00:00:00The Resolution Revolution
00:06:30The Fresh Start Effect & The Motivation Myth
00:13:15The Five-Step Habit Formula
00:20:00Real-World Examples & The 66-Day Truth
00:26:45Building Your Resolution Roadmap
SOBRE ESTE EPISÓDIO
Most people who make New Year's resolutions fail before February. But what if we told you that success isn't about willpower or motivation—it's about understanding how habits actually form?
In this episode, Alex and Moah break down (and argue about) the science behind New Year's resolutions, from ancient Babylonian festivals to modern Stanford research. Discover why Benjamin Franklin's centuries-old method still works, why"it takes 21 days to build a habit” myth is dead wrong, and the five-step framework that converts good intentions into lasting change.
Links from the show!
Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg: https://tinyhabits.com/
How to Change by Katy Milkman https://www.katymilkman.com/book
Habits take 66 days, not 21 days https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ejsp.674
Approach-oriented goals are more successful than avoidance-oriented goals https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7725288/
What are Americans’ New Year’s resolutions for 2025? https://today.yougov.com/society/articles/51144-what-are-americans-new-years-resolutions-for-2025
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00:01
Alex
What if there was this one weird trick that gave you an 18% chance of changing something about your life?
00:06 Moah Is that ancient Chinese secret?
00:09 Alex It's actually ancient Babylonian one.
00:12 Moah Are you going on about New Year resolutions?
00:14 Alex It's that time of year, and New Year's resolutions are amazing. There's something magical about just you wake up and you decide, I'm going to get more fit or I'm going to eat better or I'm going to spend more time with my family and less time working. And somehow, just because you started to write a different number at the end of every date, 18% of people change their lives for a full year.
00:41 Moah As amazing as you making it sound, most of them fail. Most of the people who make New Year resolutions did not make it to the end of the year.
00:53 Alex So the crazy thing about you being.
00:55 Alex Such a New Year's resolution skeptic is.
00:58 Alex I remember about a decade ago, you decided that you were going to start reading 52 books a year. And for the last 10 years, you've kept that New Year's resolution when you read 52 books a year.
01:07 Moah That's not how it happened. I started tracking down what books I have read on a random Google sheet, and then that kind of turned into, can I see if I can read 50 books a year? So I think the habit comes first. And I was tracking it to see where I was, rather than, next year, I'm going to go read 50 books.
01:32 Alex I remember January 1st. You're like, I'm going to do it this year.
01:35 Alex And you'd only read like 20 the year before.
01:37 Moah I don't believe you. And that's not how it happened. Okay, fine. So you love New Year resolutions so much.
01:43 Alex I love New Year's resolutions.
01:44 Moah When's the last time you kept a New Year resolution?
01:47 Alex Well, never. I try every year.
01:50 Moah My point is, it doesn't work.
01:52 Alex Well, even when I failed, though, even.
01:54 Alex If my goal was to drink less.
01:56 Alex For a whole year, the fact that I drank less for three months is a big win.
02:01 Moah They did see that people, when they make dry January, tend to reduce their alcohol consumption. The baseline consumption went down, even if they no longer stay dry the rest of the year.
02:14 Alex Today's episode, we're going to talk all about New Year's resolutions, and New Year.
02:19 Moah Resolutions are your great intentions, and how do you make them stick with you for a long time, turn them into sustainable habits?
02:29 Alex So at the end of this episode, we're going to make sure that you are in the 18% of people who keep their resolutions the entire year. Hey there, I'm Alex.
02:37 Moah And I'm Mo.
02:38 Alex We met at mit, got married, co founded Boomerang, invented email snoozing, and have spent a lot of time geeking out about productivity.
02:45 Moah On Less Busy Lab, we'll share and argue about research backed tips, productivity hacks, and secrets from 15 years of running a small team that does big things.
02:56 Alex There are no silver bullets in productivity, but we'll help you get more done while feeling less busy. Let's go.
03:01 Moah So New Year resolutions are not something that new age productivity gurus came up with recently. This is something that's been going on for a long time. The first use official phrase New Year's resolution was in 1850, according to Oxford Dictionary.
03:22 Alex And the idea of changing things in the new year goes back timelessly. There's records of seasonal festivals in ancient Babylon called the Ekitu festivals where people made promises to the gods that they would do something in the new year, usually paying back their debts or returning.
03:41 Alex Things that they'd borrowed from other people and hadn't gotten back to them yet.
03:45 Alex You don't want to be in hock.
03:46 Moah To the gods and what they believe is if you make promises to God on what they are going to do in the new year, they'll have good luck for the year. For the year, yeah.
03:55 Alex So people have been trying to do this for a really long time. And people are more in my camp in the sense that they love New Year's resolutions. 30% of people every year make a New Year's resolution.
04:06 Moah What are they making resolutions about?
04:08 Alex The single most common New Year's resolution is to save more money. After that, it's a big sludge pit of things related to health. Exercise more, eat better, sleep better, be healthier.
04:20 Moah Like this is like a bouquet of flowers. It's a good thing.
04:27 Alex But it was hard to read as survey data because these are all kind of overlapping.
04:30 Moah Exercise more, be healthier, maybe even drink less.
04:35 Alex Yeah, drink less. And then after that, there's a second bouquet of more intellectual things. Learn something new, read more books, learn a new language. Exactly. Okay, so I think that's kind of the three most common sets. People have all kinds of things. When you start looking at the really.
04:51 Alex Long tail, there's some weird resolutions out.
04:53 Moah There from the research at least. What usually works better is approach oriented, wanting to do something more than avoidance oriented. I will do less of it or quit smoking in general. Is that something that you see for yourself or.
05:14 Alex I have a 0% success rate here. So do you think It's a framing thing. Do you think it's more if you did it as a replace the behavior or do you think it's because overcoming addictions is hard?
05:25 Moah I think overcoming addition is hard and a lot of it is to do with how automatic things are. And it's hard to rewire our brain. A lot of habit researchers recommend you replace with another habit and try to change the format. They don't recommend drinking non alcoholic drinks because you're still drinking with drinking. They try to replace with something else.
05:50 Alex So the one thing where people in.
05:51 Alex The survey data agree with you is that people are really pessimistic about other.
05:55 Alex People'S New Year's resolutions.
05:57 Moah So everybody agree that it will fail.
05:59 Alex Only 3% of people believe that New Year's resolutions are very likely to succeed and another 20% think they're somewhat likely to succeed. But when you ask people about their own New Year's resolutions, 55% of people at the end of the year feel like it was successful in some way, shape or form.
06:17 Moah They did.
06:18 Alex What I think they see it more like the way I see some of my past resolutions. I didn't keep my resolution, but I did manage to move my behavior toward that spectrum perfect ideal of keeping the New Year's resolution.
06:35 Moah So it's more about moving you from zero to something rather than zero to hundred.
06:42 Alex Yeah. So if your goal was to go from 170 pounds to 163, maybe you didn't lose seven pounds, but maybe you lost two or three. Some of the reason we keep doing this is even though we most of the time don't hit our goal. Exactly. We at least are in a better place than were before we started doing.
07:01 Moah So you're saying people are not hopelessly optimistic. They have some reason to believe that trying is better than not trying at all.
