Designing Your Stack: The Art of Intentional Routine Building
Now that we understand the mechanics of the habit loop and the importance of identity, we can get to the core strategy: habit stacking. So, what is habit stacking? It’s a method for building new habits by attaching them to existing ones. Instead of relying on a time or location to be your cue, you use a current, well-established habit as the trigger for the new one you want to adopt.
The basic formula for habit stacking is:
After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].
The beauty of this approach is its simplicity. You already have dozens, if not hundreds, of strong habits baked into your daily life: waking up, brushing your teeth, making coffee, putting on your shoes, eating lunch. These are solid neural pathways in your brain. By linking a new, desired behavior to one of these existing pathways, you leverage the brain’s natural momentum. You’re not creating a new habit loop from scratch; you’re simply inserting a new action into an existing one.
Step 1: Start with a Minimum Viable Action
The biggest mistake people make when building habits is starting too big. We declare, “I’m going to work out for an hour every day!” After two days of intense soreness and a disrupted schedule, we quit. Our ambition outpaces our ability to be consistent.
The solution is to define what we can call a minimum viable action (MVA). This is the smallest, easiest version of your desired habit—a version so simple that you can’t say no. The MVA is not about making massive progress on day one. It’s about showing up and casting a vote for your new identity. It’s about mastering the art of starting.
Here’s how to reframe ambitious goals into MVAs:
- “Read more” becomes “Read one page.”
- “Meditate for 20 minutes” becomes “Sit and breathe for 60 seconds.”
- “Clean the whole house” becomes “Put one item away.”
- “Write a book” becomes “Write one sentence.”
It might sound laughably simple, but that’s the point. On your busiest, most stressful day, you can still read one page. You can still breathe for one minute. The MVA makes consistency almost effortless. Once the habit of showing up is established, you can gradually increase the duration or intensity. But first, you must build the foundation of consistency. When you think about how to habit stack, always begin by pairing a current habit with a minimum viable action.
Step 2: Conduct a Friction Audit
Every action in your life has a certain amount of friction associated with it. Friction is anything that makes a behavior harder to do. The more steps, time, or effort required, the higher the friction. Our brains are wired to follow the path of least resistance. You can use this to your advantage by intentionally manipulating friction in your environment.
To build a good habit, you must decrease the friction. To break a bad habit, you must increase it. Let’s conduct a quick friction audit for a habit stack you might want to build:
Goal: Meditate for one minute after brewing your morning coffee.
Current Friction Points: You don’t know how to meditate. Your phone with the meditation app is in another room. The kitchen is noisy and your family is walking around.
How to Decrease Friction:
– Download a simple meditation app beforehand and pick out a one-minute guided meditation.
– Create a rule that your phone stays on the kitchen counter overnight.
– Designate a specific chair in the corner of the kitchen as your “meditation spot.”
By making these small adjustments, you’ve removed the obstacles that stand between you and your desired action. The path of least resistance now leads directly to your one-minute meditation. Conversely, if you wanted to stop checking your phone first thing in the morning, you could increase the friction by leaving it to charge in the living room overnight. When your alarm goes off, you’d have to physically get out of bed and walk to another room to turn it off, making it much harder to mindlessly scroll.
Step 3: Design Your Environment for Obvious Cues
Your environment is a powerful, invisible hand that shapes your behavior. The most effective way to stick with your habits is to make the cues for your good habits obvious and visible. If your goal is to drink more water, don’t hide a glass in the cupboard; leave a water bottle on your desk, next to your bed, and on the kitchen counter. You are creating visual triggers that constantly prompt the desired action.
This principle is essential for successful habit stacking. Your environment should support the chain of behaviors you’re trying to build. Let’s say you want to build a routine where you journal for five minutes after you finish your morning coffee. How can you design your environment?
After I finish my coffee, I will journal for five minutes.
Environmental Design: The night before, place your journal and a pen on the kitchen table, right next to your coffee maker. When you go to pour your cup, the cue (the journal) for your next action is unmissable. You don’t have to remember to journal. You don’t have to find your pen. The environment does the work for you.
Step 4: Incorporate Accountability
While habit stacking is an internal system, external accountability can be a powerful motivator. Knowing that someone else is aware of your goals creates a gentle social pressure to follow through. This doesn’t have to be intense or high-stakes. It can be as simple as having a “habit buddy.”
You and a friend can agree to text each other each morning after you’ve completed your new habit. For example: “Done with my one-minute meditation!” This simple act of checking in does two things. First, it creates an immediate reward—the satisfaction of sending the text and getting a positive response. Second, it raises the stakes ever so slightly. We are less likely to skip a habit when we know we have to report back to someone. The desire to maintain our reputation and be seen as consistent is a strong behavioral driver. Find someone in your life who also wants to build routines and suggest becoming accountability partners. It can make all the difference, especially in the early days.
