Habit Stacking: 127 Small Actions That Take Five Minutes or Less

by S.J. Scott

You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. You use the same stock of willpower for all manner of tasks. It’s important to recognize that your levels of willpower (and therefore motivation) will decrease as the day goes on. This means that if you’d like to make any significant, lasting change in your life, you need to schedule it as early in your day as possible.

Want to lose weight? You can maintain a food log and write down everything you eat. The core benefit here is accountability. When you know that you must record every item put into your mouth, you’ll skip the occasional sweet or piece of junk food. Repeat this process enough times and you’ll steadily lose weight—without going on a diet.

The simplest way to stick with a new habit is to make it “stupidly simple” to complete, which is a valuable lesson that I learned from Mini Habits by Stephen Guise. As an example, if you want to write every day, then you create a goal of writing just one paragraph per day. Sure, you can do more than that, but as long as you’ve written this paragraph, then you can consider this a complete task for the day. The core idea is to set a simple goal that overcomes inertia.

Do this in an incremental manner. In the first week, your routine will last five minutes. The second week will be ten minutes, then up fifteen minutes for week three. Repeat this process until the routine is thirty minutes with a handful of small actions. Now, this scaling up doesn’t mean you’ll haphazardly add a bunch of small habits. Instead, you should make sure you’re consistently completing the routine and not experiencing resistance to this activity.