07:11 Alex Exactly.
07:12 Moah And I think that's what Katie Milkman from Wharton School of Economics found. She wrote this book called how to Change and it's all about fresh start effect. It's about temporal landmarks. So temporal landmarks are points in time that give some sort of meaning. New Year is the biggest temporal landmark. You could also do it on your birthday.
07:34 Alex Usually also have a failing resolution every birthday.
07:37 Moah Yeah. And then like it just need to have some sort of milestone or a marker. You have a new baby. Like our co founder has a new baby in his life and he's going to have some new things that he can start implementing.
07:53 Alex But there are a lot of smaller milestones.
07:56 Moah What they found was like beginning of the month has a higher starting.
08:01 Alex That makes sense.
08:02 Moah Beginning of the week even is more people trying to start. So there are more people intending to start something right. There is the, as I said before, resolutions are intending to change intentions, great intentions. And you have 145% increase in like annual commitments at the beginning of the year.
08:30 Alex That makes sense.
08:32 Moah So there are more people wanting to start.
08:34 Alex My favorite was coming back from a vacation.
08:37 Moah That's a great.
08:38 Alex You've gotten out of your routine, you're coming back with a fresh start because you weren't doing the same thing the day before.
08:45 Moah So fresh start effect definitely sees that there are more people wanting to start. And if they do start on some sort of landmark, you have a little bit elevated chance of success. You can start things. It's the follow through and keeping up with it. So people make resolution to get fit. And the problem is you're changing from less healthy, less fit version of you in the last year and then you intend to get more fit in the next year. But that's just it. Intention. There is no roadmap. There is no how. What is the bridge from last year you to the next year you. And that's where habits come in. And if we go back to the ancient historical figure who has really done it and has basically a lot of records of it is Benjamin Franklin.
09:45 Alex We're gonna have to do a Benjamin Franklin running joke because I still am sticking with my tour guide from Philadelphia that said he stayed up all hours of the night drinking heavily and had 35 different babies with different women. And I'm not buying that he was a paragon of virtue.
10:02 Moah He is not. He record himself for what he is failing every single day. But he also has that virtues that he was tracking to do better at. And it's not like, hey, next year I'm going to do this things better and write a giant list of things that he dropped off after two weeks. He only focus one virtue at a time. So every week he has this is the virtue that I'm focusing on. And he rotates through those 13 virtues week by week.
10:33 Alex What are these virtues? Do you have any examples of them?
10:36 Moah I actually have the PDF. I think we should actually link to it so that people can track it if they want. Temperance, so. So that he doesn't eat too much or drink too excessive amount.
10:50 Alex Could use some help with that.
10:52 Moah And then don't waste time. I think he named it industry so that you don't waste time.
10:59 Alex I could use some help with that.
11:00 Moah You also have order putting things away. So some wiki's just trying to tidy his house.
11:07 Alex I'm okay with that.
11:08 Alex Okay, so these are like very kind of timeless, universal, better. So every week he'd pick a different one. Every week or every month? Every week, pick one to focus on.
11:17 Moah Right.
11:19 Alex It might work.
11:21 Moah I think the tracking was a thing too that he wanted to write down. So if you actually Google Benjamin Franklin 13 virtues, they are trackers that you can just download so that you can actually track.
11:35 Alex Okay, I'm going to go off on tracking for a second because, okay, there was this thing that Jerry Seinfeld went on a podcast. He made a joke that he had a big calendar in his office and that he put an X every day that he wrote and never wanted to break the chain. So that was the secret to him writing every day. He later said, no, I didn't do that. I just knew I needed to write every day. And I've tried that. And it is the worst possible way to try to make yourself stick with some kind of resolution or something.
12:06 Moah Why don't we bridge the resolution to habit? Right? So how do we form great habits? What are the fundamental pieces of building a great habit?
12:17 Alex The best research that we've ever seen in this area comes from a professor named B.J. Fogg at Stanford. He runs what's the group called?
12:24 Moah Behavioral Research Lab at Stanford. Stanford.
12:27 Alex And his book is called Tiny Habits. And it is exactly what it sounds like. How do you make really small habits?
12:37 Moah And the second part of the title for BJ Sports book is the Small Changes that change Everything, which is similar to Katie Milkman's book is how to Change. We're all talking about transformation.
12:50 Alex Well, everybody wants to be a better version of themselves. So there's two acronyms that you need to know to understand BJ's habit framework. The first one is MAP. And your likelihood of doing a behavior comes down to the product of your motivation, your ability, and a prompt. Motivation is how much you want to do it. Most people, when trying to create a new habit, lean really heavily on motivation, but you can't because the motivation part is the most variable part. It changes day to day. It's not reliable.
13:24 Alex It's not.
13:24 Alex It's not enough to carry you through.
13:25 Moah It's strongest when you're making the new.
13:27 Alex Year resolution and then it fades over time. Ability is how easy is it for you to do the new behavior? If your new behavior is squat 500 pounds, I have zero ability to do that. But that's not really the insight. The insight is how hard is it for you to do it. So if you set the behavior to be something really hard, you need a lot of motivation to overcome it. And then the prompt is what reminds you to do it.
13:52 Moah Trigger.
13:52 Alex Trigger. Because the most common reason for not doing a New Year's resolution is you Forgot exactly. In BJ's framework, you really want to deemphasize motivation and increase ability and get a really good prompt.
14:08 Moah So that's theory behind habit formation.
14:11 Alex Exactly.
14:12 Moah What's abc?
14:14 Alex So A is actually the prompt again.
14:16 Alex But he called it the anchor so.
14:17 Alex That he could have it be ABC and then the behavior.
14:21 Alex And then at the end the C is for celebration. One of the pieces that he thinks is the most powerful is that you really want to feel good about yourself when you do the behavior.
14:32 Moah BJ Fork's theory of both MAP and ABC are great, but it's hard to remember and have it as a clear step by step process to follow. So I wanted to make it a five step process using mostly of what he has recommended with a little bit.
14:51 Alex Of less busy lab value add on top.
14:56 Moah Our proprietary formula one is pick the behavior choice. Right. Find the behavior that maps to your overall goal. You want to get fit. What does it mean? Great resolution. But it's not a behavior that you control. Right. The behavior you should define is something you can do that is within your control.
15:15 Alex And also there are a lot of different ways that get fit.
15:17 Moah Right. So is it walking? 30 minutes a day?
15:20 Alex CrossFit?
15:21 Moah Is it lifting weights three times a week?
15:24 Alex Yoga?
15:25 Moah You have to pick the exact behavior that you're going to commit to. And then step two is make it easy. And how do you make it easy?
15:36 Alex The reason the book is called Tiny Habits is because make it tiny. BJ's example in his book was flossing his teeth. Floss one tooth.
15:44 Moah Floss one tooth.
15:45 Alex So if he's busy and he needs to go to bed, it only takes a second to floss one tooth. You don't have to get them all. That way he can keep his habit even if he's having a terrible day.
15:55 Moah The worst day possible, and still keep the habit.
16:00 Alex And so 95, 97% of the time, once you've got the floss out and you've got the floss between the two teeth, you're finished.
16:08 Moah Yeah.
