This is a lesson I learned while reading the book Atomic Habit by James Clear. Let me quote the main ideas here.

“Anne Thorndike, a primary care physician at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, had a crazy idea. She believed she could improve the eating habits of thousands of hospital staff and visitors without changing their willpower or motivation in the slightest way. In fact, she didn’t plan on talking to them at all. […] They started by changing how drinks were arranged in the room. Originally, the refrigerators located next to the cash registers in the cafeteria were filled with only soda. The researchers added water as an option to each one. Additionally, they placed baskets of bottled water next to the food stations throughout the room. Soda was still in the primary refrigerators, but water was now available at all drink locations. Over the next three months, the number of soda sales at the hospital dropped by 11.4 percent. Meanwhile, sales of bottled water increased by 25.8 percent. […]

People often choose products not because of what they are, but because of where they are.

If I walk into the kitchen and see a plate of cookies on the counter, I’ll pick up half a dozen and start eating, even if I hadn’t been thinking about them beforehand and didn’t necessarily feel hungry.

In the Sale industry, they have a term called Impulse Buying, which “is triggered when a shopper sees a product for the first time and visualizes a need for it.”

The most powerful of all human sensory abilities, however, is vision.

In the early 1990s, the cleaning staff at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam installed a small sticker that looked like a fly near the center of each urinal. Apparently, when men stepped up to the urinals, they aimed for what they thought was a bug. The stickers improved their aim and significantly reduced “spillage” around the urinals. Further analysis determined that the stickers cut bathroom cleaning costs by 8 percent per year.

So here are some example to redesign your environment and make the cues for your preferred habits more obvious:

• If you want to remember to take your medication each night, put your pill bottle directly next to the faucet on the bathroom counter.
• If you want to practice guitar more frequently, place your guitar stand in the middle of the living room.
• If you want to drink more water, fill up a few water bottles each morning and place them in common locations around the house.

The power of context also reveals an important strategy: habits can be easier to change in a new environment. Trying to eat healthier? It is likely that you shop on autopilot at your regular supermarket. Try a new grocery store. You may find it easier to avoid unhealthy food when your brain doesn’t automatically know where it is located in the store.”

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