What Makes a Good Environment?

Your environment shapes your outcomes.

But what is a “good” environment?

It depends what you want to achieve.

James Clear has some principles for building and breaking good habits:

To build good habits:

  1. Make it obvious
  2. Make it attractive
  3. Make it easy
  4. Make it satisfying

To break bad habits:

  1. Make it invisible
  2. Make it unattractive
  3. Make it difficult
  4. Make it unsatisfying

These can be applied broadly, and we can simplify:

A good environment

  1. Makes positive behaviour obvious and easy
  2. Makes negative behaviour difficult

Where does this apply?

If you’re trying to eat better, remove all the bad food from the house. Replace your normal snack food with something healthy and put it out in obvious view.

  • To find an unhealthy snack, you now have to leave the house or order online. That extra friction helps prevent it.

If you want to watch less TV, remove the streaming services from wherever you’d normally watch. You won’t be tempted by their icon everywhere, and when you do want to watch something, you’ll be more deliberate about it.

So in short, what makes a good environment?

It makes good behaviours easy, and it makes bad behaviour hard.