Habit stacking is something that I have been wanting to look into for a while. It was mentioned in a number of my self help books that I read over the beginning of the pandemic. Habit stacking is basically just building positive habits but you structure them in a way that doing one reminds you to do the others.
To look into habit stacking I read the book Habit Stacking by S.J. Scott. In the book Scott talks about how how habit stacking improved his life and made him use his time more efficiently and help him work towards bigger goals. He defines some guidelines for habit stacking.
- Start small, shorter smaller habits are easier to keep up with
- Habits should not take more than 5 minutes
- Habits need to relate to a bigger goal
- The trigger to start your habit stack needs to be something that will happen everyday, whether it is an alarm or the act of you entering the kitchen
He also defines the seven primary areas of you life that you should be focusing habit stacking in:
- Career
- Finance
- Health
- Leisure
- Organizing
- Relationship
- Spirituality.
And a one habit stack doesn’t have to be just for one of these areas. You can have a morning stack that has you make your bed (organization) make a smoothie (health) text someone that you love them (relationship) and sit down to meditate (spirituality/health).
A habit stack may also be the trigger for you to start a bigger habit like sitting down to write or going for a run.
Overall you are in control of how you set up your habit stacks, there is no habit stack for every person and you need to create a routine that works for you. Here is another site that goes into more detail.
So, I started creating morning and evening routines and for a while I did quite well, however, one skipped day turned into two and so on and so on. I found that if I create a good morning routine I also need to follow a good evening routine because otherwise I neglect my sleep hygiene and subsequently everything else. However, the app I found does make keeping track of habit stacks much easier. It is called Routinery and you can see an example of how to use it below. Overall I think that habit stacking can be positive and I think it works very well for certain people. It was helpful for me but not life changing.