How to stick with your habits: start by defining them

Most abandoned habits do not die from a lack of willpower. They die because they were badly worded from the start. “Go to bed early”, “eat better”, “do more sport”: these resolutions share the same flaw. Nobody can say, at the end of the day, whether they were kept or not.

Take “go to bed early”. Early, how early? 10 pm for a morning person, half past midnight for a night owl. At 1 am, tired, you will always find an argument to declare that tonight, 1 am counts as “early for you”. The habit becomes a negotiation with yourself, and you win every time.

The referee test

A good habit passes a simple test: a stranger, looking at your day, should be able to call it kept or missed without hesitating. If it needs interpretation, the habit is badly defined.

“Go to bed early” fails the test. “Go to bed before midnight” passes it: at 0:01, it is missed, full stop. “Eat better” fails. “No added sugar after 6 pm” passes. “Do sport” fails. “30 minutes of activity” or “8000 steps” passes, and even checks itself, more on that below.

The old SMART method said the essential part long ago with its M, for measurable. A goal you cannot measure is not a goal, it is a wish. The difference looks like nothing, yet it decides everything: it removes the wiggle room your brain uses to let you off the hook.

Why vagueness suits you (and sinks you)

The brain favours the immediate reward over the distant benefit. Charles Duhigg and James Clear each say it in their own way: a good habit pays off in six months, the easy way pays off now. We covered that weak link in our summary of Duhigg’s Power of Habit.

A vague habit offers a third escape route, sneakier than simply giving in: reinterpretation. You do not drop your goal, you quietly redefine what it meant. “Eat better” becomes “I had a salad at lunch, so the evening burger is fine”. You keep a clear conscience while the habit empties of meaning.

A University College London study measured that it takes 66 days on average to make a behaviour stick. That is long, and above all it is 66 chances to negotiate with yourself. A vague criterion loses half of them on the way. A measurable one shuts the door: at midnight sharp, there is nothing to argue about. That is exactly why the first of James Clear’s four laws is to make the habit obvious, with a precise intention like “I will cycle for 20 minutes on Monday at 7 am”. We summarised those laws, and the chapter everyone forgets, in our analysis of Atomic Habits.

How to reword your habits

Take each of your habits and ask two questions. What number defines it? When does it get checked?

• “Drink more water” becomes “8 glasses of water during the day”.
• “Read” becomes “10 pages before sleep”.
• “Less social media” becomes “30 minutes of social screen time maximum”.
• “Meditate” becomes “10 minutes, timer running”.

A number, a unit, sometimes a cut-off time. If you cannot attach a figure, the habit is not ready, it is only an intention.

The figure has to be honest too. Aiming for a sustainable 8000 steps beats aiming for 15000 you drop after three days. On that exact point, the science came down on the side of realism, and we dug into it in our article on the 10000-step myth.

A measurable criterion makes the commitment credible

A measurable goal has one last advantage, and it is the one we care about most. It makes the commitment verifiable, therefore serious.

As long as a habit stays vague, no commitment holds. You cannot promise anything about “going to bed early”, since you alone decide after the fact whether the promise was kept. With “before midnight”, the promise becomes binding. Kept or missed, no appeal.

We built Make It or Pay on that principle. You set a habit, a frequency, and a real penalty if you miss it. For that penalty to be fair, the criterion has to be sharp: a numeric threshold, a simple proof. That is exactly why we removed the vaguest templates, such as “go to bed early”, from the app. A penalty on an interpretable criterion would be unfair, and above all useless, since you could always argue your case. On steps or meditation minutes, the phone measures for you and there is no debate left.

A habit you keep starts well before discipline. It starts with a sentence so precise that, in the evening, there is nothing left to interpret.

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Sources: Charles Duhigg, “The Power of Habit”. James Clear, “Atomic Habits”. Phillippa Lally et al., University College London, 2009 (average time for a habit to form). Independent analysis articles.