Design your environment
One of the places I like to suggest starting is with what I call environment design.
So basically, the things that are on your desk at home, your kitchen counter, your office at work.
They influence your behaviors.
And if you can restructure your physical environment or your digital environment, then you’re more likely to actually stick with the right habits.
So, as an example, a lot of people feel like they watch too much television.
So, walk into pretty much any living room, where do all the couches and chairs face?
They all face the TV. It’s like, what is this room designed to get you to do?
Now I’m not saying you have to restructure your entire house, but there are a range of choices you could make, right?
You could take the chair and turn it away from the television and have it face a coffee table with a book on it.
Or you could put the TV insides a wall unit or cabinet, something behind doors so you’re less likely to see it. You could also increase the friction of the action in the environment.
So you could like unplug the TV after each use, and then only plug it back in if you can say of the show that you want to watch.
So, you’re not just like “turn Netflix on and find something.”
So that’s an example of curtailing a bad habit with environment design, but you can also use it to promote good habits.
So for example I used to buy apples and I would put them in the crisper at the bottom of the fridge, and I would not see them because they were trucked down there.
And so them, two weeks later, they would go bad and I’d get annoyed because I’m throwing food out and throwing money away.
And so I bought a big display bowl and I put it right the middle of the counter and put the apples in there, and now they’re gone in like 3 days just because it’s obvious.
There’s study that I mentioned in the book from Massachusetts General Hospital.
They went into the cafeteria at the hospital, and they added water to all of the fridges, and they also added some of those little rolling carts that have water in them by the food station in the cafeteria.
And that was all they did. They didn’t talk to anybody. They didn’t motivate anybody. And 6 month later, water sales are up 25%, soda sales are down 11%.
And I always think that’s interesting because if you were to go up to any person in that room and be like, “why are you drinking a coke?” They’d be like, “I wanted a coke!”
Why do you have water? “This is what I felt like having.”
But the truth is some percentage of them chose it just because It was obvious.
Just because of what the environment nudged them toward.
環境は自分の習慣に大きく左右されるので、
環境を変えることが、LAZYを抑える方法ですね！