Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives by Gretchen Rubin

the change would make a difference for his writing—but the clutter in his apartment didn’t bother him the way it would have bothered me. And because it didn’t really matter to him, probably it hadn’t been interfering much with his productivity. Even among the Foundation Four, we all must make choices that reflect our values.
    The deeper I went into my investigation of habits, the more I appreciated the importance of understanding each person’s values and temperament. It was so easy to assume that the steps that work for me would work for others—but habits don’t operate that way. Individual differences mattered even more than I’d believed when I started.
    First things first—but we must all decide what comes first, for us.

If It’s on the Calendar, It Happens

Scheduling
    I’m a full-time believer in writing habits … You may be able to do without them if you have genius but most of us only have talent and this is simply something that has to be assisted all the time by physical and mental habits or it dries up and blows away. … Of course you have to make your habits in this conform to what you can do. I write only about two hours every day because that’s all the energy I have, but I don’t let anything interfere with those two hours, at the same time and the same place.
    Flannery O’Connor, letter, September 22, 1957
    T he Strategy of Scheduling, of setting a specific, regular time for an activity to recur, is one of the most familiar and powerful strategies of habit formation—and it’s one of my favorites. Scheduling makes us far more likely to convert an activity into a habit (well, except for Rebels), so for that reason, I schedule even some slightly ridiculous habits, such as “Kiss Jamie every morning and every night.”
    Habits grow strongest and fastest when they’re repeated in predictable ways, and for most of us, putting an activity on the schedule tends to lock us into doing it. In college and law school, I never asked myself, “Should I go to class?” or “Do I need to do this reading tonight?” If class was scheduled, I went. If reading was on the syllabus, I read it.
    A friend with a daily schedule gets up at 4:30 a.m., meditates for twenty minutes, grabs a flashlight for a forty-minute walk, eats breakfast with her two sons, showers, dresses, and is on the train to work at 7:30. (She’s a Lark, clearly.) For someone else, any of these activities might be a challenge, but not for her; she’s already decided what to do.
    Scheduling also forces us to confront the natural limits of the day. It’s tempting to pretend that I can do everything if only I get the “balance” right, but scheduling requires choices. Scheduling one activity makes that time unavailable for anything else. Which is good— especially for people who have trouble saying no. Every week, Eliza and I go on a “Wednesday afternoon adventure” (though we’re not particularly adventurous, and usually end up at a museum). Especially now that Eliza is in the tricky teenage years, I want to make sure we have some pleasant time together each week. So I put our adventure on the schedule, and if I’m asked to do anything that would interfere, I say automatically, “I’m not available at that time.” Scheduling makes activities automatic, which builds habits.
    Scheduling appeals to many people, but Upholders are particularly attracted to the predictability of schedules and the satisfaction of crossing items off to-do lists. Questioners see the sound reason behind adding an item to the calendar, and for some Obligers, merely seeing an item pop up on the schedule creates a helpful sense of accountability. However, because Rebels want to choose to do an activity, putting an activity on their schedule may dramatically diminish their inclination to do it.
    I decided to use Scheduling to start an