Linking a Behaviour to an Existing Event

Beginner · 10 min

Why alarms fall short

The first idea for remembering a new behaviour is setting an alarm. But alarms have two weaknesses. First, when the alarm rings you are usually in the middle of something else; you snooze it, then forget it. Second, an alarm is detached from context: 8 p.m. does not land on the same moment every day — one day you are at dinner, another on the road. The events already in your day, by contrast, are context itself: pouring coffee, brushing teeth, walking in the door, shutting the laptop. As reminders they are more reliable than alarms, because they already happen.

What is an anchor event?

An anchor event is a moment that already occurs reliably in your day, immediately after which the new behaviour is attached. The pattern is: "After X, I will Y." Examples: "After I pour my morning coffee, I will write one sentence in my journal", "After I come home and take off my shoes, I will stretch for five minutes", "After I brush my teeth at night, I will note tomorrow's one important task." A good anchor's first criterion is reliability: the event must happen every day, without fail. The second is fit: there must genuinely be a few minutes of space right after the anchor to do the behaviour.

Finding your own anchors

Do not look far for anchor candidates; your real day map is already a list of them. Pull out the small moments that repeat daily: waking, making coffee or tea, finishing breakfast, leaving home, arriving at work, finishing lunch, coming home, after dinner, brushing teeth. Then choose the one that fits your new behaviour best: if the behaviour needs mental clarity, pick an anchor that lands in your high-energy period; if it is about winding down, an evening anchor works better. The distance between anchor and behaviour also matters: tying a balcony behaviour to a kitchen anchor adds friction.

Strengthening the link

Writing the linking sentence is the start; the link settles through repetition. In the first days, small supports help: putting the book next to the coffee machine, laying the stretching mat somewhere visible by the door. These arrangements bring the behaviour into view the moment the anchor happens. Within a few weeks the sequence starts to flow by itself: with the smell of coffee, your hand reaches for the notebook. If the link skips a day, no alarm is needed; you continue with the same anchor tomorrow. If skips start stacking up, that is data suggesting the anchor was chosen wrong — try changing the anchor, not the behaviour.

Writing your linking sentence somewhere visible helps too: a small note on the fridge, or a single line on your phone's lock screen, supports memory in the first weeks. In time the note becomes unnecessary; when the anchor happens, the behaviour comes to mind by itself. The first day you remember without looking at the note, the link has formed. From then on the task is to protect it — and to return via the same anchor if it lapses.