The Power Of Environmental Design

The single greatest influencing factor that determines your actions, and as an extension your results, is your environment. It provides an ever-present pull force that guides you in a certain direction. Take the metaphor of being in a canoe on a river. With no effort the river’s current will take you exactly downstream. In order to go anywhere else, you need to fight the current and row.

Your environment is a collection of all the forces that are acting on you at once and determine the flow of your river. It determines the path of least resistance, and it’s so impactful that Jim Bunch is known for saying “Everything is an environment and environment is everything.”

I was reminded of this in a very simple but relatable example: My alarm going off in the morning. I’ve had a lot of success putting my phone on a charger across my bedroom so that I need to get up to turn it off. It’s textbook environmental design.

However, a few weeks ago we were experiencing a heat wave so I was sleeping with a fan on. The noise of the fan drowned out my alarm, so I made an adjustment. I started setting my alarm on the Amazon Alexa device next to my bed. When the alarm went off, instead of being forced to get up and turn it off, all I had to do was speak. I found that it made getting myself out of bed way harder than it used to be because it required more will-power than necessity.

So I made the switch back, am putting my fan on a lower setting so I can hear the alarm again, and have been getting up in the morning with more ease.

When it comes to life change, many people overlook the simplicity of changing your environment. We think about willing ourselves into new actions until we build habits, but the far more effective approach is to change your environment so that the desired behavior is a natural byproduct of the design. That what you want to do is downstream, and all you need to do is let your river float you to it.

I’ve found the most effective forms of environment are incorporating accountability to add consequences for poor choices, and implementing systems that make impactful things easy to do. If you want to change your environment in the most positive of ways so that you become extremely consistent with your health habits and choices, and ridiculously productive and focused in your work, check out what I’ve put together about the 9 Super Habits. They make an extraordinary life effortless.