Switch - Chip Heath [85]
Many smokers, for example, find it easier to quit when they’re on vacation, because at home, every part of their environment is loaded with smoking associations. It’s like trying to quit smoking inside a Camel advertisement—everywhere you look are reminders of the habit. There’s that drawer in the kitchen where the lighters are stashed, the clay pot on the porch that’s become an archive of ashes, the ever-present scent of smoke in the car and the closet. When a smoker goes on vacation, the environment recedes toward neutrality. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to quit, but it’s easier.
It’s unrealistic, however, to think that most of us can shift our environment so dramatically. If you’re trying to change your team’s habits at work, then yes, relocating your office would be a big help. Good luck selling that idea. What are some more practical ways to create a habit?
The first thing to realize is that even small environmental tweaks can make a difference—that’s what we saw in Chapter 8. Remember how Amanda Tucker rearranged her office to make it easier for her to listen to her employees? That was the first step in establishing a new habit. (Environmental tweaks can even force a habit, as we saw in the Rackspace example. When the call-queuing system was thrown out, the customer-service staffers quickly developed the habit of answering the phone.)
But forming a habit isn’t all environmental—it’s also mental. It would be very difficult, for instance, to tweak the environment in a way that would compel you to learn how to play the piano. So how do you lay the mental groundwork for a new habit?
5.
Say that you’ve been putting off going to the gym. So you resolve to yourself: Tomorrow morning, right after I drop off Anna at school, I’ll head straight to the gym. Let’s call this mental plan an “action trigger.” You’ve made the decision to execute a certain action (working out) when you encounter a certain situational trigger (the school circle, tomorrow morning).
Peter Gollwitzer, a psychologist at New York University, is the pioneer of work in this area. He and colleague Veronika Brand-statter found that action triggers are quite effective in motivating action. In one study, they tracked college students who had the option to earn extra credit in a class by writing a paper about how they spent Christmas Eve. But there was a catch: To earn the credit, they had to submit the paper by December 26. Most students had good intentions of writing the paper, but only 33 percent of them got around to writing and submitting it. Other students in the study were required to set action triggers—to note, in advance, exactly when and where they intended to write the report (for example, “I’ll write this report in my dad’s office on Christmas morning before everyone gets up”). A whopping 75 percent of those students wrote the report.
That’s a pretty astonishing result for such a small mental investment.
Does this mean that simply by imagining a time and place where you’ll do something, you increase the likelihood that you’ll actually do it? Yes and no. Action triggers won’t get you (or anyone else) to do something you truly don’t want to do. An action trigger never would have convinced college students to participate in an online calculus camp on Christmas Day. But, as the extra-credit study demonstrates, action triggers can have a profound power to motivate people to do the things they know they need to do.
Peter Gollwitzer argues that the value of action triggers resides in the fact that we are preloading a decision. Dropping off Anna at school triggers the next action, going to the gym. There