habits is to practice environment design.

One of the most effective ways to reduce friction associated with your habits is to practice environment design.

1. How to achieve more with less effort?
2. Imagine you are holding a garden hose that is bent in the middle. Some water can flow through, but not very much. If you want to increase the rate at which water passes through the hose, you have two options. The first option is to crank up the valve and force more water out. The second option is to simply remove the bend in the hose and let water flow through naturally.
3. Trying to pump your motivation to stick with a hard habit is like trying to force water through a bent hose. You can do it, but it requires a lot of effort and increase the tension in your life. Meanwhile, making your habits simple and easy is like removing the bend in the hose. Rather than trying to overcome the friction in your life, you reduce it.

If you want to make a habit a big part of your life, make the cue a big part of your environment

If you want to make a habit a big part of your life, make the cue a big part of your environment. The most persistent behaviors usually have multiple cues.

1. If you want to practice guitar more frequently, place your guitar stand in the middle of the living room.
2. If you want to remember to send more thank you notes, keep a stack of stationery on your desk.
3. If you want to drink more water, fill up a few water bottles each morning and place them in common locations around the house.

By sprinkling triggers throughout your surroundings, you increase the odds that you will think about your habit throughout the day.

It is hard to stick to positive habits in a negative environment.

It is hard to stick to positive habits in a negative environment.

We become a product of the environment that we live in.

1. You can break a habit, but you are unlikely to forget it.
2. Once the mental grooves of habit have been carved into your brain, they are nearly impossible to remove entirely - even if they go unused for quite a while.
3. It is hard to maintain a Zen attitude in a life filled with interruptions. It takes too much energy.
4. In the short run, you can choose to overpower temptation.
5. In the long run, we become a product of the environment that we live in.

A more reliable approach is to cut bad habits off at the source. One of the most practical ways to eliminate a bad habit is to reduce exposure to the cue that causes it.

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