Habit Plans Are Too Rigid. Use Habit Sprints Instead.

It’s only two weeks into the new year and I’m already changing my habits. How embarrassing. How did I not see this coming? I’ve been deep in the habit science for nearly a decade. I should know better than this. Is this just destined to happen every January? The same old story about a great start and a miserable finish?

And what’s the point in highlighting my failures?

Because failure was baked into the process.

I was planning on it all along.

One of the biggest mistakes I see people make is creating a habit plan that is too rigid. They think they can “pre-think”?everything. In other words, if they set it up?just so, it?must?be destined to work.

But habit systems need to be built to bend and flex with the curve balls of life. In particular, it’s important to?expect?that things are going to go wrong and have a system for dealing with it.

To clarify a bit, some of my resolutions have gone amazingly well. But others are in need of tweaking or dropping altogether.

“Be the Scientist and the Subject”

One framework for thinking flexibly about habits that the authors of Change Anything put forward is to?think of habits the way scientists think of their research — testing hypotheses, gathering data, evaluating the results, and then changing what they believe based on the data. But with habits, the testing and experimenting is about exploring the fine-grained realities of your life. Just because your friend set up a habit in a certain way doesn’t mean (even if you want to work on the same thing) that you should set it up like him. You may both be working on getting better sleep, but because you have kids (and kids are agents of chaos) that means you have to stay focused on things you?can?control, like increasing “sleep hygiene” (lowering the lights and temperature at 9 PM, charging your phone on a different level of the house than where you sleep, getting sunlight first thing in the morning, closing the light-blocking curtains at night, etc). Whereas your friend (with no kids) might be able to set a clear goal of “being in bed by 10 PM” and be able to stick to it because there is more predictability in their evening routines. The point is that the?way?habits get implemented takes experimentation, time to figure out, and quite a bit of tailoring to your unique situation and needs. It takes a lot of little experiments — where you’re both the scientist?and?the subject — to figure this stuff out.

As the authors of?Change Anything?argue:

The changers we studied discovered what worked for them through a scientific process of trial and error. They didn’t get it right the first time. In truth, when people are struggling with tenacious habits, few ever do. Instead, they took two steps forward and one step back–and sometimes the reverse. But they had a skillful way of learning from their setbacks so that their plan?evolved?in a deliberate direction. They snipped a little here and added a little there. They tried a new technique, observed, learned, and tried again. Day by day, week by week, they moved forward until one day their plan addressed all of their unique challenges–and they succeeded.?Tailoring your personal change plan will require the same kind of purposeful experimentation?(p. 27–28).

In other words, building successful habits is about being willing to fail, tweak, and try again — that that?is?what success looks like. It isn’t a game of perfection — it’s a game of iterative persistence.

Habit Plans vs. Habit Sprints

Having a habit plan that’s supposed to work for the long haul may be a bit naíve. A better system is to re-evaluate your habits every two weeks. Instead of making a master?plan, think of your iterative habit-building process in two-week?sprints. It’s important that during those two-week sprints, you make it a true test (think of the seriousness with which a scientist does their research). Give it your all, track it, and do your best to hit your habit each day. One of three things is going to happen: it’s going to work (you did it 80–90% of the time), need some tweaking (you did it 40–60% of the time), or need some chucking (you did it 0–10% of the time). All of that is valuable information because it’s all data. And with data, you can turn around and run another two-week experiment. So take what you learned, double down on the habits that are working, tweak or modify the ones that are going so-so, and drop the ones that are dead weight (don’t worry, you can always come back to them).

This feels a bit more like you’re playing in a sandbox — building habit structures, tweaking them, and occasionally tearing them down. Incidentally, it also takes a lot of the pressure off. It’s not to say that you’re not taking your habits seriously. Quite the opposite — you’ll feel like you’re all in. It’s similar to the way a child playing in a sandbox is always 100% into whatever they’re building. (Don’t believe me? Just step on your kid’s sand castle next time you’re at the beach.)

Using flexible habit sprints instead of rigid habit plans will put you on a path of habit resilience. Habit plans have a tendency to point people in the direction of perfection. But nobody cares about your perfect streak — especially if that streak ends in a flaming ball of discouragement when it inevitably breaks. It isn’t sticking perfectly to the plan that matters. What matters is that your system is set up to be tweaked every two weeks — that’s what will get you what you?really?want — which is not habit perfection, but habit persistence.

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Also published on the?Brain by Design blog?and?in?Better Humans?on January 17, 2023.