The 20-Second Rule: How to Build Better Habits

In his book, The Happiness Advantage, happiness researcher Shawn Achor discusses how he wanted to make practicing guitar a daily habit.

However, he encountered a problem, one that plagues everyone: He couldn’t motivate himself to do it. No matter how much he tried to motivate himself, his guitar remained in his cupboard. Achor recalls:

He couldn’t motivate himself to do it. No matter how much he tried to motivate himself, his guitar remained in his cupboard. Achor recalls:

No matter how much he tried to motivate himself, his guitar remained in his cupboard. Achor recalls:

Achor recalls:

The guitar was sitting in the closet, a mere 20 seconds away, but I couldn’t make myself take it out and play it. What had gone wrong? [1]

The Problem with Willpower

Achor’s problem was a common one:

If you want to change a habit in the long term, in the beginning, you have to rely on willpower. But willpower is a finite resource and can’t be relied on.

In other words, the more decisions you make on a daily basis—the order in which to organize your agenda, what to order for lunch, when to do your groceries—the more likely you are to experience what psychologists call decision fatigue.

Once you experience decision fatigue, improving habits—especially at the end of a stressful day—becomes less of a priority. Habitual, negative behaviors, like forgoing the gym in favor of easier ones like watching television, become routine. It becomes an almost inescapable rut.

Given a choice, disempowering habits almost always trump behaviors that stretch us. They offer us a path of least resistance and, when regularly forged, become the easier choice.

But what if you had a tool to reshape that path entirely? A tool that made positive habits more accessible?

What You Need To Focus On

A common problem people have with changing their habits is learning how to start.

If you think of a habit, you tend to think of the habit in its entirety. All habits are comprised of multiple steps, tiny actions required to necessitate it, and thinking about it is enough to overwhelm anyone.

For example, when you think about going to the gym, you don’t focus on the routine part of The Habit Loop (exercising)—you focus on everything else you need to do to do the habit.

You think about packing your gym bag, traveling to the gym, changing into your gym clothes, warming up, exercising, showering, warming down, and traveling home.

That’s a lot of things to think about.

Here’s the rub:

You don’t need to think about all of that.

Simply focus on the first action you need to take (in my case, when going to the gym, I only focus on picking up my gym bag, which is placed by my front door).

However, what if we redirected our focus from not only what we needed to do to start our habits, but also how we could make that start as easy as possible?

The Power of Activation Energy

Activation energy, as Achor explains, is that spark you need to start:

In physics, activation energy is the initial spark needed to catalyse a reaction. The same energy, both physical and mental, is needed of people to overcome inertia and kickstart a positive habit.

In Achor’s example, he realized that having to remove his guitar from his closet to practice increased the effort he needed to practice – even if that effort only cost him an extra 20 seconds.

Those 20 seconds meant the difference between doing his habit—and not.

He came to a resolution: put his guitar in the center of his apartment.

Guess what happened?

He practiced guitar for 21 days straight without exception.

Achor called this “The 20-Second Rule”. In his own words,:

Lowering the barrier to change by just 20 seconds was all it took to help me for a new habit.

Using the 20-Second Rule to Break Bad Habits

The 20-Second Rule can not only be used to build new empowering habits, it can be used to ease the transition between negative and positive ones as well.

Achor’s next experiment was to replace watching television when he returned home from work with reading and writing his book.

This time, he took the batteries out of his remote and moved them – you guessed it – 20 seconds away in another room.

Here were his findings:

The next few nights when I got home from work, I plopped down on the couch and pressed the ‘on’ button on the remote – usually repeatedly – forgetting that I had moved the batteries. Then, frustrated, I thought to myself, ‘I hate that I do these experiments’. But sure enough, the energy and effort required to retrieve the batteries – or even to walk across the room and turn the TV on manually – was enough to do the trick.

How to Use the 20-Second Rule

There are multiple ways you can experiment with the 20 Second Rule. Just remember, as a rule of thumb:

You need to decrease the activation energy you need to do positive habits and increase it to do negative habits.

If you want to replace a bad habit like drinking alcohol after work with a better one, consider moving your pint glasses to another room in your house or leaving alcohol that’s best served chilled unrefrigerated (no one wants to drink a beer or white wine that hasn’t been chilled).

If you’d like to minimize the number of hours you spend online, delete the social media apps on your smartphone (one I’m currently experimenting with) or install a plugin for your browser that limits your Internet usage. You can’t disable this plugin because it requires extra effort – and activation energy.

If you want to eat more healthily, consider doing one weekly grocery shop for the whole week. Prepare your lunch and dinner meals in advance or leave your credit/debit card at home to minimize the temptation of ordering takeaways on your journey home after a stressful day.

A Final Word

It’s no secret change is hard.

But by understanding activation energy, we can replace negative behaviors with better ones—and all in under 20 seconds.