16:08 Alex So but you don't always have to.
16:10 Moah Top of making this easy is setting up the environment to make it as low friction as possible.
16:17 Alex Don't put your floss in the drawer. Two flights of stairs in the cabinets.
16:20 Moah That you have to go get. Put it next to the couch. Part one and part two of making this easy is make it small and make it accessible to you. Whatever you need.
16:30 Alex Yeah, whatever is going to make the habit. Whatever the smallest meaningful step you can do. That's the thing you should set as the habit so that it's as easy as possible to maintain. And then make the environment so that the thing you need to do has as little friction as possible. If you want to go running, put your socks and your shoes by the door. Whatever you can do to basically increase your ability.
16:50 Moah And the third step is find a trigger. And the way to get the trigger in your mind is to put it in the format of after X event. That normally happens regularly. Then I do the new habit that you want to do.
17:12 Alex So instead of having to create something new in your mind, a totally new pathway, you're just taking an existing pathway.
17:18 Moah And tweaking it a little bit. Yeah. And I think habit stacking is something that people talk about. Right. You stack it to something you already do. Like something that you normally have to do, like eat lunch.
17:32 Alex After I turn the light off in the living room, I turn off the light every night. I'm not going to forget to turn off the light. I never forget to turn off the.
17:41 Moah Light and then celebrate.
17:44 Alex I never remember to do this right. Never.
17:47 Moah This seems so unnatural to celebrate. For me, my way of celebrating is tracking it. Right. People like checking off things. I love putting a cross on whatever weekly planner and tracker that I have. I'm actually thinking about using GQs with a recurring test so that I have a thing to check off every single day and it will create the next test for the next day.
18:14 Alex Did Ben Franklin log his failures or his successes?
18:17 Moah I think he was logging his failures.
18:21 Alex Maybe avoiding punishment was enough of a trigger for him.
18:24 Moah Maybe he didn't want to write down how he fails.
18:26 Alex But this isn't like a big.
18:28 Alex This isn't like throw a party. BJ's example in his book is that he will look himself in the mirror and smile.
18:34 Moah As a reward, I drink this special herbal tea after I do my yoga. Right? Yeah. You can set up pairing something nice.
18:43 Alex You just have to make sure it's not so. Probably shouldn't be eat a bowl of ice cream.
18:48 Moah That will counteract all the five last step. This is our value. This is what BJ Fogg did not have.
18:56 Alex And he might have.
18:59 Moah You are going to fail. You are going to forget one day. You're going to forget one week. How do you reset yourself?
19:08 Alex And it's best to think through some of these scenarios.
19:11 Moah How you are going to fall off.
19:13 Alex How are you going to get back on the wagon after you fall off?
19:16 Moah It's also important to be aware of what could get you off track. Going on trips, going, getting sick is one of the many ways habits got rewire stop, right?
19:30 Alex And you want your reset rule to be as high commitment as possible. So if you're gonna go on a business trip and you're gonna be at a conference at 7:30 in the Dagum morning and you know you're not gonna get your yoga in on the business trip, if your habit's small enough, maybe you can do it on the trip anyway. But if it isn't, I do one.
19:46 Moah Sense salutation and that's okay.
19:49 Alex But if something comes up where you hurt your knee and you can't do anything, if you know that you're going to be recovered in three weeks, if you go ahead and book a yoga class three weeks out, that's a really high commitment. It's a really powerful reason for you to start your habit again or once you've fallen off. If you write down on a piece of paper that day, I forgot to floss my teeth today, but I will do it again tomorrow. Anything's better than just thinking, oh, I really ought to start that again. Because you don't.
20:19 Moah Yes, we want to give a couple examples of how to use this five step framework.
20:24 Alex And we just cooked these up. The specifics aren't important.
20:28 Moah Let's say we go back to the one of the most common get fit as a resolution for your New year. The translation for behavior that you can commit to is after I put my shoes on in the morning, I'll walk for 10 minutes. That's it.
20:45 Alex What you need to say is after I get done eating lunch, I will set foot outside. So you sit there at lunch, you're watching your Netflix and you're gobbling your orange chicken from Panda Express. And then when you're done, you put on your shoes and you step outside. If it's raining, you kept your habit. If it isn't raining, I'm outside anyway. Gosh, it's nice out here. I'm going to take my walk. Small habit, easy to access. Don't have to change your routine.
21:10 Moah I think that's where we differ a little bit, the tiny habits part of the whole floss, one tooth. I just can't. Like I have reservation but go take.
21:20 Alex It up with bj.
21:23 Moah So for me at Least you can just step outside. Because I'm the kind of person who would just step outside and walk back in.
21:29 Alex You put your shoes on, tie up.
21:31 Alex Your shoes, step outside and then decide, no, I'm not going to take a walk ever.
21:36 Alex No, of course not.
21:37 Moah See, I am not the kind of person like why we are at a person. For me, if the goal is to step outside, I will go and step outside and come back. You have to go walk 10 minutes regardless of what's happening.
21:50 Alex So one of the primary theses of this show is that there's no silver bullet for anybody. Nothing works perfectly for everybody.
21:57 Alex You got to find what works for.
21:58 Moah You, what is going to lead you to the maximum number of repetitions. That's what's important for habit forming. There's a myth that you have to do 21 days for a habit to form. And it's a myth. They actually did a control trial with people to actually track. What they found is on average it takes 66 days. And then there's another study that did it and they found medium was 59 days. So more or less it's about two months.
22:27 Alex Try small first.
22:28 Moah As long as it will lead you to the desired behavior at least a.
22:32 Alex Decent percentage of the time. Yeah, you don't want to have your. If you're going to do an after lunch walk, you don't want to have your shoes be up in your closet upstairs. You want to have them by the door.
22:40 Moah Right. And it also shouldn't be like I am going to walk 10,000 steps every single day. Some days you just don't have the time and you want to make the.
22:50 Alex Wagon as little as possible.
22:51 Moah And then you also need to kind of plan for now that people are in a lot of hybrid situation. You might be able to go take a walk if you're working from home that day. But if you are at the office with coworkers and they are rolling right into the meeting, what happened to your walk? So you have to think through a little bit. What's the if then statement? So then it says after I eat lunch, I will go take. So that's the if then statement.
23:17 Alex Got to have that trigger. You want to wire it to an existing behavior.
23:21 Moah What's the celebration when you come back? You high five the door. Ow.
23:29 Alex Like our eight year old's high five.
23:31 Alex Yeah, you can high five the door. You could do a fist pump into the air.
23:35 Alex There are a lot of things you.
23:36 Alex Could do that are celebratory and somewhat relatable.
23:38 Moah Listen to your favorite Piece of music good?
23:40 Alex Absolutely, yeah. Have a celebration song where you put on the music while you're drinking your water after your walk. Something that makes you feel good, gives you some kind of endorphins or dopamine or something that's good for you.
23:52 Moah What about the professional or work habit you want to create?
23:57 Alex The most common one professionally is grow my professional network.
24:02 Moah In this work environment, people love to make sure that they have good professional network.
24:08 Alex So one thing that's true, we may talk more about this next time, is that it's easier to make habits that are daily than it is to make habits that are weekly or monthly. Or even worse if it's every two weeks or three weeks, because it's really hard to get that trigger to become automatic. Exactly.
