Design for Lazy

Stick to your habits without using any willpower

“If you want to achieve your goals, you have to just push through and resist temptations.” This is common wisdom in a few circles but a few studies have recently shown that this is wrong:

The people who are best at achieving their goals and score highest on self control actually design their environment to minimize opportunities for temptation. They don’t have to push through because there is nothing to push against.

How can you implement this in your daily life? How can you minimize temptations so that you don’t need to exert any willpower?

Top three things to do

Live close to friends

We will get into this in a later post but your social life is the biggest predictor of your happiness and wellbeing, much more than your daily gym routine. Living close to friends means you’ll hang out with them more, easy as that. Some ideas:

• Live with friends: Once you solve the issue who is doing the dishes, living with friends, or family, can give you more happiness for less money. Effortless socializing, meeting new friends of friends, shared chores, so less work.
• Move to friends: If the thought of somebody else’s hair in the shower is something you find hard to accept, then at least try moving close to your friends. If you live within 1 km of a happy friend, you are 40% more likely to be happy. More than 3km and the effect disappears. Walking distance.
• Befriend your neighbors: Moving is a lot of work and reading a random Substack post is probably not what’s going to make you move. So why not go the other way? Befriend your neighbors instead. Talk to people at your local gym, grocery shop, community event.

I used to live alone for something like ten years, because somehow that’s what I felt was the adult thing to do when you’re not living with a partner (I was in a long long-distance relationship). Then one day I realized you could live with friends even as an adult and never looked back. So much better.

Christoph

Remove temptations

Not sure about you but if I have chocolate in the house, I’ll eat it. Less so for alcohol but I know friends who have this habit with alcohol. So: Just don’t have it in the house. Some more ideas

• Buy groceries online: Ideally when you’re not hungry. This way you remove all the temptations you’d see in the supermarket, save some time, and only have healthy food or the allowed temptations in the house.
• Restrict device usage: You could just say “don’t buy a TV” but that doesn’t work anymore. The modern equivalent of this is: Use good apps to block your device usage. Our favorites: Parental control device settings, set by your partner or friend, removing feeds and recommendations from apps with browser plugins.
• Make things hard to access: Chocolate far out of reach, TVs by default unplugged, drugs in a time-locked safe to only open on weekends - I’ve seen some creative things. Get creative!

I have moved my phone to charge in a different location than my bed while I sleep, as per the previous post have blocked all algorithmic apps and social media, and I also use my partner as portion control for any unhealthy foods I indulge in (candy)

Cameron

Lower the barriers

Removing temptations is one part of architecting your choices. Making good habits easier is the flipside of that

• Place things where you’ll use them: Your journal, guitar, meditation cushion, pull-up bar, gym bag. If it’s within easy reach and in your visual field, it’ll be easier to start doing it.
• Create dedicated zones: A clear work space, chill space, and a bedroom where you don’t have devices can help your brain get “into the zone” better without getting distracted.
• Have a boredom-list: A simple visible list of ideas when you feel low-energy or low-willpower to help you when you’re tempted to just default to start swiping. Make sure it’s things you’ll enjoy in the moment, otherwise it’ll be hard to stick with.

Have a story to share? We’d love to hear it. Our next topic will be on “Commute”. Just reach out to christoph@euzoia.org

Try something now

All these ideas can feel overwhelming to implement, but don’t worry. In exactly one year, we will post an updated version of this, so if you don’t get to try something now, try again a year from now!