Examples of bad habits, and one small swap for each

What counts as a bad habit

A bad habit is something you repeat that you’d rather not, set off by the same time or place most days.

It doesn’t make you a bad person. It makes you a person with a routine nobody chose on purpose.

But every habit runs on the same little loop. In his Atomic Habits summary (opens in a new tab), James Clear names the four parts: cue, craving, response and reward.

So the useful question is when it shows up. That minute is also most of how to stay consistent on the days motivation has gone home early.

Ten examples of bad habits, with a swap for each

Find the minute the habit starts, then change that minute.

The fourth column matters more than it looks. It’s the part that shows you, two weeks from now, which nights the swap actually worked.

Phone and screen habits

Three of the ten live on the phone. They start in different minutes, so they need different swaps.

Doom-scrolling after dinner

The plate’s cleared and the couch is right there. And the thumb starts moving before you’ve decided anything.

The swap: put the phone away for 10 minutes. Another room is best, though a drawer does the job.

Ten minutes is short enough to say yes to. But it’s also long enough to start something else, like the pan in the sink that’s been waiting since you sat down.

And the pan won’t argue.

The phone in bed

This one shows up at lights out. The swap is to move the charger across the room, so reaching the phone means getting up.

Nobody scrolls for long while standing at the far wall of the bedroom, holding the cable very still at the one angle it agrees to charge.

That’s the whole trick.

Late replies

The message came on Saturday. You meant to answer it properly once you had a quiet evening, and now it’s Wednesday and the quiet evening still hasn’t come.

Why does a reply get harder the longer it waits? Because the proper answer you planned keeps growing in your head.

The swap: send a short hello. “Saw this and thought of you” will do.

Morning and evening habits

Mornings and late evenings are when you’re most tired. So habits settle there very comfortably.

Snoozing the alarm

The alarm rings, and your thumb finds the snooze button in the dark without either eye opening, the way it has every weekday morning for years.

Clever thumb.

The swap: get up when the alarm rings. You don’t need to be awake, only standing.

Late-night snacking

Around 10 pm, you’re at the fridge again, looking in as if it might have restocked itself since 8.

The swap: swap one sweet thing. Tea instead of the biscuits, or one square instead of the bar. There are no food rules here.

Since it’s our app, a plain note: nine of the ten swaps above are busy-day steps in Yumemira, the small-steps goal journal for iPhone. The charger is the odd one out.

The ready goal Less phone time has a busy-day step that reads “Put the phone away for 10 minutes”. You tap Mark done when it’s finished, then Say how it went in one line.

On paper it looks the same: a tick next to the habit, and a few words about how the swap went.

Home and money habits

These three don’t arrive all at once. They pile up one plate at a time.

Leaving the dishes

After dinner, the pan is “soaking”, and by Thursday it has soaked for three days and started to look like it pays rent there.

It isn’t leaving.

The swap: tidy for 2 minutes. Whatever’s left when the time’s up can stay.

Set a 2-minute timer and stop when it rings.

The clutter chair

Picture the chair in your bedroom that stopped being a chair a while ago. It holds clothes now, the ones too worn for the wardrobe. When did it last hold a person?

The swap is the same 2 minutes, on the chair only, folding or hanging whatever’s on top until the timer goes and not one sock more.

Some nights it gets its seat back.

Impulse buys

Payday is the usual minute, or a sale email that lands late at night. The swap: skip one small buy, and leave it in the cart until tomorrow.

Will you still want that third phone case once you’ve slept on it and checked what’s already in the drawer?

It’ll still be there.

The app’s No-spend days goal counts the days you kept, three times a week by default. Paper works the same way with a tick.

And each goal in the app counts its own way, glass by glass or dollar by dollar.

Work habits

Work habits hide inside the job itself. So they feel less like habits and more like the weather.

Email first

You open the laptop and the inbox opens with it. By the time you look up, other people’s messages have planned your whole morning while your own list waits in your head.

That’s backwards.

The swap: focus for 10 minutes on your own list before the inbox. In the app, that’s the busy-day step for the Study or focus goal.

But ten minutes is the ceiling, not the floor. Then the inbox can have you.

Skipping lunch

Busy days are the minute here. A call runs over, then another one starts, and lunch turns into a coffee late in the afternoon that you drink standing up.

The swap: make a simple snack at home the night before, so lunch is already in the bag. A sandwich is fine.

So is a banana.

How to swap a habit without willpower speeches

Willpower speeches are long, and you usually give them to yourself late at night. Three plain moves do more.

1. 1

   Swap one habit at a time.

   Choose the one that bothers you most this week. The other nine can wait their turn.

2. 2

   Make the old habit harder.

   Charger across the room, the snack shelf higher up, the shopping app off the Home Screen. Clear calls this “make it difficult”.

3. 3

   Make the new step tiny.

   Two minutes, ten minutes, one sweet thing. If it feels almost too small to count, it’s the right size.

Small steps like these are the whole idea behind micro habits. The cue-and-reward reasoning is in the habit loop, explained slowly.

Why write a line after? In two weeks you won’t remember which nights the swap worked, and the lines will.

Write one line the night you try the swap.

It can be as short as the fourth column of the table. And if you’d like the step and the line in one place, try it in Yumemira.

When the old habit wins a round

Some nights the swap won’t happen. The video wins, and the next one’s already loading.

The old habit has had years of practice in that exact minute, on that exact couch, and the swap has had a week or two, so it’ll lose a few rounds.

That’s fine.

Tonight, put the phone on a charger across the room before the next video starts.

The next video can wait for the morning.