Good habits

Picking a good habit is easier when you pick only one. Here are five steps to start it.

1. Pick one habit. Choose the one you want most. The others can wait a few weeks.
2. Write it with a time or an amount. You cannot check “read more” at the end of the day. You can check “read for ten minutes after breakfast”.
3. Put it right after something you already do. Breakfast, lunch and brushing your teeth happen every day, so they remind you. This is called habit stacking.
4. Make it small enough for a bad day. If ten minutes is too much when you are tired, do two. A short day still counts.
5. Mark each day you did it. A tick on a calendar is enough, or use the habit tracker template. If you miss a day, do it the next day.

Small habits add up. Ten minutes a day, every day for a year, is about 61 hours. The page on the power of consistency shows the sum. When your first habit happens without a reminder, go back to the list and add a second.

A good habit is more likely to stick when it is simple, when you repeat it for weeks, and when you keep track of it. Here is what three studies found.

A simple habit formed in weeks. A bigger one took months.

One study followed people who had joined a gym, and hospital workers who had to wash their hands. Hand washing turned into a steady habit in a couple of weeks. Going to the gym took about 4 to 7 months (Buyalskaya and colleagues, 2023). The researchers say one possible reason is that hand washing is simpler, and happens many times a day.

A habit takes weeks or months, and a missed day does not undo it.

In another study, people each picked one small thing to eat, drink or do every day, at the same point in the day, such as after breakfast. It took them between 18 and 254 days before it felt automatic. Missing one day made no real difference (Lally and colleagues, 2010). The page on how long it takes to form a habit has the full numbers, and habit formation explains how a habit is built.

People who keep track do better at reaching their goals.

A research team put together more than a hundred experiments in which some people were asked to keep track of their progress toward a goal. On average, those people did better at reaching their goals than people who were not asked to. Keeping track helped more when people wrote it down (Harkin and colleagues, 2016). If the habit you want is to stop doing something, see how long it takes to break a habit.

The three studies below are what we read for this page: the full text of the first, and the summaries of the other two. The list of habits, and the minutes beside each one in the tool, are our own.

1. Buyalskaya, A., Ho, H., Milkman, K. L., Li, X., Duckworth, A. L. and Camerer, C. (2023). What can machine learning teach us about habit formation? Evidence from exercise and hygiene. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(17), e2216115120.
2. Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W. and Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998 to 1009.
3. Harkin, B., Webb, T. L., Chang, B. P. I., Prestwich, A., Conner, M., Kellar, I., Benn, Y. and Sheeran, P. (2016). Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 142(2), 198 to 229.