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Comment by alxlu | Hacker News Reader

> And by “start small” I mean “floss one tooth per night for 3 months to build a flossing habit” small. Let your good habits progressively and slowly consume more time, similar to what bad habits do.

The difficulty here is primarily in initiating the task consistently imo. Once you are already at the point of flossing one tooth there likely isn’t much mental resistance to flossing the others. I think it’s better to do things that lower the resistance to starting the task in the first place as opposed to just making the task smaller.

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That's exactly the point: activation energy is the hardest to summon, and once you have it's "easy" to finish the rest of the habit (e.g. floss all your other teeth).

If "floss one tooth" is still too much, go smaller: "take my floss out of the drawer and put it on the counter."

For me I don't believe there's a way to make the activation small enough of a thing that I would be able to consistently do it. If my task were to consistently lift a finger every Monday I don't think I'd be able to do it.

I think they are saying that it doesn't make sense to call it "starting small" if it is the "hardest to summon."

Doesn't those go hand in hand? You dread starting because you don't want or have the energy to spend 20+ min on it. So you reduce the task to taking 5 seconds and eliminate the reason for it being hard. Say, put on one shoe, if you want to develop the habit of walking.

Right, but breaking down tasks after "activating" the task probably isn't very useful. Doing the one tooth thing doesn't really help since once you are already there, the gap between doing that and the rest of the teeth is basically nonexistent. You might as well start off flossing all your teeth if you are able to get to the flossing part. Breaking down activation energy is also hard. Taking floss out and putting it on the counter feels like it might not be reinforcing enough. Something more useful might revolve around storing the floss in a more readily available position or using something like floss picks and/or other things that might reduce friction. But ultimately, I think everything eventually boils down to raw discipline.

Well this is kind of "smuggled in." If you are flossing one tooth, you need to have floss readily available. The point is that you are eating the (yes, usually significant) startup cost and that's it. Keep doing that until it's not even a cost for you, then you can start eating into the variable cost of a more complete habit.

As far as knowing to initiate the habit, place it directly behind an already established habit. Flossing is easy since you probably brush your teeth regularly.

I think what I'm trying to say though is that there's no benefit to starting with one tooth if you have already paid that "startup cost". Since at that point the cognitive load of flossing one tooth vs flossing all your teeth is basically nonexistent.

One tooth is strictly less time, less commitment, less cognitive overhead than all your teeth.

Simple as that.

Of course this is just the regime that helped me build 4 or 5 brand new daily habits in under two years, all of which I had tried and failed several times before. YMMV.

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