24:25 Moah Yeah.
24:25 Alex So I was thinking, oh, go to a monthly networking event. But I think an easier one would be, what if you left one LinkedIn comment every day? That could work because that's quick. And that way you are getting a new network because people may respond to your comment and you may meet somebody that way, but at the very least, you're maintaining your network.
24:46 Moah Yeah, I think that's definitely which part of the day you should put it to Q ender or queue after.
24:55 Alex So for me, I wouldn't want to do this after standup or after lunch because LinkedIn has a way of sucking me in. And then I may grow my professional network, but I may get fired for.
25:07 Moah Not doing anything, or you may start a flame. Or.
25:12 Alex For me, if I wanted to do this, I would probably put it at the end of the day.
25:16 Moah Mm.
25:16 Alex I think what I would optimize for when I close my work laptop, I will pull out my phone and go to LinkedIn and type in a comment. I'm not gonna get sucked in because I've either gotta go get the kids or start dinner. If I'm doing this at five o' clock in the afternoon, I'm not gonna spend an hour in LinkedIn.
25:34 Moah You don't have the time.
25:35 Alex And I've got enough time like I've always got. It's. We've made the behavior small.
25:39 Moah Right?
25:40 Alex Just one comment's easy. I've got my phone. I can just open it up and be like, hey, what's the first post? I'll just say, that's really cool.
25:49 Alex Unless it's something bad. I got fired today. Well, maybe that's not the right tone, but you could find something really easy.
25:55 Alex To respond to and form that habit.
25:57 Alex How do I celebrate this? I don't know what Feels appropriate for.
26:01 Alex Leaving a comment on LinkedIn.
26:05 Moah This is why people keep forgetting that part of the habit formation because it's kind of unnatural. Do a slack bot that asks you and then you had a thumbs up or check mark or something.
26:18 Alex That's not bad.
26:19 Alex LinkedIn, they've got a big thumbs up there. That would be perfect.
26:22 Alex Just do a thumbs up to yourself. Grin and do a thumbs up. You did it. There's a celebration.
26:27 Moah There you go.
26:28 Alex Now help me get back on the wagon. What happens when the Internet goes down?
26:32 Moah And no, you could miss it just because you forgot. Right? You're in a rush. You have to leave early that day because the kids have a school event and you're closing your laptop at 3:30 or 4:30 and not real regular 5:00 clock. So there would be something happening like oh there's an emergency call and you got pulled in and then you didn't have your daily. How do I get back on routine wind down. I would say schedule the 10 minute calendar appointment the next day. So like 450 after you'd be like hey, go do this.
27:06 Alex I see. And then I'll close my laptop at 4:50. Yeah, that's not bad.
27:10 Moah Cool.
27:10 Alex Thumbs up and schedule a calendar appointment. We just created a spectacular less busy lab habit. So on that note, Mo, do you want to share the tip of the week?
27:21 Moah Yes. Try to build one new habit at a time. So follow Benjamin Franklin's behavior one he was focusing one for one week knowing that it takes about two months for you to form a habit. I would say just focus one resolution you want to focus on. Turn it into a habit that you can create and use that five step process that we gave you. Identify the behavior, make it easy, figure out what cue that's going to trigger you to do this behavior. Celebrate and also create the fallback plan.
28:04 Alex And if you want to do more stuff, use boomerang to do a send later to yourself to say hey, let's start this next habit in March or set up a queue in gqueues and snooze.
28:14 Moah Snooze it for two months.
28:16 Alex Out and four months out.
28:17 Alex But try to if you could have.
28:19 Alex Multiple resolutions, if one of them is set up automatic withholding for your 401k or something that's a one off. But if you want to create a habit, it's easiest to create one new.
28:28 Moah Habit at a time and then stack them over time to get better at whatever you're trying to do. It's really important to Be focusing all your willpower on creating one neural pathways that is becoming automatic for you. And then once that becomes automatic, you can add more.
28:45 Alex What's going to be your resolution this year?
28:48 Moah So my resolution or goal is to sleep better. The behavior that I'm going to fix or commit to is get morning sunlight at least 10 minutes within the first hour of my wake up time. And the cue that I'm going to set up is the kids go off to school at 8:30. When they are going out, I'm going to put on my jacket and shoes and get out the door after they get out.
29:18 Alex And what's your plan for getting back off the wagon when we have to come to the portal and record our podcast?
29:25 Moah I think going to portal it just counts because I'll be out in the car. Yeah. So most of the time if I'm going to the city or anywhere else, I will be getting the sunlight. I don't really have a very firm plan on rainy and cold days, which we don't get that many.
29:48 Alex Luckily where we live, the weather's great.
29:52 Moah I do have a very fancy and pretty raincoat, so maybe that will motivate me enough to get out. I don't have a plan on how to celebrate, but getting to check off a checkbox is a celebration itself.
30:06 Alex Can I make it dopier?
30:07 Moah Yeah.
30:08 Alex Can I get you some sun stickers? And you can put sun stickers on a calendar.
30:12 Moah That would be fun.
30:13 Alex Okay, I know what your Christmas present's gonna be.
30:16 Moah All right, what about you? What is your resolution? Mr. Resolution?
30:21 Alex I'm gonna take a page from the most popular resolutions list. We'll link it in the show notes.
30:25 Alex I'm gonna try to read more this year. I feel like the last couple years my 9 year old is reading more books than I am and that's probably.
30:32 Alex A good thing, but I feel like.
30:34 Alex I've spent a lot more time doom scrolling or playing video games than reading. I think my goal is gonna be after I put the kids to bed. I will page.
30:44 Moah So after is the cue. After. What about the nights that I put them to bed?
30:49 Alex I did my part to put them to bed. I got them brushed and everything.
30:52 Moah And then. Do you have any celebration after you read a page? What do you get?
30:57 Alex I'm just gonna take the LinkedIn one. I'm just gonna give myself a big old thumbs up every night and feel good about it.
31:02 Moah How about I give you a high five?
31:04 Alex You'll give me a high five?
31:05 Alex You're not there A high five of the door, the rabbit.
31:10 Moah And if you for any reason, like we're out some nights and go to bed really late or we're traveling, what's your plan?
31:18 Alex The plan for me is going to be that I'm going to read that page in the morning instead, because there's always an opportunity to read that page. I mostly do ebooks, so they're mostly on my phone and on my Kindle. I'll just catch up and get back on the wagon by being in the same place in the book I would have been.
31:38 Moah The resolutions are your good intentions and to achieve your good intentions with more than maybe 18% success rate, you can try the five step execution plan to turn that resolution into habits.
31:58 Alex Good luck building habits and we'll be back next time.
32:02 Alex Just in time for everybody's favorite New.
32:04 Alex Year's resolution related holiday Quitter Friday in order to give you a little bit of extra motivation to keep you sticking to your New Year's resolutions right when most people give them up. Happy Holidays and Happy New Year.
32:16 Moah We hope you enjoyed this episode of Less Busy Lab. If you haven't already, please can I say it?
32:21 Alex I want to say it.
32:22 Moah Okay, fine.
32:23 Alex Smash that subscribe button.
