How Habit Stacking Will Make You More Productive

Motivation, repetition and discipline is required.

As important as it is to embrace spurs of the moment and chaos, our brains love good routines to get into. Every morning we get up and we feel a sense of control with our lives as we go through a routine we’ve been doing for a good chunk of our lives.

Beyond that, there are smaller and nuanced details for how we accomplish tasks.

To open a can with a tab on it, I rip the tab off, take the end of a spoon, wedge it between the gap left by the tab and pull up. I’ve done this unusual habit ever since I was a kid when I struggled to open up fruit cups that my mom packed for lunch.

We also have tricks to how we tie our shoes, wash our hands, how we get to work, how we get dressed and so on. We do all of these things because it all subtly cues our body into what we’re doing or what we intend to do and thus our body complies.

Just like our routines that have been built over time, building new skills and developing habits work in a similar fashion. Those quirks and tricks were all once habits that evolved into our routines that we know today.

As a result, regardless of how old you are, we are all capable of developing new habits and behaviours on a whim.