The search for the perfect habit stack keeps people stuck longer than the habit itself would. Everyone’s after the one combination that’s supposed to work best, the one they’ve read about, the one someone with a bigger following swears by. None of that matters as much as asking if it fits in the day you already have.

after, not before.

As you consider these ideas and how you might adapt them to fit your life, there’s one thing to keep in mind. Your existing habit acts as the trigger or prompt for the new one. Don’t insert your new habit before the existing one.

Before I have a shower, I’ll do two squats. The shower hasn’t happened so there’s nothing to prompt or trigger the two squats. Start all your habits with ‘after I [existing habit], I will [new habit]’.

the examples.

In sharing examples for you to start with, I’ve grouped them by the most common themes I come across. Morning routines are the most widely talked about and the time when people feel most pressure to ‘get right’. Exercise habits are endlessly challenging and most people I work with find this the most frustrating. Evening routines are widely talked about but are usually the time of day that people forget to consider, mostly because they are too tired and have too many things they need to do before they can finally go to bed. Productivity is the other area I see causing people frustration and they can be hard on themselves, usually without justification.

morning routine.

Your morning routine likely has more reliable anchors than any other part of the day. The same things generally happen in the same order at a similar time. This is driven, in part, by a fixed deadline provided by the start of your workday. It’s assisted by the fact that you still feel half asleep and as though you are operating on autopilot. And the day hasn’t had time to get going and derail you. So, assuming your alarm has reliably gone off, and you are able to respond by getting up, you have a nice clear set of actions to work with.

Boiling the kettle, brewing your tea, making breakfast, eating breakfast, doing your dishes, having a shower, cleaning your teeth, getting dressed.

Don’t use all of them and don’t add more than one thing to your routine at a time.

You want to drink more water. After you switch the kettle on, drink a glass of water.

Meditation. 5 minutes after you’ve eaten your breakfast.

Build upper body strength. Two push ups after you clean your teeth.

Focus your brain on what you need to get done that day. Get dressed and then write down up to three things you need to get done. Try to add the reason they need to be done and how you’ll feel when they are done. This stops you creating tasks for no reason or choosing things that aren’t really priorities.

exercise.

You want to exercise more. This is something I hear all the time. Let me push back a little. What is ‘more’? Do you know what exercise you want to do? Have you got a reason for choosing that one? Have you got a goal you want to work towards? Do you know how much time and how often you want to do the exercise?

Taking a moment to quantify ‘more’ and specify what you are doing and why is important not only in building the habit but also in measuring your progress and knowing when you are at the place you want to be with it.

The type of exercise you want to do, the time it will take, the equipment you need, these are all important in working out where the trigger is for your stack. Consider:

You want to go to the gym three times a week and there is a class you like that is on at 6pm but you never make it back out the door when you get home from work. There are different ways you can approach this.

Have your gym bag packed and at the door ready to go. When I walk in the door, I will put my work bag down and pick up my gym bag. Walk through the door is your trigger, the gym bag is a visual reminder. Lay your workout clothes out ready to change when you get home.

Gym clothes ready and waiting in the hall. When I walk through the door, I will pick up my workout clothes and go and put them on. Walk through the door is your trigger, your workout clothes are the visual reminder.

You also have options to put your gym clothes in the car, take them to work, hire a locker at the gym. Then you need to find the trigger in each scenario to prompt you to go.

Another exercise could be to go for a run, and you always feel tired at the end of the day. So, your habit will be to run in the morning three days a week, one day being the weekend. What days are best to get up a little earlier? Do you have work from home days where you could use your commute time? Now you need to look at where you put your running clothes and your shoes. What point in your morning routine will act as the trigger to get you out for your run?

evening routine.

Evening habits get less attention than morning ones, but the anchors are just as reliable. Walking through the door, eating dinner, brushing your teeth, plugging in your phone, setting your alarm these happen most nights without you deciding to do them.

The question is, what habit do you want to create? Bedtime wind-down? Work on your side hustle? Time on a hobby? The thing I hear most is that people have things they want to do in the evening, but they can’t make themselves do them. They are too tired after work and end up sitting on the sofa watching TV and suddenly it’s bedtime. There’s nothing wrong with this, unless tired is a story you’re telling yourself to avoid doing the other thing. You haven’t chosen to watch TV; it just happens out of habit.

This is where habit stacking can be helpful. Let’s say you want to do something on a hobby or side hustle, but you keep watching TV. Start by putting the TV remote out of sight. Try to spot the moment where you move to the sofa without thinking. What’s going on? What happened before? Can you use that moment to trigger a new action instead of it signalling that you go to the sofa? What needs to be easily available to get you started on your hobby or side hustle? Where does it need to be to be visible?

I put my laptop on the worktop in the kitchen so that after I washed the dinner dishes I would pick it up, I would tell myself that I would put it away but when I got to my desk, I would open it and do a task on my side hustle. So, my evening looked like: after dinner I will pick up my laptop to put it on my desk, when I put my laptop on my desk I will open it, when I open my laptop, I will send one email. I did this every night and by the end of the week I’d sent five emails with no thought behind scheduling the task.

productivity.

If working on a hobby or side hustle counts as productivity, then I’ve just talked you through one way you might do this in your evening. But there are other times of the day where you want to be more focused or feel more productive. For me, it’s getting myself focused at the beginning of my day, for other people it’s after lunch or after a meeting, points in their day where they struggle to transition from an activity to focused work.

I’ve tried a few things that could work. The first thing I do when I arrive at work or leave a room to go to my home office, is to fill a glass with water. So, I sit down at my desk and take a drink of water, this is my cue to decide what my first task will be. This turned out to be my winning habit stack, but I’ve tried visual cues in the form of cards with tasks written out, I’ve tried sensory cues with a small diffuser and an essential oil that I smell to create a signal for focused work time.

Opening your laptop or switching on your computer is the most obvious task that happens every time you start work or get back to your desk. This makes it the most reliable trigger. If you can create a habit of closing your laptop when you move away from your desk – when I stand up, I will close my laptop – then the opening of your laptop becomes a trigger every time you get back to your desk. If you don’t have a laptop, screen locking or putting the machine to sleep can work equally well.

the pitfalls.

The biggest pitfall is time. People don’t have time to think about how to create their habit or put the work in to build their habit stack. I get it. I’ve been there. All I can really say is, have you tried it? Or, what if you could crack that one frustrating habit that you keep thinking about and that keeps nagging at your brain? What if that went away? Would that be worth some time to figure out the stack?

Memory is the other pitfall I hear most often. I forget. This was my biggest obstacle until I started using visual cues and organising my environment to help me. Running shoes in a cupboard out of sight aren’t going to remind you to run. A hobby ‘hidden’ in the garage is out of sight, what could you bring indoors and into your line of sight to help you?

where to go from here.

These are starting points, not a checklist to work through. Pick one thing that fits into a day you already have. Not the one that sounds best, or that you think everyone is doing. The thing that feels the smallest or easiest but would make the biggest difference.

If you would like help working out which habit will make the difference in your life, book a free introductory call.