Redesigning your environment
Sometimes how we spend our time is at odds with how we want to spend our time.
And intentions to change, as powerful as they may feel in the moment, are rarely effective.
For example, I enjoy social media but prefer to use it in small doses. However, because of how effortless it is to access and stay engaged with these apps, sometimes I end up using them way more than I intend to.
By far the most effective strategy I’ve found for limiting my usage of these types of applications is by making it increasingly difficult to access them:
Sometimes I’ll leave my phone in another room (see Cal Newport’s phone foyer method); other times when I need access to my phone for other reasons I’ll have an app installed that makes it basically impossible to open a social media app for more than 5 minutes.
Author of Atomic Habits, James Clear, wrote in a blog post that “[our] environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior.”
It turns out that the most durable path to change isn’t through adopting some bullish mindset about how you will do things differently; instead it involves making intentional design changes to your environment such that access to behaviors you don’t want to do are sealed off, which then paves the way for you to engage in the behaviors that are more aligned with how you truly want to spend your time.