How to Make Good Habits Inevitable and Bad Habits Impossible

“The best way to break a bad habit is to make it impractical to do.” — James Clear

Victor Hugo and the Deadline

Victor Hugo was supposed to deliver his manuscript for The Hunchback of Notre-Dame to his publisher in 1830. He missed every deadline. Finally, his exasperated publisher gave him an ultimatum: deliver the manuscript within six months or face significant financial penalties.

Hugo’s solution was extraordinary. He collected all of his fine clothes and had his valet lock them away, keeping only a large gray shawl to wear around the house. Without suitable clothing to go out, Hugo had no choice but to stay home and write. He completed the manuscript on time.

Hugo understood something about himself: given the choice between writing and going out, he would choose going out. So he eliminated the choice. He designed a constraint that made his desired behavior inevitable.

Commitment Devices: Locking in Future Behavior

A commitment device is a choice made in the present that locks in future behavior and reduces the ability of your future self to deviate from your preferred course. Victor Hugo’s clothing lock-up was a commitment device. So is:

• Setting up an automatic savings transfer on payday (so the money is never available to spend)
• Using a website blocker that restricts access to distracting sites during work hours
• Signing up for a race (so you’re committed to training for it)
• Putting your alarm clock across the room (so you can’t snooze without getting up)
• Buying only what’s on the grocery list before you shop for the week

The key insight: your future self will face the same temptations, emotional states, and moments of weakness as your current self. The difference is that your current self is in a moment of clarity and motivation. Commitment devices use that moment of clarity to constrain the future moment of weakness.

Ulysses and the Sirens

The original commitment device story comes from Homer’s Odyssey. Odysseus (Ulysses) knew that the Sirens’ song would be irresistible—that hearing it would compel him to steer toward the rocks and drown his crew. So before reaching the Sirens, he had himself tied to the mast and ordered his crew to ignore his commands while passing their island. He made the good behavior (sailing past safely) structurally inevitable, even though he knew his future self would desperately want to deviate.

This is the essence of a commitment device: recognizing that your future self is not fully rational and building structures that protect you from your own future irrationality.

Automation: The Most Powerful Form of Habit

While commitment devices restrict future choices, automation goes further—it eliminates the choice entirely. When a behavior is automated, it happens without any decision-making at all.

The Power of One-Time Decisions

Clear makes a powerful observation: a single decision, made once, can lock in dozens of future healthy behaviors. He calls these “one-time actions with compound rewards”:

• Set up automatic savings on payday. Every month, money moves to savings without any willpower or decision required.
• Sign up for a medication delivery service. Prescriptions arrive monthly without any need to remember or refill.
• Buy a high-quality mattress. Every night, your sleep improves without any ongoing effort.
• Unsubscribe from mailing lists. Every email session becomes less cluttered without any ongoing decisions.
• Schedule annual doctor, dentist, and eye appointments. Health maintenance happens automatically.

These one-time choices create an environment that continuously produces the desired behavior—without requiring ongoing willpower or motivation.

Technology as a Habit Partner

Technology can automate many beneficial behaviors:

Financial habits:

• Auto-invest a fixed percentage of each paycheck into index funds
• Set up automatic bill payments to avoid late fees
• Use an app that rounds up purchases and invests the difference

Health habits:

• Use apps that automatically track steps, heart rate, and sleep
• Set up grocery delivery with a recurring healthy-food order
• Schedule reminders for medications, hydration, and movement breaks

Learning habits:

• Subscribe to a daily email digest of articles in your field
• Set up automatic downloads of educational podcasts to your phone
• Use tools that block distracting websites automatically during work hours

Reducing Friction to Its Minimum

The ultimate application of the 3rd Law is to engineer your environment so thoroughly that the good behavior is not just easy—it’s the default.

Creating Frictionless Good Habits

For exercise:

• Gym is on your commute route, so stopping requires no extra travel.
• Workout clothes are prepared the night before, laid out at the foot of your bed.
• Gym bag is always packed and by the door.

For healthy eating:

• Meals are prepped on Sundays, so healthy options are the fastest thing to grab during the week.
• Delivery services bring pre-portioned, healthy meal kits.
• Healthy snacks are pre-cut and placed at eye level in the fridge.

For reading:

• A book always lives on your nightstand and another in your bag.
• Reading apps on your phone open to the page you left off, so you can read in any waiting moment.

For writing:

• Your document is open when you start your computer each morning (set it as a startup program).
• Writing happens at the same time and place every day, with no setup required.

Breaking Bad Habits: Increase the Friction

The inverse of making good habits easy is making bad habits hard. Every additional step between you and a bad habit increases the cognitive overhead required to engage in it—and at the margin, many people won’t bother.

One-Time Friction Increases for Common Bad Habits

Phone overuse:

• Delete social media apps (reinstalling requires deliberate effort and time).
• Put your phone in a different room before bed.
• Use grayscale mode to make the phone less visually appealing.

TV overuse:

• Unplug the TV after each use (requires active setup to start watching again).
• Remove the TV from the bedroom.
• Cancel streaming subscriptions you use habitually rather than intentionally.

Overspending:

• Remove saved payment information from online stores.
• Add a browser extension that delays checkout by 24 hours on impulse purchases.
• Leave credit cards at home and carry only a debit card with a limited balance.

Key Takeaways

• Commitment devices use present-moment clarity to constrain future moments of weakness. Design choices that make good behavior inevitable.
• The Ulysses contract principle: if you know your future self will face temptation, build structures now that prevent future deviation.
• One-time decisions with compound rewards (automatic savings, auto-bill-pay, scheduled appointments) create ongoing good outcomes without ongoing willpower.
• Technology can automate many beneficial habits—use it intentionally to make good behaviors the default.
• To break bad habits, increase friction: every additional step reduces the probability that the habit will be completed.