I’ve identified “do X regularly” as a useful behavior. That can get bucketed into two things.

Habits

By “habit” I mean a subconscious or automatic response to stimuli, built by just doing the thing over and over.

Every Sunday evening I take a B12 supplement. It’s just something I remember to do; it may be part of my bedtime ritual that’s consciously modulated depending on the day. I have the usual strong habits that I don’t even think about: brush teeth before bed, look both ways before crossing the street, etc. They don’t require any effort to maintain, they get done even when I’m drunk, etc.

Routines

When I used Habitica, one of my weekly and then monthly tasks was to practice the NATO alphabet. Now I have it memorized and occasional real-life use is enough to maintain it. Did the same for my old credit card number. These weren’t habits; I needed the app to remind me and didn’t do it on my own. But I did actually follow through enough to succeed.

I’m going to use “routine” for a conscious, regular action. My body doesn’t know the 29th of the month from any other day, but that’s when I’m supposed to pay rent.

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Looking back at the regular actions I’ve tried to take, most of the failures have been routines. The “failed” habits in my list are both things I kept up for a year or so, and then quit doing because I just didn’t really want to do them anymore. Furthermore, it seems like the way that habits work is pretty well understood. So to be regularly doing things, I want to turn them into habits.

I would like to follow a better schedule: eat meals at a certain time, do certain things before and after work, etc. If I can express these as stimulus-response habits I think they’re doable. But some of them are abstract. There’s two groups of these in my list:

• the “memorization task” type. These don’t have any obvious stimulus, and they have expected end dates before habit formation will set in. I’ve used Mnemosyne and a reminder but kept adding too much shit to it and making practice sessions unpleasantly hard. Ex:
  • Practice the Major System weekly/monthly until memorized
  • Practice street names/address numbers weekly/monthly until memorized
  • Practice interval ear training until I get good
• the “abstract task” type. I have a biweekly to-do list (pulling from about a hundred to-dos in the backlog) and I’d like to tackle one every day. The actual tasks vary from sitting at my computer to running errands. They also don’t have any obvious stimulus. In general they’re more important than the memorization tasks.

I think the way to routine formation could be making them into habits by

• coming up with cues for the abstract triggers, like an alarm or smart light
• coming up with shared actions to begin the abstract tasks, like getting up to start a timer or something

I still have some learning to do, like whether positive reinforcement helps speed habit formation (can I psych myself into not hitting snooze via ice cream treat?), and then to apply this framework to a specific desired routine. I think tomorrow I’ll come up with a trial candidate.

I’m interested to hear what you folks use for habit and routine formation, and any suggested readings you might have.