“Guiding Structure means the structure of your environment is the largest determinant of your behavior. If you want to successfully change a behavior, don’t try to change the behavior directly. Change the structure that influences or supports the behavior, and the behavior will change automatically.”
– Personal MBA, Josh Kauman
Changing one’s habit is a really difficult thing to do. It takes years, commitment and consistency. Like me, I’ve planned to write at least one blogpost regularly per week since 9 years ago, but I still failed until now.
Often when approaching the end of the year, we looked back and realised nothing much achieved. Because we could not keep up with the habits we set earlier. Our time has value, if only we appreciated it by doing something productive to reach our goals.
The advice about guiding structure struck me. Instead of trying to change the habit directly, I need to change the structure surround it. For instance, if you want to change habit into eating healthy foods everyday, do not stock unhealthy foods in your house in the first place. It will make you forcefully eat whatever available in your fridge in the beginning, but along the time you will get used to it.
That makes sense. I think I have done one or two steps like that before. For example, at one point I wanted to reduce my consumption of coffee. I stopped stockpiling coffee at home, including the instant ones. I was also too lazy and busy to order coffee outside, so I drank more water instead. It made me realise I could survive few days without coffee.
Another point is about my work-out habit. It was hard for me to commit to exercising at least 1 hour per week. I have taken several dancing classes that I like, joined gym memberships, and followed exercise videos in YouTube, but none of them worked. I could not make it consistent, thus did not lose any weight.
When I moved and lived in the United Kingdom for one year, I lost 8 kilos. Did I do any exercise? No, basically I just walked a lot everywhere, such as to send off my daughter to school. I also did a lot of walking by traveling around and visiting interesting places.
Moving back to Jakarta, without any places I like to walk and see, I gained more weights. I realised then that walking was the best exercise that worked for me. So I bought a Walking Pad, a smart treadmill but less bulky. It can be easily folded, moved and stored anywhere. Since then, I walked at least 4000 steps a day at home, and hopefully can increase it into 10,000 steps. I tried to make the accessibility to exercise effortless using this Walking Pad.
Another example could be seen in my book reading habit. I put books everywhere in my house; in the living room, bedrooms, and even in bathroom. I also stored a lot of ebooks in 5 different applications easy to access from my laptop, tab, and smartphone: Playbook, Kobo, iBook, Google Drive, and BorrowBox. There are audiobooks too, in case my mood is only listening. The result was, most of the time I could finish 4-5 books a month.
So, what kind of guiding structure I need to cultivate to make me regularly write my blog?