Video

Shawn Achor’s example:

• goal: He want practice guitar more often while reducing the amount of time he spent on watching TV.
• problem: Simply telling himself that he’ll do it, wasn’t enough for him to actually do it.
• solution: Put his guitar on living room, and take the batteries out of the remote control and move them to anther room.

The 20 second rule

The point is to lessen the barriers between activities you want to do more often, by making it more convenient for yourself to do them. While on the flip side, increase the obstacles between activities you want to stop participating in, by making them more difficult to start.

If you’re able to lower the activation energy required to begin a certain behavior, your chance of doing what you want to do, increase exponentially. And this is especially important because, even if you enjoy doing something, but there’s a lot of friction in the way before you can begin, you’re more likely to skip it and go do something easier instead.

Common problems & solution

1. If you want to exercise more often, make sure your gym is as closer as possible. Preferable somewhere on your route to work.
2. If you have trouble eating heathy, simply throw out all the unhealthy food in your house.
3. Another common problem is unintentional phone use, when trying to work or study. You can create two different users, one that is optimized for work, and another one that is optimized for fun. Likewise, when you want to relax, you don’t have anything to remind you of work, and you can fully unwind.

Summary

Remember, starting is always the most difficult part. So make your desired actions easy to start, while making your unwanted actions difficult. The will allow you to become the master of your own behavior.