Build Productive Habits by Answering Three Questions

(and of course doing a little work)

By Jeremy DeRuiter

I haven’t given a single thought to brushing my teeth for something like forty years. It’s simply what happens when I first get out of bed in the morning and what I do last right before going back to bed at night. No choice involved, no willpower exerted. It is the purest form of habit.

I have my parents to thank for that one — I have no memory of them teaching me to brush. Somewhere in that prehistory of my childhood where all memories are lost or thick with fog, they gave me enough repetitions followed by that “Come here and breathe on me” accountability check that it sunk in good and deep as a twice-a-day habit.

As an adult, however, the work to build productive habits has felt a lot more difficult. Changing behavior is HARD. There is such a strong momentum in our daily lives, and so much of that pushing and pulling is informed by habits, many of which are just running in the background without you thinking about them. Unproductive habits make it more difficult to become the person you want to be. Productive habits become shortcuts to living a life you love.

The trick then, is about finding ways to introduce productive habits into your life that push out or replace the unproductive ones.

Being human, I’ve struggled with this a bunch over the course of my life, but it’s gotten a bit easier recently and that’s what I’m here to share with you. But first, to establish my credentials as Fellow Human Who Struggles but Figured Out a Few Things for Myself, check out this list of habits that are now part of my morning routine and the bumpy road I traveled to get here:

• Daily workout routine (failed something on the order of fifty different times and ways, solved permanently seven years ago)
• Having a daily gratitude practice (failed about a dozen times in different ways, solved permanently two years ago)
• Doing a daily meditation (failed a few times, solved permanently two years ago)
• Reading — not listening — to a book every morning for myself (solved on first attempt, two years ago)
• Having a daily affirmations practice (failed twice, solved earlier this year
• Creating a daily visualization practice (solved on first attempt, earlier this year)

Failing Forward as a Runner

The first time I attempted to establish a workout routine was maybe 12 years ago. I wasn’t happy with where my weight was and wanted to start jogging to help slim down. This means that I had plenty of desire, but the trouble was that I had zero knowledge. I’d never been a runner. I did not know how to build this habit.

Picture me out there, setting out jogging for a few hundred yards maybe until I’m some combination of out-of-control panting, heart racing, and maybe developing shin splints to boot. Dejected, I walk for a while, then start jogging again, no sense of what pace I should be running at until I’m once again completely wasted. Begin the walk of shame back to the house.

That scene would repeat itself in various iterations, maybe twice a week if I was filled with extra gumption to try again, but always ended in what felt to me like failure. It’s no surprise that I failed to build an effective habit when I look back at that period of my life — who would want THAT experience every day? Yikes!

At some point, my wife and I decided to buy a treadmill, and this created an opportunity that took a while to be fully realized. The treadmill helped me with being able to control my pace and also helped with avoiding shin splints. I started jogging with greater success and of course much-improved feelings around the practice, but the new problem became that often I wouldn’t feel like getting on the treadmill.

I would get home from work an hour or two after Megan, a teacher, who would have been done with her lunch at 10:30 in the morning. By the time I landed home around 5:00 or worse, 5:30, she would be ravenous. We would eat, and then clean up, and now, with a belly full of food, I had zero inclination to hop on the treadmill. We’d settle in to watch a show or two while I digest, but then at that point it became a real issue of willpower to want to break away from that comfy and fun scene to go work out. In that period of my life, I’d manage to work out three times a week on good weeks, often relying on the weekend to get in two of those three.

The breakthrough came for me when Megan and I started doing our workouts in the morning. There was so much less variability in my morning routine than there was in the complicated chain of events that all had to line up correctly in order for an evening workout to come together — getting out of work on time, traffic running smoothly, dinner not taking too long or being too heavy, and my willpower to workout exceeding the comfort of the moment on the couch with Megan.

Instead, I wake up, brush my teeth (thanks Mom and Dad!), take the dogs out, and then hop on the treadmill. Now the only major variable involved is what time I wake up, which is pretty easily solvable so long as I get to bed at a reasonable time and set myself a couple alarms of increasing intensity to make sure that I don’t snooze my way through my window of opportunity.

That change from post-work/dinner to mornings meant that on the weekdays it quickly became automatic for me to get in a workout. There’s still an element of willpower involved with how “good” a workout I get, but the bottom line is that every single day I start out my day with getting some kind of a sweat going, which in turn makes me feel good (yay, endorphins!) at the beginning of the day.

