I’m excited to have been picked to join BJ Fogg’s 3 Tiny Habits programme for this coming week. Dr Fogg is founder and director of the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, and an expert on the psychology of persuasion. His behaviour model and in particular the behaviour grid are worth checking out.
The 3 Tiny Habits programme is a way of looking at how people form habits. As I am both a serial procrastinator and someone who finds it hard to stick to routines, I thought I’d give it a go. So I signed up and found out yesterday that I got accepted on the programme. The instructions are simply, very simple, but that’s the point.
- Pick something simple & easy to do in very little time.
- Decide when to do it.
- Practice.
There’s more to it than that but I’ll wait until after the programme to describe more. In the meantime, writing down the 3 habits I will try to form over the coming week is a way of declaring publicly my commitment. Mine are:
- After I finish my breakfast, I will write down on an index card 3 things that I want to do during the day.
- After I eat my lunch, I will take my vitamin tablets.
- After I have cleared up after dinner I will post a single Tweet describing one thing that I have learnt during the day.
See, I said they were simple. Of course with some willpower you wouldn’t need to join a programme to create such simple habits. But that would miss the point I think. Doing things in a group like this strengthens the behaviour. The really fun and rewarding part will be building bigger habits in the future. From little acorns to great oak trees grow.