32:25 Moah Are you happy now?
32:26 Alex So happy.
32:28 Moah Please subscribe to our podcast to get all our future episodes. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Find me on LinkedIn for more behind the scenes content and updates.
32:39 Alex We'll put the links to all the research papers, tools and templates mentioned in the episode in the show notes.
32:44 Moah We'll also be adding a listener questions segment in the future episodes, so if you have any productivity related questions, send us an email at questions@lessbusylab.com our sponsors this week.
32:55 Alex Are the same as they are every week. GQueues and Boomerang. Check them out.
32:58 Moah Thanks for listening and we hope you're already feeling less busy and more productive.
00:06 Moah Is that ancient Chinese secret?
00:09 Alex It's actually ancient Babylonian one.
00:12 Moah Are you going on about New Year resolutions?
00:14 Alex It's that time of year, and New Year's resolutions are amazing. There's something magical about just you wake up and you decide, I'm going to get more fit or I'm going to eat better or I'm going to spend more time with my family and less time working. And somehow, just because you started to write a different number at the end of every date, 18% of people change their lives for a full year.
00:41 Moah As amazing as you making it sound, most of them fail. Most of the people who make New Year resolutions did not make it to the end of the year.
00:53 Alex So the crazy thing about you being.
00:55 Alex Such a New Year's resolution skeptic is.
00:58 Alex I remember about a decade ago, you decided that you were going to start reading 52 books a year. And for the last 10 years, you've kept that New Year's resolution when you read 52 books a year.
01:07 Moah That's not how it happened. I started tracking down what books I have read on a random Google sheet, and then that kind of turned into, can I see if I can read 50 books a year? So I think the habit comes first. And I was tracking it to see where I was, rather than, next year, I'm going to go read 50 books.
01:32 Alex I remember January 1st. You're like, I'm going to do it this year.
01:35 Alex And you'd only read like 20 the year before.
01:37 Moah I don't believe you. And that's not how it happened. Okay, fine. So you love New Year resolutions so much.
01:43 Alex I love New Year's resolutions.
01:44 Moah When's the last time you kept a New Year resolution?
01:47 Alex Well, never. I try every year.
01:50 Moah My point is, it doesn't work.
01:52 Alex Well, even when I failed, though, even.
01:54 Alex If my goal was to drink less.
01:56 Alex For a whole year, the fact that I drank less for three months is a big win.
02:01 Moah They did see that people, when they make dry January, tend to reduce their alcohol consumption. The baseline consumption went down, even if they no longer stay dry the rest of the year.
02:14 Alex Today's episode, we're going to talk all about New Year's resolutions, and New Year.
02:19 Moah Resolutions are your great intentions, and how do you make them stick with you for a long time, turn them into sustainable habits?
02:29 Alex So at the end of this episode, we're going to make sure that you are in the 18% of people who keep their resolutions the entire year. Hey there, I'm Alex.
02:37 Moah And I'm Mo.
02:38 Alex We met at mit, got married, co founded Boomerang, invented email snoozing, and have spent a lot of time geeking out about productivity.
02:45 Moah On Less Busy Lab, we'll share and argue about research backed tips, productivity hacks, and secrets from 15 years of running a small team that does big things.
02:56 Alex There are no silver bullets in productivity, but we'll help you get more done while feeling less busy. Let's go.
03:01 Moah So New Year resolutions are not something that new age productivity gurus came up with recently. This is something that's been going on for a long time. The first use official phrase New Year's resolution was in 1850, according to Oxford Dictionary.
03:22 Alex And the idea of changing things in the new year goes back timelessly. There's records of seasonal festivals in ancient Babylon called the Ekitu festivals where people made promises to the gods that they would do something in the new year, usually paying back their debts or returning.
03:41 Alex Things that they'd borrowed from other people and hadn't gotten back to them yet.
03:45 Alex You don't want to be in hock.
03:46 Moah To the gods and what they believe is if you make promises to God on what they are going to do in the new year, they'll have good luck for the year. For the year, yeah.
03:55 Alex So people have been trying to do this for a really long time. And people are more in my camp in the sense that they love New Year's resolutions. 30% of people every year make a New Year's resolution.
04:06 Moah What are they making resolutions about?
04:08 Alex The single most common New Year's resolution is to save more money. After that, it's a big sludge pit of things related to health. Exercise more, eat better, sleep better, be healthier.
04:20 Moah Like this is like a bouquet of flowers. It's a good thing.
04:27 Alex But it was hard to read as survey data because these are all kind of overlapping.
04:30 Moah Exercise more, be healthier, maybe even drink less.
04:35 Alex Yeah, drink less. And then after that, there's a second bouquet of more intellectual things. Learn something new, read more books, learn a new language. Exactly. Okay, so I think that's kind of the three most common sets. People have all kinds of things. When you start looking at the really.
04:51 Alex Long tail, there's some weird resolutions out.
04:53 Moah There from the research at least. What usually works better is approach oriented, wanting to do something more than avoidance oriented. I will do less of it or quit smoking in general. Is that something that you see for yourself or.
05:14 Alex I have a 0% success rate here. So do you think It's a framing thing. Do you think it's more if you did it as a replace the behavior or do you think it's because overcoming addictions is hard?
05:25 Moah I think overcoming addition is hard and a lot of it is to do with how automatic things are. And it's hard to rewire our brain. A lot of habit researchers recommend you replace with another habit and try to change the format. They don't recommend drinking non alcoholic drinks because you're still drinking with drinking. They try to replace with something else.
05:50 Alex So the one thing where people in.
05:51 Alex The survey data agree with you is that people are really pessimistic about other.
05:55 Alex People'S New Year's resolutions.
05:57 Moah So everybody agree that it will fail.
05:59 Alex Only 3% of people believe that New Year's resolutions are very likely to succeed and another 20% think they're somewhat likely to succeed. But when you ask people about their own New Year's resolutions, 55% of people at the end of the year feel like it was successful in some way, shape or form.
06:17 Moah They did.
06:18 Alex What I think they see it more like the way I see some of my past resolutions. I didn't keep my resolution, but I did manage to move my behavior toward that spectrum perfect ideal of keeping the New Year's resolution.
06:35 Moah So it's more about moving you from zero to something rather than zero to hundred.
06:42 Alex Yeah. So if your goal was to go from 170 pounds to 163, maybe you didn't lose seven pounds, but maybe you lost two or three. Some of the reason we keep doing this is even though we most of the time don't hit our goal. Exactly. We at least are in a better place than were before we started doing.
07:01 Moah So you're saying people are not hopelessly optimistic. They have some reason to believe that trying is better than not trying at all.
07:11 Alex Exactly.
07:12 Moah And I think that's what Katie Milkman from Wharton School of Economics found. She wrote this book called how to Change and it's all about fresh start effect. It's about temporal landmarks. So temporal landmarks are points in time that give some sort of meaning. New Year is the biggest temporal landmark. You could also do it on your birthday.
07:34 Alex Usually also have a failing resolution every birthday.
07:37 Moah Yeah. And then like it just need to have some sort of milestone or a marker. You have a new baby. Like our co founder has a new baby in his life and he's going to have some new things that he can start implementing.
07:53 Alex But there are a lot of smaller milestones.
