A couple of years ago I was interested in learning about habit development (mostly because I wanted to develop new habits myself) and came across a behavior change method called Tiny Habits by a behavioral psychology research at Stanford named BJ Fogg.
The method is simple. Pick a very small and specific habit. Visualize it. Next, identify ways you can make that small and specific behavior easy to do. Lets say the behavior you chose was to pick up and practice hitting a chord on your guitar after you get home from work. What would make that easier? Well, maybe you can try leaving your guitar next to the door! Finally, you pick a trigger and a reward in order to sustain the behavior.
That sounds pretty simple right? Well, yeah. It is. It's an excellent framework - but that's all it is. A framework. It does not prescribe what the habits should be, what the triggers should be or what the rewards should be. It offers a scaffolding for you to build on. An outline for you to expand upon. That's the hard part that companies spend many years and dollars trying to figure out.
In other words, even though the general mechanics of the habit loop is pretty well understood at this point, the question of how to make a specific behavior stick - namely, what triggers and rewards need to be in place - depends on the person and the behavior. For example, for practicing the guitar, it's not clear what the reward should be. What motivates one person to pick up a guitar is different from what motivates another person. For some, maybe just playing the guitar is reward enough and this whole system is just unnecessary.
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