Bundling My Way to a Powerful Morning Routine

I wish I remember where I first came across the subject of “habit bundling” because that was the crucial next step for me in creating the rest of my productive morning routine. Bundling is the practice of creating a habit by attaching a new behavior to a habit that you already have.

Habit bundling is one of those “it’s-so-obviously-a-good-idea-why-didn’t-I-already-know-about-this?” things. Because building a habit is hard work, and requires repetition before it becomes automatic, one of the crucial steps in building a habit is just remembering to do the new thing, whatever it is.

Habit-bundling is effective because it addresses two stumbling blocks at once. The existing habit becomes a cue to remember to do the new one and because your existing habit is already automatic, that means that you’ve created the space in your life for that practice. It becomes easier to create juuuuust a little bit more room to wedge in that additional new behavior. So, boom! Bundling helps you remember AND helps you find the space for the new habit.

This is what helped me solve another repeated failure-to-launch practice around expressing gratitude. I’d seen a bunch of different references to just how healthy and productive a practice it is to spend some time thinking about the people and things in your life that you’re grateful for. I saw it enough times that I wanted to try it out for myself.

A book that I was reading at the time finally inspired me to try, advising readers to spend time at the end of the day writing down ten things that you’re grateful for. I gave it a go one night, forgot to try it the following night, remembered again to try it, but struggled to come up with ten before I was too tired to stay at it, and so on and so forth.

When I later read about habit bundling, I decided to give gratitude another try, using my morning workout as the anchoring habit. Our treadmill is down in the basement, so as I was building this new habit, I would detour over to the chair in front of the TV before heading to the treadmill. Instead of looking for ten things to be grateful for from the previous day, I looked for three. I’d spend a few minutes finding those three things and reflecting about how I felt in the moment the day before and then head over to the treadmill to get in my workout.

It worked! It became not only something that was easy to do, but something that I looked forward to doing each morning.

Across weeks and months, I’d come across other ideas that seemed like they’d fit nicely alongside the gratitude practice, and so I’d add them to the habit bundle that was becoming a habit chain. As of today, every weekday morning I start my day with 3–10 minutes of meditation (the variability often hinges on how long it takes me to get downstairs), 3–5 minutes of gratitude, 2-ish minutes of visualizing dreams that I have for my life coming true, 1 minute of affirmations, 15–30 minutes of reading, and 15 minutes to an hour of exercise.

I love my routine. I feel like it all launches me into the start of my workday prepared with a clear mind, positive attitude, invigorated body, and a grateful spirit.

What About You?

Yeah, all that stuff I wrote above? It’s not going to work for you. Why would it?! If you tried to just copy the plan that I established in my life inside of your life, I’m guessing it won’t work out, just in the same way I couldn’t make an author’s 10-item nightly gratitude routine fit in mine. But don’t fret! Here’s what you need to consider:

• What do you really really (really) want to start doing in your life? You cannot skip the desire step of this equation. If you don’t fully, deeply want to add _______ new practice to your life, you’ll continue to prioritize other things over it. Start here: what feels like the best idea for you to try out? The one that either sounds hugely beneficial to where you’re trying to go in life or the one that seems like something you would enjoy doing as part of your day-to-day?
• Where in your life do you have the most opportunity? This comes down to eliminating obstacles and variability — what parts of your days or week tend to go on autopilot already? Are there existing habits that you’ve already established that you can use as an anchor? Things like when you brush your teeth, during your morning shower, while you eat breakfast, or during your commute, when you first arrive at work or get back home, during a lunch break, when you sit down to watch tv for the night but before you turn on the tv, immediately after you put the kids to bed, etc.
• What would it look like to start small? Think about it: you’re already fully spending your 24/7, so every new practice you build into a habit will be taking time from something else. If you try to start off at Maximum Over-Achiever Mode, I’m guessing that all those unconscious (and maybe not suuuuuper-productive) habits will go to war. They will stage a street fight inside of your psyche to regain the turf they lost on your schedule. Next thing you know, the new habit you were trying to start will die before it ever really had the chance to live.

Instead, start super small. Try something between three minutes and fifteen minutes. That might feel ridiculously short, but RESIST the urge to go hard at it before it’s become an engrained daily(ish) routine. In the same way that I went too hard at jogging before I knew how, and gave it up again and again, just start with something easy that become a series of small wins until it becomes something that you crave doing every day.

If you really want the thing and you carve out the space in your life to get a small victory each day, I promise you will start down the path to building powerfully productive habits. Good luck!