07:56 Moah What they found was like beginning of the month has a higher starting.
08:01 Alex That makes sense.
08:02 Moah Beginning of the week even is more people trying to start. So there are more people intending to start something right. There is the, as I said before, resolutions are intending to change intentions, great intentions. And you have 145% increase in like annual commitments at the beginning of the year.
08:30 Alex That makes sense.
08:32 Moah So there are more people wanting to start.
08:34 Alex My favorite was coming back from a vacation.
08:37 Moah That's a great.
08:38 Alex You've gotten out of your routine, you're coming back with a fresh start because you weren't doing the same thing the day before.
08:45 Moah So fresh start effect definitely sees that there are more people wanting to start. And if they do start on some sort of landmark, you have a little bit elevated chance of success. You can start things. It's the follow through and keeping up with it. So people make resolution to get fit. And the problem is you're changing from less healthy, less fit version of you in the last year and then you intend to get more fit in the next year. But that's just it. Intention. There is no roadmap. There is no how. What is the bridge from last year you to the next year you. And that's where habits come in. And if we go back to the ancient historical figure who has really done it and has basically a lot of records of it is Benjamin Franklin.
09:45 Alex We're gonna have to do a Benjamin Franklin running joke because I still am sticking with my tour guide from Philadelphia that said he stayed up all hours of the night drinking heavily and had 35 different babies with different women. And I'm not buying that he was a paragon of virtue.
10:02 Moah He is not. He record himself for what he is failing every single day. But he also has that virtues that he was tracking to do better at. And it's not like, hey, next year I'm going to do this things better and write a giant list of things that he dropped off after two weeks. He only focus one virtue at a time. So every week he has this is the virtue that I'm focusing on. And he rotates through those 13 virtues week by week.
10:33 Alex What are these virtues? Do you have any examples of them?
10:36 Moah I actually have the PDF. I think we should actually link to it so that people can track it if they want. Temperance, so. So that he doesn't eat too much or drink too excessive amount.
10:50 Alex Could use some help with that.
10:52 Moah And then don't waste time. I think he named it industry so that you don't waste time.
10:59 Alex I could use some help with that.
11:00 Moah You also have order putting things away. So some wiki's just trying to tidy his house.
11:07 Alex I'm okay with that.
11:08 Alex Okay, so these are like very kind of timeless, universal, better. So every week he'd pick a different one. Every week or every month? Every week, pick one to focus on.
11:17 Moah Right.
11:19 Alex It might work.
11:21 Moah I think the tracking was a thing too that he wanted to write down. So if you actually Google Benjamin Franklin 13 virtues, they are trackers that you can just download so that you can actually track.
11:35 Alex Okay, I'm going to go off on tracking for a second because, okay, there was this thing that Jerry Seinfeld went on a podcast. He made a joke that he had a big calendar in his office and that he put an X every day that he wrote and never wanted to break the chain. So that was the secret to him writing every day. He later said, no, I didn't do that. I just knew I needed to write every day. And I've tried that. And it is the worst possible way to try to make yourself stick with some kind of resolution or something.
12:06 Moah Why don't we bridge the resolution to habit? Right? So how do we form great habits? What are the fundamental pieces of building a great habit?
12:17 Alex The best research that we've ever seen in this area comes from a professor named B.J. Fogg at Stanford. He runs what's the group called?
12:24 Moah Behavioral Research Lab at Stanford. Stanford.
12:27 Alex And his book is called Tiny Habits. And it is exactly what it sounds like. How do you make really small habits?
12:37 Moah And the second part of the title for BJ Sports book is the Small Changes that change Everything, which is similar to Katie Milkman's book is how to Change. We're all talking about transformation.
12:50 Alex Well, everybody wants to be a better version of themselves. So there's two acronyms that you need to know to understand BJ's habit framework. The first one is MAP. And your likelihood of doing a behavior comes down to the product of your motivation, your ability, and a prompt. Motivation is how much you want to do it. Most people, when trying to create a new habit, lean really heavily on motivation, but you can't because the motivation part is the most variable part. It changes day to day. It's not reliable.
13:24 Alex It's not.
13:24 Alex It's not enough to carry you through.
13:25 Moah It's strongest when you're making the new.
13:27 Alex Year resolution and then it fades over time. Ability is how easy is it for you to do the new behavior? If your new behavior is squat 500 pounds, I have zero ability to do that. But that's not really the insight. The insight is how hard is it for you to do it. So if you set the behavior to be something really hard, you need a lot of motivation to overcome it. And then the prompt is what reminds you to do it.
13:52 Moah Trigger.
13:52 Alex Trigger. Because the most common reason for not doing a New Year's resolution is you Forgot exactly. In BJ's framework, you really want to deemphasize motivation and increase ability and get a really good prompt.
14:08 Moah So that's theory behind habit formation.
14:11 Alex Exactly.
14:12 Moah What's abc?
14:14 Alex So A is actually the prompt again.
14:16 Alex But he called it the anchor so.
14:17 Alex That he could have it be ABC and then the behavior.
14:21 Alex And then at the end the C is for celebration. One of the pieces that he thinks is the most powerful is that you really want to feel good about yourself when you do the behavior.
14:32 Moah BJ Fork's theory of both MAP and ABC are great, but it's hard to remember and have it as a clear step by step process to follow. So I wanted to make it a five step process using mostly of what he has recommended with a little bit.
14:51 Alex Of less busy lab value add on top.
14:56 Moah Our proprietary formula one is pick the behavior choice. Right. Find the behavior that maps to your overall goal. You want to get fit. What does it mean? Great resolution. But it's not a behavior that you control. Right. The behavior you should define is something you can do that is within your control.
15:15 Alex And also there are a lot of different ways that get fit.
15:17 Moah Right. So is it walking? 30 minutes a day?
15:20 Alex CrossFit?
15:21 Moah Is it lifting weights three times a week?
15:24 Alex Yoga?
15:25 Moah You have to pick the exact behavior that you're going to commit to. And then step two is make it easy. And how do you make it easy?
15:36 Alex The reason the book is called Tiny Habits is because make it tiny. BJ's example in his book was flossing his teeth. Floss one tooth.
15:44 Moah Floss one tooth.
15:45 Alex So if he's busy and he needs to go to bed, it only takes a second to floss one tooth. You don't have to get them all. That way he can keep his habit even if he's having a terrible day.
15:55 Moah The worst day possible, and still keep the habit.
16:00 Alex And so 95, 97% of the time, once you've got the floss out and you've got the floss between the two teeth, you're finished.
16:08 Moah Yeah.
16:08 Alex So but you don't always have to.
16:10 Moah Top of making this easy is setting up the environment to make it as low friction as possible.
16:17 Alex Don't put your floss in the drawer. Two flights of stairs in the cabinets.
16:20 Moah That you have to go get. Put it next to the couch. Part one and part two of making this easy is make it small and make it accessible to you. Whatever you need.
16:30 Alex Yeah, whatever is going to make the habit. Whatever the smallest meaningful step you can do. That's the thing you should set as the habit so that it's as easy as possible to maintain. And then make the environment so that the thing you need to do has as little friction as possible. If you want to go running, put your socks and your shoes by the door. Whatever you can do to basically increase your ability.
