Mini-review: Habit Stacking

Habit stacking is consists of a few ideas strung together to amplify their impact:

• Find something small which can be routinely done (habit)to improve an aspect of your life ( health, spirituality, career, finance, leisure, relationship & organising!)
• Attach it to an existing routine (like brushing your teeth) or trigger (when you feel down).
• Add additional habits until you've built a stack over time.

It turns out that I've been doing this for a while already e.g. my morning routine when I'm at home tends to look something like this:

• Wake up
• Go to bathroom
• Brush teeth
• Make green tea
• Feed the wormery with veg scraps
• Do some washing up
• Do some recycling
• Stack fruit and veg by microwave (to ensure 5+ a day)
• Drink tea
• Do some yoga stretches
• Do some kettle bell swings
• Do 7 minute workout

And there is some rationale to it all. For example, I tend to be rather stiff in the morning and walking around the kitchen/garden completing a few tasks tends to loosen things up enough to contemplate the workout.  More generally, it takes much of the cognitive load away freeing up your mind to think about other things instead.

What was new to me in the book was:

• Adding similar routines to other parts of the day e.g. lunchtime, end of work day and also using triggers e.g. particular emotions. 
• Elephant habits. Similar to Tracey's Eat that frog approach where you break down an unappealing task into small sections. Making this a habit was new.
• Broken windows. I had come across this in Gladwell's Tipping Point with regards to crime, but hadn't considered applying it to housekeeping. 

The book also encouraged to tackle a couple of things I've been meaning to do for a little while:

• Set up a direct debit for council tax. 
• Find an app to track all of my bank accounts/credit cards in one place. 

For the second of these, I used Money Dashboard rather than Mint as I'm based in the UK.  As an aside, I'm rather impressed with Money Dashboard so far and I like the ability to tag transactions in a particular way as well as create budgets for and track particular types of spending. For example, I tend to buy quite a few second hand blu-rays (often only paying a quid or so for them) for viewing on our projector and I wanted to just keep half an eye on my spending in this area.

Lastly, a word for Scott's personal writing style which made this a very easy and appealing read.