Context and Cues: The Science of Habits and the Struggle with Clutter

The Weekly Tittle is an exercise designed to focus your attention on a specific space, aspect, or challenge of decluttering and organizing your home. We assign a new tittle in each webcast/podcast, then check on your progress the following week.

Turn Over a New Leaf (or Take a Fresh Look at an Old One)

Since our main topic today was habits, our assignment is to identify a new habit that you’d like to cultivate, or to examine an old habit that you’d like to modify or eliminate:

• Identify a habit that you’d like to add, modify, or subtract from your routine. (No habit is too small for this assignment.)

For a new habit you’d like to cultivate:

• Think about what related actions or behaviors you’re already doing on a regular basis.
• Write down your intention to use the current behavior as the trigger for the new habit. For example, “When I start making a grocery list, I will scan the refrigerator for items that are ready to be purged.”
• Put the reminder in a place where you’ll be likely to see it when you’re doing the triggering behavior.
• Practice and adjust the new habit.

For a habit you’d like to modify or eliminate:

• Notice where, when, and under what circumstances do you do this habit? What action or pathway are you stuck in?
• Think about what triggers this habit. Examine the context.
• Consider how you might shift the triggering circumstances or related habits.
• Write down your intention to react differently (or not at all) to the trigger(s) you’ve identified.
• Practice making the shifts you’ve identified.

For the full discussion of this week’s tittle, watch the Weekly Tittle segment on YouTube.