Habit Pairing: A Practical Guide

If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “I really need to start doing ______” but you can’t seem to actually do the thing, this article is for you.

As solo business owners, so much of our success is built on our ability to maintain good work habits, so today I’m sharing a technique that’s been helping me improve my habits, get stuff done, and feel more on top of things overall.

Habit pairing (aka “habit stacking” or “habit anchoring”) is a habit development method popularized by James Clear in Atomic Habits and BJ Fogg in Tiny Habits. And don’t worry, we’re not getting into “one weird trick” territory. Not only is this technique simple enough to start using immediately, it’s backed by behavioral science (Fogg is the founder of Stanford’s Behavior Design Lab).

It’s worked so well for me, I want to share it with you. So…what is habit pairing?

Essentially, it’s attaching a new habit you want to start doing to an existing, or anchor, habit that you’re already consistently doing. It’s important to choose an anchor habit that’s so essential to your routine that you can’t easily avoid it. The anchor habit reminds you to do the new habit, and over time the new habit becomes part of your regular routine.

Here are three examples of how I’m using this technique in my business to build better habits and turn long-procrastinated tasks into routinely-done ones.

ONE: Tracking and completing all of my tasks and to-dos

The problem: Like all business owners, I have a mountain of tasks and to-dos that are hard to keep track of. New things are added every day, some of them are client-facing and some are internal to my business, and everything has a different deadline. Written lists and to-do apps haven’t worked for me, and I constantly felt like I was forgetting something.

My anchor habit: Using my calendar app (Google Calendar). All my client meetings are in Google Cal, so I look at it several times each day.

The new habit: Adding all my to-dos as Tasks in Google Calendar

How pairing helped: “Pairing” my task list with my calendar has been the best thing I’ve ever done for my productivity. I add tasks to specific days based on their deadlines, and every morning at 9am I get a calendar notification with a list of tasks for the day.

Here’s my trick—I don’t allow myself to dismiss that notification until all the tasks are checked off. I hate notification clutter, so this also works as psychological motivation to finish my tasks so the notification can go away.

I also see the tasks every time I look at my calendar so it’s impossible to forget them, which means I no longer worry that I’m something important is slipping through the cracks. Using the Tasks functionality in GCal as my to-do list has been a major game changer for me, and such an easy change to make.

TWO: Setting aside time for focused work

The problem: I was having trouble making time for focused work during the day. When I had an open block in my calendar, I found myself using that time on emails and Instagram instead of more important things.

My anchor habit: Making coffee and sitting down at my computer to start the workday.

The new habit: I put my phone in a basket on the other side of the room right before I sit down in the morning. I leave it there for 60-90 minutes, and during that time I’m completely focused on my work instead of email or social media.

How pairing them helped: My phone is a huge distraction (who can relate?!) and keeping it physically distant for the first part of the day helps me get focused. This new habit has created a window of deeply productive time before other demands pop up and steal my focus. Again, it’s so simple but the effect has been huge for me.

THREE: Tracking my expected income against my income goals

[This one is sort of niche for a solo service provider, apologies if it doesn’t relate to your business directly!]

The problem: I was tracking my billable time spent on hourly client work separately from my invoices for milestone-based projects. This gave me an incomplete view of my total expected monthly income, which made it hard to see whether I was going to meet my income goals or not.

My anchor habit: Using a spreadsheet to track the amounts, timing, and relevant clients for all milestone-based project work. This spreadsheet also held my monthly income goals.

The new habit: Tracking my billable hourly work in the same spreadsheet so I could keep a running total of billable hours by client and translate that into expected income on a monthly basis. (There was a one-time effort to set up the structure and formulas in the spreadsheet to make this work.)

How pairing them helped: Keeping all of my expected income data in one place is more efficient, of course, but it also means that I use the spreadsheet more often and I’m looking at my progress toward my income goals several times per week.

This gives me peace of mind when my finances are looking good, or an early warning if I start falling behind on my goals. When that happens, I have plenty of time to lean on my business resilience tactics to make sure my numbers come back up. This new habit was slightly more complex to implement than the others, but absolutely worth it for the financial visibility and clarity I’ve gotten from it.

Think about the must-do habits you already have in your routine. Maybe it’s eating lunch, or looking at your email inbox, or closing your laptop at the end of the day. Can you take one of your “I should do ______”s and start pairing it with one of these anchor habits?

Let me know if you try it, I’d love to hear if this works for you.

Cover image from Unsplash.