Living environment – sabotage or life hack.

“Clean up your room!” or the more local variety “Order up your room!”. These are probably some of the most frequent, annoying, and frustrating phrases I have heard as a youngster, and unfortunately even as an adult. It’s only recently, after a lifetime of living in a cluttered environment that I’ve reached the point where I want to clean up the room.

Order and cleanliness around me were never a priority. Somehow the message never landed when coming from my parents. The message did hit home when finally figuring out that everyday moods, productivity, and habits are shaped primarily by the visual stimuli in our environment.

Visual cues are some of the most impactful sensory inputs. Out of about eleven million sensory receptors humans possess, roughly ten million of those are dedicated to sight. It follows that with such a huge proportion of our sensorial resources dedicated to sight, most of what we think and do have a direct root in our immediate visual range. They shape our lives and everyday decisions. Huh, so organizing my personal space or choosing where to spend my time is more critical than I thought.

Environment then.

Have I ever found myself lazy, procrastinating, ready to play games, binge food or TV hours on end, and generally avoid anything productive? Yes, many times over. Last night’s pizza boxes were abandoned on the coffee table. A few days’ selections of coffee mugs. Empty plastic bottles and junk food wrappers. Game controllers and remotes lying around. Everything pointed to the resurgence of the previous’s day craving, a visual cue for every bad habit every day packed into 4m x 5m of space. Welcome to my living room before the inevitable visit from the cleaning lady at the end of the week.

Lack of motivation? Check. Disorganized thinking? Check. Waking up and going to sleep tired? Check. Taking three times longer to find anything in the pile of clutter? Check.

These days it’s only a bit better. The wife and I have sprinkled a bit of toddler magic in our lives and the mess we had is now compounded by the boundless creativity of mess-making of a 1-year old. However if anything, it’s helping us be more disciplined in keeping a clean environment, fortunately, we don’t get enough time to make our own mess, he does it for us.

Environment now.

Last year, we got our own place. It came with a bit more freedom to customize and be more strategic in distributing stuff around the house. I took James Clear’s Atomic Habits advice to heart:

“Your habits change depending on the room you are in and the cues in front of you. The environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior. Despite our unique personalities, certain behaviors tend to rise again and again under certain environmental conditions. In church, people tend to talk in whispers. On a dark street, people act wary and guarded. In this way the most common form of change is not internal, but external: we are changed by the world around us.”

“Every habit is initiated by a cue, and we are more likely to notice cues that stand out. Unfortunately, the environments where we live and work often make it easy not to do certain actions because there is no obvious cue to trigger the behavior. It’s easy not to practice the guitar when it’s tucked away in the closet. It’s easy not to read a good book when the bookshelf is in the corner of the guest room. It’s easy not to take your vitamins when they are out of sight in the pantry. When the cues that spark a habit are subtle or hidden, they are easy to ignore.”

Environment priming changes I tried and tested.

I focused on a few things fairly easy to incorporate in my environment, with great results so far:

• Getting better sleep:
  • Changed to a new mattress with a higher price point, somewhat stiffer. Huge improvements over the old one, cooler and easier to rest on.
  • The bedroom is for sleep. No TV, laptop or tablet in bed. Allowances: phone as alarm clock, kindle reader with low luminosity.
  • Set the phone to automatic DND/Sleep Mode at 9 PM. No doomscrolling in the evening.
  • Added f.lux app to my PC/Laptop. It’s forgradually switching from blue to warm light as the day and evening progresses. The light that comes from computer and mobile phone screens has a real effect on the human circadian system, especially at night. Based on your wake time and location, f.lux creates a custom lighting schedule for you that changes every day throughout the year. By moving the sliders, you can fine tune the colors to fit your needs.
• Reading more and making it a family interest:
  • Small (or big) bookshelves everywhere. The new bedframe has an incorporated bookshelf in the nightstand. Our living room doubles as the library. Marcus’s room has a small flisat bookstand which he loves. My desk has 2-3 books on in hand’s reach constantly.
  • I cleared up all distractions from my phone’s home screen. No social media apps or email. Added all reading related and productivity apps as the first things I see/get reminded of. There’s Audible/Kindle/Audiotribe, the Audible Widget as well as a few hobby related apps like Ukulele for learning. Exception are messaging apps but nothing that involves, involuntary scrolling or ingesting unwarranted information.
  • Buying more kid books and less toys. Also a great gifting practice for other parents.
  • Blocking social media news feeds using browser extension.
• Eating healthier and avoiding junk food:
  • Any packaged junk food that does make its way into our shopping basket gets relegated out of sight/at the back of the kitchen cabinet. Out of sight, out of mind.
  • Added a regularly filled fruit basket to our kitchen table. Whenever we visit it’s an easy reminder and easy action to grab a crunchy apple/banana/seasonal fruit.
  • Adding a water bottle “in hand’s reach” around the house.
• Quitting video-games or making them less desirable:
  • Tucking the game console in a separate drawer, requires installation before each use. Bonus: toddler can’t reach it.
  • Using a website blocker to avoid gaming news websites. Some of them were compulsive openings every time I went to my browser, kinda like opening the fridge regularly to find out what’s inside.
  • Removing any gaming platform shortcuts from my PC or uninstalling.
  • Quitting gaming related Discord or other social media groups.
• Being more active:
  • Buying a motor powered adjustable desk to alternate sitting/standing during long office hours.
  • Preparing the gym bag, sports clothes and water bottle in the evening so it’s never a chore in the early hours of the morning.

The room reset tehnique

Another great way to set up the environment that is also taken from the stories in Atomic Habits:

“….the story of Oswald Nuckols, an IT developer from Natchez, Mississippi, and his simple strategy for making future habits easy.

Nuckols refers to the approach as “resetting the room.”

For instance, when he finishes watching television, he places the remote back on the TV stand, arranges the pillows on the couch, and folds the blanket. When he leaves his car, he throws any trash away. Whenever he takes a shower, he wipes down the toilet while the shower is warming up. (As he notes, the “perfect time to clean the toilet is right before you wash yourself in the shower anyway.”)

This might sound like he’s just “cleaning up” but there is a key insight that makes his approach different. The purpose of resetting each room is not simply to clean up after the last action but to prepare for the next action.

“When I walk into a room everything is in its right place,” Nuckols wrote. “Because I do this every day in every room, stuff always stays in good shape . . . People think I work hard but I’m actually really lazy. I’m just proactively lazy. It gives you so much time back.”

Out of all the habit-forming techniques available, I found priming the environment to be the most effective. Whether it’s the home, my digital playground, or the office it has been the greatest return on investment, with minimal conscious effort and willpower spend.

Thanks for reading.

Andrei