Habits Are the Key to Everything, So Why Can’t I Remember to Do Them?

"Don't set goals, set systems" was a phrase all over Youtube at the start of the year, and for good reason. Translating goals into daily actionable steps is the only logical way to move towards them. Habits are a natural offshoot to this conversation. But I've always felt confused by conversations surrounding habits: some people find them automatic? Do they not just forget they've set the habit? I certainly do.

I noticed this in myself and decided that needed to change, because I have some pretty specific goals to work towards this year. So as always, I crafted some personal systems to help. I want to share some insights I've learned along the way.

Table of Contents

• Reframing habits as Good Decisions

• Environmental Triggers

• Reducing decision making

• Reminding myself I have agency

• The Final Piece of the Puzzle! The Gate Metaphor

• Conclusion

Reframing habits as Good Decisions

I don't find habits to be automatic actions, I find them to be actions I repeat but always deliberate over. This goes for good and bad "habits": I know tidying the house before bed will make me feel better, but it's a mental battle every time. I know I shouldn't pick up my phone early in the morning, but I deliberate over it, then inevitably pick it up anyway.

From this deliberation comes day-to-day friction because there is a constant negotiation between two sides of my brain: "I should do something but eh I don’t really want to" even if I know I should, or that I actually want the result. Then I do The Thing and it’s fine! Every single time.

I became aware of this constant deliberation and decided to try something new: reframing "habits" as Good or Bad Decisions. I started writing down when I felt I'd made a Good Decision, and equally writing down when I realised I made a Bad one. Then I baked that into my Capacities daily tracking, so I could consistently reflect on this.

I found I typically made Bad Decisions in two cases:

1. I simply forget I wanted to do The Thing at all.

2. I am wilfully ignoring action because Present Me doesn't want to do it, even though Past Me decided I should for good reason.

So given I am serious about my goals, I needed to address these things. I’ve found three things to be key:

1. Environmental triggers are everything

2. Reducing decision making is generally helpful

3. I have agency. I can just do things. I might have to do it in discomfort, or in frustration, but I can just do it anyway.

I'll discuss each further below.

Environmental Triggers

By hugely simplifying my environment, I could give myself very specific visual triggers to remind me to make Good Decisions. When I was preparing to move house, I sold, donated or got rid of an unbelievable amount of items. The less cluttered physical environment gave my brain a calmer environment to exist in and the relief was immediate. I realised that a cluttered or messy environment was a physical to-do list I didn't want to complete. But by that logic, with this calmer environment, I could strategically place reminders of what I actually want (or need) to do.

The best example of this is my bedside table setup. My evening ends in the same location my morning begins: in bed. 🛏️ So the bookends of my daily routine live on my bedside table. I use this so much I actually got bigger bedside tables!

1. Morning pages journal

2. Skincare

3. Book/kindle

4. 5 year journal

5. Pens

Every morning, I get out of bed and get ready to stand up, thinking about something else, and then I’ll see my journals and remember that I want to do morning pages. Then I do my skincare because that’s just beyond it.

When I go to get into bed in the evening, I see my 5 year journal and my pens for filling out my daily trackers, so I write and fill in the trackers. Then I see my skincare so I apply it again, then I pick up my book and get into bed to read.

I've done this every single night for 6 months yet it's never mindless or automatic. I always need to decide to do every step, and often I think "one night without skincare won't hurt", or "I don't need to journal today". That's the deliberation again. But it's too convenient not to do it, given everything I need is within reach, so I make the Good Decision. This starts and ends the day with a morale boost. 💫 

Another example of an environmental trigger is my paper planner which is an important part of my Hybrid Productivity System which I talked about here.

Reducing decision making

Even with environmental triggers, making choices is still necessary. I’ve found that generally minimising the number of decisions I need to make makes things a bit easier.

One example of this is with skincare. I used to spend ages every morning deciding which moisturiser to use, evaluating the pros and cons of each. At the time, I read this as luxury and as self care but I now see it was decision paralysis for really no gain? Did my day change if I used Charlotte Tilbury's Magic Cream or Kiehl’s moisturiser? Not even remotely. But my days started off with so many decisions (moisturiser is just one step, after all) and I just don't need that.

You might be thinking, "it's just a moisturiser, why does it involve that much thought?" but that's precisely the point. Whether I wanted this level of thought or not, it's what happens for everything. No wonder my brain is such a chaotic place to be! There's just so much to say, so much to consider! Whilst I love this brain of mine, I must conserve my brain power for the important decisions, such as the ones that will help me reach my goals.

