Change your Environment, Change your Behavior
- 1. CHANGE YOUR ENVIRONMENT CHANGE YOUR BEHAVIOUR FOGGY EXPERIMENTS IN BEHAVIOUR DESIGN by @ashpodel Inspired by BJ Fogg’s behavior design principles
- 2. Behavior happens when trigger, motivation and ability converge at the same time. HIGH ABILITY HIGH MOTIVATION That is, if something is easy to do and you want to do it, every time it is triggered, you will do it. TRIGGER WORKS LOW ABILITY LOW MOTIVATION But, if something is hard to do and worse, you don’t want to do it, no matter how often it is triggered, it won’t happen. TRIGGER FAILS See BJ Fogg’s behavior model. http://behaviourmodel.org
- 3. Your environment is a rich ground for facilitating behavior change by: modifying your ability to do things providing artifacts that trigger behavior, and managing your motivation levels.
- 5. 1. The Two Toothbrushes Creating a trigger to brush teeth at night To remind myself to brush my teeth before sleeping, I put an extra toothbrush by my bedside.
- 6. Did It Work? Not exactly. It worked for the first two days, and then I ignored it. And so, instead of brushing my teeth, I made it even simpler. I decided to just use mouthwash. Learning If a trigger is not working because of low motivation, make the behavior even easier to do.
- 7. 2. Hiding Notification Counts Reducing ability to peek at unread email These icons show I moved the icons unread email counts. below the visible area, so that I had to scroll to get to them. To prevent myself from looking at email every few minutes, I moved the email icons on my phone so that I would have to scroll to see them.
- 8. Did It Work? Nope. Scrolling wasn’t enough of a disability. And so, I’ve turned off push email. This is actually a bit scary, but I’m going to try it for a week. Learning When impairing ability, small changes work less well, you might have to make a drastic move.
- 9. 3. The ‘Work’ Zone Keeping my motivation to work high Since I was Now, I’ve away for the converted it summer, I had back to a changed my work space workspace to to stay ‘in be a storage the zone’ space, but I when didn’t switch it working. back. To keep my motivation levels to keep working high, this physical space marks the territory that represents this work zone.
- 10. Did It Work? So far. I have found myself concentrating for longer periods of time. Work related stuff is always on the table and fewer people stop by to chat and distract. But, I don’t know why it is working. It could be the space, the people or something else. Learning Change one thing when running an experiment.
- 11. To summarize, If a trigger isn’t working, make the behavior easier to do. When reducing ability, make it really hard. Experiment and iterate. But change something you can learn from. What’s next: See if these behaviors are sustained, that is, if they are ‘path behaviors’. (See http://www.behaviorgrid.org) Follow me on @ashpodel as I explore BJ Fogg’s behavior design principles.