16:50 Moah And the third step is find a trigger. And the way to get the trigger in your mind is to put it in the format of after X event. That normally happens regularly. Then I do the new habit that you want to do.
17:12 Alex So instead of having to create something new in your mind, a totally new pathway, you're just taking an existing pathway.
17:18 Moah And tweaking it a little bit. Yeah. And I think habit stacking is something that people talk about. Right. You stack it to something you already do. Like something that you normally have to do, like eat lunch.
17:32 Alex After I turn the light off in the living room, I turn off the light every night. I'm not going to forget to turn off the light. I never forget to turn off the.
17:41 Moah Light and then celebrate.
17:44 Alex I never remember to do this right. Never.
17:47 Moah This seems so unnatural to celebrate. For me, my way of celebrating is tracking it. Right. People like checking off things. I love putting a cross on whatever weekly planner and tracker that I have. I'm actually thinking about using GQs with a recurring test so that I have a thing to check off every single day and it will create the next test for the next day.
18:14 Alex Did Ben Franklin log his failures or his successes?
18:17 Moah I think he was logging his failures.
18:21 Alex Maybe avoiding punishment was enough of a trigger for him.
18:24 Moah Maybe he didn't want to write down how he fails.
18:26 Alex But this isn't like a big.
18:28 Alex This isn't like throw a party. BJ's example in his book is that he will look himself in the mirror and smile.
18:34 Moah As a reward, I drink this special herbal tea after I do my yoga. Right? Yeah. You can set up pairing something nice.
18:43 Alex You just have to make sure it's not so. Probably shouldn't be eat a bowl of ice cream.
18:48 Moah That will counteract all the five last step. This is our value. This is what BJ Fogg did not have.
18:56 Alex And he might have.
18:59 Moah You are going to fail. You are going to forget one day. You're going to forget one week. How do you reset yourself?
19:08 Alex And it's best to think through some of these scenarios.
19:11 Moah How you are going to fall off.
19:13 Alex How are you going to get back on the wagon after you fall off?
19:16 Moah It's also important to be aware of what could get you off track. Going on trips, going, getting sick is one of the many ways habits got rewire stop, right?
19:30 Alex And you want your reset rule to be as high commitment as possible. So if you're gonna go on a business trip and you're gonna be at a conference at 7:30 in the Dagum morning and you know you're not gonna get your yoga in on the business trip, if your habit's small enough, maybe you can do it on the trip anyway. But if it isn't, I do one.
19:46 Moah Sense salutation and that's okay.
19:49 Alex But if something comes up where you hurt your knee and you can't do anything, if you know that you're going to be recovered in three weeks, if you go ahead and book a yoga class three weeks out, that's a really high commitment. It's a really powerful reason for you to start your habit again or once you've fallen off. If you write down on a piece of paper that day, I forgot to floss my teeth today, but I will do it again tomorrow. Anything's better than just thinking, oh, I really ought to start that again. Because you don't.
20:19 Moah Yes, we want to give a couple examples of how to use this five step framework.
20:24 Alex And we just cooked these up. The specifics aren't important.
20:28 Moah Let's say we go back to the one of the most common get fit as a resolution for your New year. The translation for behavior that you can commit to is after I put my shoes on in the morning, I'll walk for 10 minutes. That's it.
20:45 Alex What you need to say is after I get done eating lunch, I will set foot outside. So you sit there at lunch, you're watching your Netflix and you're gobbling your orange chicken from Panda Express. And then when you're done, you put on your shoes and you step outside. If it's raining, you kept your habit. If it isn't raining, I'm outside anyway. Gosh, it's nice out here. I'm going to take my walk. Small habit, easy to access. Don't have to change your routine.
21:10 Moah I think that's where we differ a little bit, the tiny habits part of the whole floss, one tooth. I just can't. Like I have reservation but go take.
21:20 Alex It up with bj.
21:23 Moah So for me at Least you can just step outside. Because I'm the kind of person who would just step outside and walk back in.
21:29 Alex You put your shoes on, tie up.
21:31 Alex Your shoes, step outside and then decide, no, I'm not going to take a walk ever.
21:36 Alex No, of course not.
21:37 Moah See, I am not the kind of person like why we are at a person. For me, if the goal is to step outside, I will go and step outside and come back. You have to go walk 10 minutes regardless of what's happening.
21:50 Alex So one of the primary theses of this show is that there's no silver bullet for anybody. Nothing works perfectly for everybody.
21:57 Alex You got to find what works for.
21:58 Moah You, what is going to lead you to the maximum number of repetitions. That's what's important for habit forming. There's a myth that you have to do 21 days for a habit to form. And it's a myth. They actually did a control trial with people to actually track. What they found is on average it takes 66 days. And then there's another study that did it and they found medium was 59 days. So more or less it's about two months.
22:27 Alex Try small first.
22:28 Moah As long as it will lead you to the desired behavior at least a.
22:32 Alex Decent percentage of the time. Yeah, you don't want to have your. If you're going to do an after lunch walk, you don't want to have your shoes be up in your closet upstairs. You want to have them by the door.
22:40 Moah Right. And it also shouldn't be like I am going to walk 10,000 steps every single day. Some days you just don't have the time and you want to make the.
22:50 Alex Wagon as little as possible.
22:51 Moah And then you also need to kind of plan for now that people are in a lot of hybrid situation. You might be able to go take a walk if you're working from home that day. But if you are at the office with coworkers and they are rolling right into the meeting, what happened to your walk? So you have to think through a little bit. What's the if then statement? So then it says after I eat lunch, I will go take. So that's the if then statement.
23:17 Alex Got to have that trigger. You want to wire it to an existing behavior.
23:21 Moah What's the celebration when you come back? You high five the door. Ow.
23:29 Alex Like our eight year old's high five.
23:31 Alex Yeah, you can high five the door. You could do a fist pump into the air.
23:35 Alex There are a lot of things you.
23:36 Alex Could do that are celebratory and somewhat relatable.
23:38 Moah Listen to your favorite Piece of music good?
23:40 Alex Absolutely, yeah. Have a celebration song where you put on the music while you're drinking your water after your walk. Something that makes you feel good, gives you some kind of endorphins or dopamine or something that's good for you.
23:52 Moah What about the professional or work habit you want to create?
23:57 Alex The most common one professionally is grow my professional network.
24:02 Moah In this work environment, people love to make sure that they have good professional network.
24:08 Alex So one thing that's true, we may talk more about this next time, is that it's easier to make habits that are daily than it is to make habits that are weekly or monthly. Or even worse if it's every two weeks or three weeks, because it's really hard to get that trigger to become automatic. Exactly.
24:25 Moah Yeah.
24:25 Alex So I was thinking, oh, go to a monthly networking event. But I think an easier one would be, what if you left one LinkedIn comment every day? That could work because that's quick. And that way you are getting a new network because people may respond to your comment and you may meet somebody that way, but at the very least, you're maintaining your network.
24:46 Moah Yeah, I think that's definitely which part of the day you should put it to Q ender or queue after.
24:55 Alex So for me, I wouldn't want to do this after standup or after lunch because LinkedIn has a way of sucking me in. And then I may grow my professional network, but I may get fired for.
