Arranging the room

Behaviour follows friction far more reliably than it follows intention. This lesson is entirely about moving friction around, and it’s the highest-return lesson in the course.

Add friction to the default

The phone goes in another room, on a charger, at a fixed time. Not face-down on the arm of the sofa - in another room. The distance is the intervention; twenty seconds of walking is enough to convert an automatic reach into a decision.

If you use your phone as an alarm, buy a clock. It costs very little and removes the last honest excuse for the phone being beside your bed.

Remove friction from the alternative

Whatever you want to do instead needs to be within arm’s reach, already set up, requiring no preparation. The book is open on the table. The sketchbook has a pencil in it. The instrument is out of its case on a stand.

An instrument in a case in a cupboard gets played roughly never. The same instrument on a stand in the corner gets played several times a week. Nothing about the person changed.

One lamp

The single most effective environmental change is a low, warm light that you turn on in the evening while turning the overhead light off. It signals evening, it makes screens look unpleasantly bright by comparison, and it makes a chair with a book beside it look like the obvious place to be.

This also does real work for your sleep, for the reasons covered in the sleep course.

The chair

If you want to read in the evening, you need a specific place where reading is what happens. Not the sofa where you also watch things - somewhere with a light, a surface for a cup, and no screen in the line of sight.

The specificity matters. A place with one strong association beats a place with three competing ones.

What to expect

You won’t need willpower for any of this after about two weeks. That’s the whole reason to do it as design rather than discipline: design keeps working when you’re tired, and discipline doesn’t.