From the course: Gretchen Rubin on Creating Great Workplace Habits

Strategy for success: Make it convenient

From the course: Gretchen Rubin on Creating Great Workplace Habits

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Strategy for success: Make it convenient

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- For all of us, we are, to a crazy extent, more likely to keep a habit if it's convenient to do that habit. And conversely, if it's inconvenient, we're much less likely to do it. And we can really harness this to our benefit. So, if there's something you want to encourage yourself to do, you want to make it as easy as possible. If there's an unpleasant task that you want to do at work, that takes a lot of assembling and pulling pieces together, you want to get everything set up, so the minute that you're ready to start work, you can just slide right into it. You want to get all the tools you need. You want to get all the resources gathered together to make it as convenient as possible. If you're managing a team and for some reason they keep not doing something they're supposed to do, filling out a form or following through on something, really look at the processes involved. If you can make it more convenient, you're going to make it much more likely that those team members are going to become in the habit of doing it. If it's too inconvenient, they're going to come up with excuses. They're not going to do it. So making things as convenient as possible. And also if you're managing yourself, if you're thinking well, should I join the gym that's across the street from my office or should I save a few bucks and go to the one that's five blocks away? If you can afford it, you want to go to the one that's right across the street, because any little benefit of convenience is going to pay off. I mean, they've done studies showing that if at a salad bar, if people are using tongs instead of spoons to take food, they'd take less with tongs, 'cause tongues are just that much more work. That's how sensitive we are to convenience. So you want to harness that to your benefit.

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