25:07 Moah Not doing anything, or you may start a flame. Or.
25:12 Alex For me, if I wanted to do this, I would probably put it at the end of the day.
25:16 Moah Mm.
25:16 Alex I think what I would optimize for when I close my work laptop, I will pull out my phone and go to LinkedIn and type in a comment. I'm not gonna get sucked in because I've either gotta go get the kids or start dinner. If I'm doing this at five o' clock in the afternoon, I'm not gonna spend an hour in LinkedIn.
25:34 Moah You don't have the time.
25:35 Alex And I've got enough time like I've always got. It's. We've made the behavior small.
25:39 Moah Right?
25:40 Alex Just one comment's easy. I've got my phone. I can just open it up and be like, hey, what's the first post? I'll just say, that's really cool.
25:49 Alex Unless it's something bad. I got fired today. Well, maybe that's not the right tone, but you could find something really easy.
25:55 Alex To respond to and form that habit.
25:57 Alex How do I celebrate this? I don't know what Feels appropriate for.
26:01 Alex Leaving a comment on LinkedIn.
26:05 Moah This is why people keep forgetting that part of the habit formation because it's kind of unnatural. Do a slack bot that asks you and then you had a thumbs up or check mark or something.
26:18 Alex That's not bad.
26:19 Alex LinkedIn, they've got a big thumbs up there. That would be perfect.
26:22 Alex Just do a thumbs up to yourself. Grin and do a thumbs up. You did it. There's a celebration.
26:27 Moah There you go.
26:28 Alex Now help me get back on the wagon. What happens when the Internet goes down?
26:32 Moah And no, you could miss it just because you forgot. Right? You're in a rush. You have to leave early that day because the kids have a school event and you're closing your laptop at 3:30 or 4:30 and not real regular 5:00 clock. So there would be something happening like oh there's an emergency call and you got pulled in and then you didn't have your daily. How do I get back on routine wind down. I would say schedule the 10 minute calendar appointment the next day. So like 450 after you'd be like hey, go do this.
27:06 Alex I see. And then I'll close my laptop at 4:50. Yeah, that's not bad.
27:10 Moah Cool.
27:10 Alex Thumbs up and schedule a calendar appointment. We just created a spectacular less busy lab habit. So on that note, Mo, do you want to share the tip of the week?
27:21 Moah Yes. Try to build one new habit at a time. So follow Benjamin Franklin's behavior one he was focusing one for one week knowing that it takes about two months for you to form a habit. I would say just focus one resolution you want to focus on. Turn it into a habit that you can create and use that five step process that we gave you. Identify the behavior, make it easy, figure out what cue that's going to trigger you to do this behavior. Celebrate and also create the fallback plan.
28:04 Alex And if you want to do more stuff, use boomerang to do a send later to yourself to say hey, let's start this next habit in March or set up a queue in gqueues and snooze.
28:14 Moah Snooze it for two months.
28:16 Alex Out and four months out.
28:17 Alex But try to if you could have.
28:19 Alex Multiple resolutions, if one of them is set up automatic withholding for your 401k or something that's a one off. But if you want to create a habit, it's easiest to create one new.
28:28 Moah Habit at a time and then stack them over time to get better at whatever you're trying to do. It's really important to Be focusing all your willpower on creating one neural pathways that is becoming automatic for you. And then once that becomes automatic, you can add more.
28:45 Alex What's going to be your resolution this year?
28:48 Moah So my resolution or goal is to sleep better. The behavior that I'm going to fix or commit to is get morning sunlight at least 10 minutes within the first hour of my wake up time. And the cue that I'm going to set up is the kids go off to school at 8:30. When they are going out, I'm going to put on my jacket and shoes and get out the door after they get out.
29:18 Alex And what's your plan for getting back off the wagon when we have to come to the portal and record our podcast?
29:25 Moah I think going to portal it just counts because I'll be out in the car. Yeah. So most of the time if I'm going to the city or anywhere else, I will be getting the sunlight. I don't really have a very firm plan on rainy and cold days, which we don't get that many.
29:48 Alex Luckily where we live, the weather's great.
29:52 Moah I do have a very fancy and pretty raincoat, so maybe that will motivate me enough to get out. I don't have a plan on how to celebrate, but getting to check off a checkbox is a celebration itself.
30:06 Alex Can I make it dopier?
30:07 Moah Yeah.
30:08 Alex Can I get you some sun stickers? And you can put sun stickers on a calendar.
30:12 Moah That would be fun.
30:13 Alex Okay, I know what your Christmas present's gonna be.
30:16 Moah All right, what about you? What is your resolution? Mr. Resolution?
30:21 Alex I'm gonna take a page from the most popular resolutions list. We'll link it in the show notes.
30:25 Alex I'm gonna try to read more this year. I feel like the last couple years my 9 year old is reading more books than I am and that's probably.
30:32 Alex A good thing, but I feel like.
30:34 Alex I've spent a lot more time doom scrolling or playing video games than reading. I think my goal is gonna be after I put the kids to bed. I will page.
30:44 Moah So after is the cue. After. What about the nights that I put them to bed?
30:49 Alex I did my part to put them to bed. I got them brushed and everything.
30:52 Moah And then. Do you have any celebration after you read a page? What do you get?
30:57 Alex I'm just gonna take the LinkedIn one. I'm just gonna give myself a big old thumbs up every night and feel good about it.
31:02 Moah How about I give you a high five?
31:04 Alex You'll give me a high five?
31:05 Alex You're not there A high five of the door, the rabbit.
31:10 Moah And if you for any reason, like we're out some nights and go to bed really late or we're traveling, what's your plan?
31:18 Alex The plan for me is going to be that I'm going to read that page in the morning instead, because there's always an opportunity to read that page. I mostly do ebooks, so they're mostly on my phone and on my Kindle. I'll just catch up and get back on the wagon by being in the same place in the book I would have been.
31:38 Moah The resolutions are your good intentions and to achieve your good intentions with more than maybe 18% success rate, you can try the five step execution plan to turn that resolution into habits.
31:58 Alex Good luck building habits and we'll be back next time.
32:02 Alex Just in time for everybody's favorite New.
32:04 Alex Year's resolution related holiday Quitter Friday in order to give you a little bit of extra motivation to keep you sticking to your New Year's resolutions right when most people give them up. Happy Holidays and Happy New Year.
32:16 Moah We hope you enjoyed this episode of Less Busy Lab. If you haven't already, please can I say it?
32:21 Alex I want to say it.
32:22 Moah Okay, fine.
32:23 Alex Smash that subscribe button.
32:25 Moah Are you happy now?
32:26 Alex So happy.
32:28 Moah Please subscribe to our podcast to get all our future episodes. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Find me on LinkedIn for more behind the scenes content and updates.
32:39 Alex We'll put the links to all the research papers, tools and templates mentioned in the episode in the show notes.
32:44 Moah We'll also be adding a listener questions segment in the future episodes, so if you have any productivity related questions, send us an email at questions@lessbusylab.com our sponsors this week.
32:55 Alex Are the same as they are every week. GQueues and Boomerang. Check them out.
32:58 Moah Thanks for listening and we hope you're already feeling less busy and more productive.
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