Make Boring Things Addictive

You do not need more willpower to exercise, study, or do the tedious task you keep avoiding. You need to lock it to something you already crave.

You do not need more willpower to exercise, study, or do the tedious task you keep avoiding. You need to lock it to something you already crave.

The story stays locked to the workout, nowhere else.

Katy Milkman, a behavioral scientist at Wharton, had the same problem most people have with the gym. She wanted to go. She rarely felt like it once the day actually arrived. What she wanted more than the workout, if she was honest with herself, was to know what happened next in the page-turning audio novel she had been listening to in her car. So she made herself a rule that she could only listen to that audiobook at the gym, nowhere else. Within weeks she was showing up five days a week, not because her discipline had improved but because she had made the thing she wanted depend entirely on the thing she kept avoiding.