I got a new bedside table. It doesn’t look like much but believe me, this little four-legged machine is going to help me get to where I want to be. I love my crappy new table more than I should.
I read a book called Atomic Habits by James Clear. The book is a great resource on how to build new (presumably good) habits and eliminate “bad” (unwanted) habits. According to the book, one of the rules of sustainable habit building is to make them as easy as possible.
Here’s a diagram from James Clear’s website that helps explain why “make it easy” is an effective rule. By making things easier for yourself you get to remove motivation from the equation. That way you can still do the thing even if you’re feeling unmotivated.
One of the new habits I am focusing on is reducing the amount of time I spend looking at my dumb phone. Less time on my phone equals more time for other things that I actually enjoy, like making music or blogging.
Through some not so rigorous self-evaluation, I realized that on a typical day I might spend ten to twenty minutes each morning looking at my stupid phone before even getting out of bed. The reason for this behavior isn’t complicated. It’s because my phone was right there beside me and it was easy to do. I didn’t think about it. It was just something that automatically did.
The solution is simple. Put my phone in a place that’s out of reach while I’m still lying in bed half-asleep coated in the morning fog. A problem with this solution is that I use my phone as an alarm, which requires the phone to be near me. But alas, that’s a solvable problem too! It’s called an alarm clock, dummy. But if I get an alarm clock, what am I going to put it on? Ahhh ha…. I know just the thing…. A new mother fucking table, bitches!!!!!! Plus a new bonus alarm clock to boot (more on my new alarm clock a bit later).
Now, each night before I go to bed, I leave my phone on my desk that’s waaaaaaaaay on the other side of the room. And each morning I spend zero minutes looking at my dumb phone. A new habit was successfully formed because I put in a small amount of up-front effort to identify the problem, develop a workable solution, and then execute the plan.
If you think about it even further, my new habit is not “not looking at my phone in the morning”. The new habit I actually created was leaving my phone on the desk each night before getting into bed.
My new alarm clock is pretty fun. Not only does it tell the time, but it also tells the room temperature. Which I now know never surpasses sixty degrees Fahrenheit during the day. It drops into the low 50s at night. Brrrrrrrrrr…. This reminds me of my favorite polar bear joke.
Q: Why did the polar bear go inside the fridge?
A: He was trying to keep warm!
As your reward for reaching the end of this blog post, I will leave you with a photo of a polar bear that I took when I was at the zoo in Chicago.
