Make the cue obvious or invisible
Every habit is activated by noticing its cue.
Are you aware of the cues in your surroundings that trigger your habits?
Have you ever tried changing habits by changing the cues that start them?
Do you want to learn effective ways to make cues more obvious or less visible?
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Increase the chance of successfully building a new habit by making the cue obvious, and of dismantling an existing habit by making the cue invisible.
Every habit starts when you notice the cue, or trigger, for the habit. Well-established cues automatically catch your attention before you consciously decide what to focus on. For example, a notification on your phone (cue) makes you check your messages (response). When your alarm goes off (cue), you get out of bed (response). Or when you feel thirsty (cue), you drink a glass of water (response).
Similarly, certain cues in specific environments can trigger habits that don’t happen in other settings. For example, when you’re at the cinema, the smell and availability of popcorn (cue) automatically trigger the habit of eating it, but the same cue might not prompt you to eat popcorn when you’re at home watching a movie. The context of being in the cinema changes how your brain reacts to the cue, making it a much stronger trigger for that behavior in that particular environment.
Consistently connecting a specific cue to a particular action that feels rewarding helps create a strong link in your mind, making it automatic to act on that cue when you encounter it. To build strong habits effectively, it's important to have reliable and stable cues. For example, placing your running shoes by the front door can remind you to go for a run. When a cue changes, it can disrupt the automatic nature of a habit, forcing you to stop and think about what you're doing. For example, if you forget to put your running shoes by the front door, you might overlook them before heading out, which could make you reconsider whether you want to go for a run. Completely removing a cue can fully disrupt a habit. For example, eliminating unhealthy snacks from your kitchen can interrupt the habit of mindlessly snacking when you’re bored.
Cues can take many forms, and understanding this variety can help you choose the most effective ones for your habits. Visual cues, such as sticky notes on your computer or objects placed in your environment, are often strong because they can quickly grab your attention. However, auditory cues, like alarms or specific sounds, can also be effective, especially in a busy environment. Contextual cues, like the time of day, your location, your emotional state, and your physical state (like feeling hungry or tired), can play a significant role too. Additionally, the end of an existing habit or behavior can serve as a cue. For example, finishing a meal could signal the time to clean up or take a walk. By recognizing these different types of cues and experimenting with what works best for you, you can tailor them to fit your preferences and make it easier to form new habits.
Habit cues that stand out are easier to notice and act on. For example, a bright, colorful water bottle on your desk can remind you to drink water throughout the day, and setting a unique alarm tone on your phone can help you remember to take your medication on time. Placing cues in specific locations or associating them with certain times—like putting workout shoes by the door or setting a reminder for the same time each day—reinforces the habit by making cues a natural part of your environment. When cues are well-placed and noticeable, they make it easier to follow through on what you want to do.
Why we forget our intentions—and how cues can help
Our intentions often don’t turn into action. One of the main reasons for this is that we simply forget to take action. For example, we might intend to call a friend but end up forgetting to do so. We may intend to take our medications regularly but sometimes miss a dose. Similarly, we might mean to return a library book on time but forget to do so.
With so much happening in our busy lives, it’s easy to forget things we intend to do. Information fades quickly from our memory, especially if we've only thought about it once or twice. In today’s fast-paced world, the constant stream of reminders and tasks makes it even more likely that we’ll forget things. For instance, we might need to keep track of appointments, deadlines, and social events while also handling daily chores. We use calendars to help us remember things, but ironically, we sometimes forget to check them, which means we miss even things we wrote down to remember. So we almost always end up forgetting something.
This is why it’s important to make the cues for our habits obvious—so it’s harder to forget to actually follow through and execute them.
Make the cue obvious or invisible
You can create obvious cues for the habits you want by using strategies like changing your physical environment, setting implementation intentions, and pairing new habits with ones you already do. To get rid of unwanted habits, one of the best things you can do is remove the cues from your environment that activate them. Start by fitting one or two cues into your daily routine. Once these cues become linked to their responses, you can consider adding more. This step-by-step approach helps you avoid feeling overwhelmed and makes it more manageable to build your new habits over time.
