Barriers and Pre-Commitments: How to Modify an Environment to Support Your Values

From time to time, most of us suffer from a gap between what we say we do and what we actually do. This is especially true in everything associated with well-being: fitness, health, personal finance, and general self-improvement.

We know we should exercise, but we don’t always want to. We know we should save, but we reach the end of the month with nothing left over.

My longtime friend J.D. Roth has a good strategy for this. It’s called barriers and pre-commitment. Here’s how he puts it:

“Barrie...