But as mentioned, there's still deliberation. I don't always make the Good Decisions, these things just make it slightly easier to do so. But I needed to address the approaches that lead to Bad Decisions, and that involved some tough conversations with myself!

Reminding myself I have agency

All of these changes in my physical environment needed to be complemented by a mindset change: namely, I have agency and my life is the result of my choices. In 2025, I personally have no reason not to make good choices.

Important point to make before I continue: I do not believe we all have the same 24 hours in a day. In a metaphysical sense sure, but practically we do not. I have a flexible WFH job, no kids, no pets, and no real responsibility outside of myself, my relationship and my house (and even then, I have a cleaner). I am privileged to be largely in control of my 24 hours a day and able to do basically whatever I need within them. I know most people don't have this flexibility, but I can only speak for my experiences. That said, I'm lying to myself if there were never times in the past I could have had more agency. It was just easier to pretend I didn't have the capability. My privileged and flexible daily reality has been the necessary foundation for me to notice this, and from which to enact changes.

Why didn't I want to do the dishes after dinner? Why didn't I want to hit my step goal? Laziness. It's like I'd learned tiredness or burnout from when undiagnosed health issues really were making me tired, or from when I really was burnt out. But it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. All the things I reasonably had time to do, I chose not to do. I made Bad Decisions daily and I felt rotten as a result.

Last year I was reading more and more about agency and I realised I could not argue with the logic of it for my situation. Consequently, the mental negotiations between who I want to be and the physical version of me making decisions right now changed in tone. I wasn't as permissive with myself. I'd had my time for permissiveness, I had already lived the consequences of my past choices, and they didn’t make me feel good, hence the need for change. Ok so I don't want to do the dishes or do more steps, but I can do it anyway.

And what do you know, it took just days to see or feel some progress and I realised that making Good Decisions regularly, feels good. That feel good wave, the higher-agency approach to life, and the fact that my house is laid out like a Beth-(and-boyfriend!)-cheat-code has meant I now am pretty good at consistently making Good Decisions. I hear that consistency is the key to what we want, and that seems to be ringing true.

Does it mean that I have 100% streaks on everything? Absolutely not. Times I don't make a Good Decision are times for reflection: do I need to adjust an environmental trigger, or was I being lazy again? If so, why? I also try to remind myself that if I make one Bad Decision, I just need to make a Good one next. It doesn't need to be a spiral or a “wasted day”, it's just a blip.

It's a constant feedback loop between Physical Me and Ideal Future Me. The bridge between us is built from my choices and thankfully the environment I've curated for us is a good foundation.

The Final Piece of the Puzzle! The Gate Metaphor

These three points have been helping all year so far, but recently I saw a tweet that has planted a metaphor in my mind that I just can't move past. It's been so helpful.

The tweet is about an interview Andrew Huberman did in 2020. From the tweet:

The agitation and stress that you feel at the beginning of something—when you're trying to lean into it and you can't focus—is just a recognized gate.... the agitation is indeed the doorway to the whole process.

For me this manifests as me literally picturing myself at a gate (in the woods, for some reason) and I have to decide whether or not to walk through it.

I will say "the agitation is indeed the doorway to the whole process" out loud to myself and every time I want to pick up my phone to avoid the task, I see my new lock screen that has this quote right at the top. All I have to do is walk through the gate and do The Thing.

Again, big or small, there is always deliberation, but I'm finding success in reframing it as agitation, and in willing myself to walk through the gate. What's amazing is as soon as I walk through it and start, the agitation goes away and I can say I've made a Good Decision.

Again, there's not a 100% success rate here but that is life. But the average of my actions is what will move me towards or away from my goals. I haven't always been so goal-focused, but as I said before, for me in 2025, I have no excuse given I set the goals I'm working towards! What I do have is systems to help me, and they seem to be working.

Conclusion

So reframing habits as Good Decisions has unlocked a level of self-understanding that I'll carry forward for the rest of my life. The combination of environmental triggers, reduced decision-making, and honest acknowledgment of my own agency has created a system that actually works for me - not because it eliminates the internal negotiation, but because it makes the right choice easier to access and harder to avoid.

If you've struggled with the traditional "just build habits" advice like I have, maybe try thinking about it as a series of Good Decisions instead. Set up your environment to remind you of those decisions, eliminate the unnecessary ones, and regularly check in with yourself to learn about yourself, and to keep yourself on track.