Personalization is key when it comes to cues. What works for one person might not work for another, so it’s important to find cues that resonate with you. Consider your daily routines and think about what kinds of reminders will be most effective for you. It might take some experimentation to discover what truly activates your behaviors. For example, you could try using a favorite song as an alarm to wake up or placing a book by your bed to remind you to read before sleeping. If one cue doesn’t seem to work, don’t hesitate to try something different until you find what fits best.
⚒️ Change the cues in your physical environment
Make cues in your physical environment obvious for desired habits and invisible for unwanted habits.
The environment affects how people act. For example, in a library, people usually keep their voices down. Traffic lights guide how drivers behave on the road. The smell of food can make you feel hungry. Features like endless scrolling and notifications encourage people to stay on social media longer. Also, music played in shopping malls can make shoppers spend more time in stores.
Vision is the most dominant human sense, shaping much of how you experience and respond to the world. Even a small change in what you see can lead to big changes in your actions. For instance, people often choose products that are more visible. You might grab a few cookies from a jar on your desk even if you’re not hungry, just because they are right in front of you. Similarly, you might end up buying expensive items at the grocery store because they are at eye level, while cheaper options are placed on the bottom shelves where you don’t notice them as easily.
If you want to build a new habit, ask yourself:
🤔 How can I make the cues for the new habit obvious?
Your environment often doesn’t have obvious cues to activate the habits you want to build, which can make those habits easy to overlook. Take charge of your environment by making the cues for your desired habits easy to see. For instance, if you put fruit in a visible bowl on your kitchen counter instead of hiding it in a cupboard, you’re more likely to eat more fruit. If you keep your e-reader on your desk instead of in a drawer that you rarely open, you might find yourself reading more. By placing full water bottles in areas where you spend the most time during the day, you can help yourself drink enough water.
If you want to dismantle a habit, ask yourself:
🤔 How can I make the cues for the habit invisible?
Your environment often has cues that trigger habits you want to quit. One of the most effective ways to dismantle a bad habit is to remove its cues from your surroundings. This approach makes it less of a struggle to quit the habit since you don’t need to rely on willpower and self-control. For example, putting your smartphone in another room can help you avoid checking it constantly. Storing unhealthy snacks in a cupboard instead of on the counter makes it less likely that you’ll reach for them automatically.
If necessary, brainstorm or look online for changes to your environment that could help you dismantle the habit standing in the way of achieving your personal goal. Try implementing these changes, and if they don’t have the desired effect, consider what might be causing this and try a different approach. Trial and error can help you find what works best.
⚒️ Change to a new location
Often, building and dismantling habits is easier in a new location. In a new place, you don’t have the same old cues that trigger your habitual behaviors, so you’re more likely to pause, think, and make different choices. This break from old cues gives you a chance to set up new habits and become the kind of person you want to be.
Here are some examples:
👉 Moving to a new home can help you disrupt old routines. For example, you might set up your kitchen to make it easier to prepare healthy meals or decide to cycle to work instead of driving.
👉 Starting a new job can be a chance to build new habits, like bringing lunch from home instead of buying fast food.
👉 Shopping at a different supermarket with a different layout can make it easier to skip unhealthy snacks that you might buy out of habit.
👉 Taking a new route to work can help you avoid the habit of stopping at a fast food place along the way.
👉 Meeting friends in places where alcohol isn’t easy to get can make it easier to avoid unhealthy drinking habits.
You can also change the locations of key elements in your home. For example, creating a workspace in a designated room can help you focus better and be more productive by associating work to that area. Setting up a cozy reading corner with a comfy chair and good lighting can make reading a more obvious choice. Moving the TV to a different room can help dismantle the habit of watching too much TV. If you have limited space, try to associate each habit to one specific spot. For example, use a chair for reading, a desk for working, and a table for eating. This way, when you sit at your desk, the cue to focus on work is clear. And if your bed is only used for sleeping, you'll fall asleep faster. A stable environment helps you build stable habits.
⚒️ Use reminders
Using reminders can help make your intended actions more obvious and increase the chances that you’ll follow through. This could mean setting alarms on your phone, using sticky notes, getting alerts from an app, or receiving email reminders. It might also be as simple as having a friend or partner remind you to do something later in the day. However, reminders have some limitations. If there’s too much time between the reminder and when you need to act, you might forget. For example, a reminder in the morning for something you need to do in the afternoon often isn’t very helpful. Reminders work best when you can act on them right away, so timing is important.
