100 Things: Every Designer Needs to Know About People

60. Forming a Habit Takes a Long Time and Requires Small Steps

When you turn on your computer each morning, you first open your email, then you go on Facebook, then you go to weather.com to check the weather (or whatever your particular pattern is). You do this every day. It’s a habit. Why are you motivated to do these same tasks every day? What did it take for these activities to become a habit? What would it take to change the habit to something else?

Philippa Lally (2010) recently studied the “how” and “how long” of forming habits. She had people choose an eating, drinking, or activity behavior to carry out every day for 12 weeks. In addition, the participants had to go online and complete a self-report habit index each day to record whether ...