How to Use “Environment Design” to Accomplish Your Goals Easier and Faster

No matter how much we try to strengthen and develop our willpower and self-control, the more time we spend in environments that discourage positive habits and encourage harmful ones, the less likely we are to flourish.

If we spend most of our time in environments that prompt us to do things we want to do and abstain from those we don’t, however, acting on our best intentions becomes a lot easier.

In their bestselling 2009 book Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein refer to the organization of the context in which we make decisions as “choice architecture,” and they believe powerful organizations like corporations and governments can — and should — help create environments that incline us toward personally and socially responsible behaviors. A “soft paternalism,” if you will.

I say, why wait for someone else to do it? Why not design our own environments as a personal project, so they nudge us toward the specific outcomes that we desire? Why not prearrange better default choices for ourselves, so we can better stay on course, even when we’re cruising on autopilot?

Start by thinking about how you can change your environment to make good habits easier to adopt and bad habits harder to continue.

A simple way to do this is to remove steps from the former and add them to the latter.

For example, if you’d like to eat more nutritious foods, place them front and center in your refrigerator, kitchen, and pantry. This makes them easier to grab when you’re hungry. And if you’d like to eat less junk food, tuck it away in a cabinet you don’t open, making it harder to access.

If you’d like to get better about doing your morning workouts, set your workout clothes out the night before, removing an obstacle that might dissuade you from leaving the warm embrace of your bed.

If you’d like to drink more water, keep a water bottle at your desk at work instead of soda, and fill it up every time it’s empty. But if you want soda, you have to go to the kitchen or vending machine.

The options here are endless. All you have to do is brainstorm ways to make whatever you want to do more visible and convenient and the things you want to stop less so.

If you take the time to do this — to sprinkle your environment with cues that lead to positive behaviors and remove their destructive counterparts — it might surprise you how much easier it is to change your life.