⚒️ Use implementation intentions
An implementation intention is a straightforward plan you create ahead of time about when you’ll carry out a new habit, using the “when” as a cue to remind you to act. Making this “when” as specific as possible is important because a clear cue makes it more likely you’ll follow through. The cue might be a certain time, place, emotional state, other people, or something you did right before. The general setup of an implementation intention is:
When [situation X happens], I will [take action Y].
For example:
👉 When it's 7am on Monday, Wednesday or Friday, I will go for a 30-minute jog in the local park.
👉 When it’s the 1st of the month, I will transfer 10% of my monthly income to my savings account.
👉 When I arrive at the office, I will spend the first 10 minutes of my day organizing my tasks.
👉 When I finish my lunch break, I will take a 5-minute walk around the office.
A more specific form of an implementation intention includes the time and location:
I will [execute new habit] at [time] in [location].
For example:
👉 I will write three things in my gratitude journal every day at 10pm in my kitchen.
👉 I will call a friend to catch up for 20 minutes every Sunday at 4pm in my home office.
Writing down an implementation intention greatly increases the likelihood that you'll perform a new behavior. It creates a clear, specific plan with a set time and place for action. When the moment arrives, you won’t need to make a decision—you just follow your plan. Having this clarity also helps you avoid distractions that could lead you off track. The goal is to make the time and place a strong cue through repetition, so the habit becomes automatic at the designated time and location.
Establishing a stable routine by doing a habit at the same time and place regularly helps it stick. But it’s also key to stay flexible when things don’t go as planned. If you can’t follow your usual routine, try doing the habit at another time or place that day, and reward yourself for staying on track. This strengthens your habit, as it shows you can still take the right actions, even in new situations.
Implementation intentions are also helpful for one-time tasks you don’t want to forget, like voting or picking up a prescription. By clearly planning and writing down when and where you’ll do the task—along with details like how you’ll get there—you create a strong plan that makes it less likely you’ll forget.
⚒️ Use habit stacking
Habit stacking means adding a new habit right after a habit you already do. This idea, created by BJ Fogg, is a specific type of implementation intention with a simple structure:
After I [current habit], I will [new habit].
For example:
👉 After I sit down at my desk, I will set a timer for 25 minutes to focus on work (using the Pomodoro technique).
👉 After I do my daily ten push-ups, I will eat one piece of fruit in the kitchen.
Habit stacking can help you build a new habit quickly by attaching it to a habit you already do. It’s important to choose a suitable habit to serve as the cue for your new one. The habit you pick should happen at a time and location where you’re most likely to succeed, like somewhere quiet or when you don’t have other things to do. The frequency of the habit you already do (for example, daily or every Monday) should match how often you want to do the new habit. You can use your habits scorecard or brainstorm ideas to find a good habit to stack your new one on top of.
Avoid using vague cues; be clear and specific about when and where you'll take action. The more specific your cue, the easier it will be to notice and follow through. For example:
👉 After I brush my teeth in the bathroom at night.
👉 When I close the front door after coming home.
👉 When I finish my coffee in the morning.
👉 When I pick up my phone.
Write down your current habit and the new habit you want to build using this structure: After [current habit], I will [new habit]. During the implementation stage, practice the new habit every time you do your current habit. After doing this several times, your brain will start to link both habits together as one action. If the current habit doesn’t seem to work for pairing, that’s okay—simply try another habit that may fit better and repeat the process.
There are many ways you can use habit stacking to your advantage:
👉 You can stack several habits on top of each other, creating a chain where each habit triggers the next one.
👉 You can place a new habit between two existing habits instead of just at the end.
👉 You can link habits to everyday events, like, "After the sun rises, I will meditate for ten minutes in my bedroom." To help, you could make a list of regular events, such as the sun rising or getting a text message.
👉 You can create general habit stacks with “When... then...” rules, like: "When I buy something new, then I’ll get rid of something old" or "When I get an email from my manager, then I’ll respond within 30 minutes."
🎉👏🎈
Making cues obvious or invisible is a powerful way to build and dismantle habits. It is the first step in James Clear’s four-step habit model: cue, craving, response, and reward. Keep your ultimate goal in mind: becoming the type of person you want to be.
References
Atomic Habits, by James Clear
How to Change, by Katy Milkman
Good Habits, Bad Habits, by Wendy Wood
