# Make the question of willpower moot by changing your environment to remove inertia. Know yourself: if you routinely struggle to build a habit, try a different approach. Instead of beating yourself up repeatedly for "not being motivated enough" to do something, design your environment and schedule to make it non-optional. For example, if you want to stop lying in bed so long after you wake up, try the trusty trick of setting an alarm on your phone and then leaving it out of reach of your bed. That way, getting up isn't a matter of willpower. Your only choices are to get up or try to ignore the alarm, which isn't really a choice at all. Make the alternatives to doing your desired habit less appealing to discourage yourself from choosing them. Tie your habit to a trigger. For example, you might forget to meditate, but if you attach it to an already-established part of your routine, like putting on your watch, you'll find that it's easier to make space for the new habit. > We know today that self-control and self-discipline have much more to do with our environment than with ourselves (cf. Thaler, 2015, ch. 2) – and the environment can be changed. Nobody needs willpower not to eat a chocolate bar when there isn’t one around. And nobody needs willpower to do something they wanted to do anyway. > I never force myself to do anything I don’t feel like. Whenever I am stuck, I do something else.” A good structure allows you to do that, to move seamlessly from one task to another – without threatening the whole arrangement or losing sight of the bigger picture. > Studies on highly successful people have proven again and again that success is not the result of strong willpower and the ability to overcome resistance, but rather the result of smart working environments that avoid resistance in the first place > The smartest way to deal with this kind of limitation is to cheat. Instead of forcing ourselves to do something we don’t feel like doing, we need to find a way to make us feel like doing what moves our project further along. Doing the work that need to be done without having to apply too much willpower requires a technique, a ruse. ## Related/To Explore - Review [[Atomic Habits]] for more insight on this. - There might be a related Zettel in [[The Four Tendencies]] as well about internal/external motivation and how to cope with that - [[sources/Book/How to Take Smart Notes]] - [[Productivity]] - [[Psychological Tricks]] - [[Forming Habits]]