Throughout my life, for as long as I can remember (except maybe very early childhood), I’ve had various habits. Over time, I’ve become more conscious about them, and now I build a set of habits that align with my goals, with what I want to achieve, and so they help me on my journey.
When I talk to people, they tell me they can’t start a habit, or they can’t quit one, or do something else. This always surprises me a bit because my method of creating habits, if I need something, doesn’t cause much discomfort. I don’t have a pattern of falling off track or giving up on a new habit. No, it’s all fairly easy.
Honestly, I don’t know what the secret is, but I’ll try to figure it out here. I call these things micro-systems, and I’ve surrounded my life with them from practically every angle. They give me flexibility in my actions while keeping me on track. And this doesn’t happen because I have to force myself to do something with willpower – no, it all happens automatically and naturally.
This isn’t just my personal experience. Research from Duke University found that about 45% of our daily actions are habitual – performed in consistent contexts without active decision-making. In other words, nearly half of what we “decide” to do each day isn’t really decided at all – it’s governed by memory and environmental cues. These small routines (“micro-systems”) can powerfully steer our lives for better or worse.
My Very First Micro-System
Let me tell you specifically what I’m talking about. In childhood, I saw my father do morning exercises every day. I asked him why he did it, and he told me that, first, it’s an excellent way to wake up, physical activity, and second, it allows him to stay in shape.
I think this served as an example for me that stuck with me for life, and I later started applying it myself. I didn’t start doing it right away, but looking back, I realize how much it influenced me because since I started exercising at 15, I adopted this habit from him and also began doing morning exercises, and for more than two decades since then, I’ve continued doing it every day.
As a rational person, my brain needs a logical explanation to justify an action I’m taking. I have a huge number of logical chains that explain what I do in my head.
And naturally, justifying daily exercise is quite easy for me. There are many positive aspects; I don’t think there’s a need to discuss them here. But basically, once a logical chain or pattern of explanation settles in my head about why I need to do something, the habit stops being questioned. I can just do it without any hesitation, doubt, or obstacles.
In other words, I don’t need to explain it to myself each time; I just do it automatically. First thing, after I go to the bathroom in the morning, I do my exercises. And this habit lives with me regardless of where I am.
Why Most Digital Nomads Struggle with Consistency (And How Micro-Systems Fix This)
Because as a digital nomad, I travel and change my living location quite often compared to a settled person. And this doesn’t hinder me. Rather, it’s the opposite – I’ve created a set of exercises that are, first, universal, and second, I can do them anywhere, I don’t need any equipment or anything else, I literally just need my body. Ok, and a hard floor.
So wherever I am, whether in Singapore, living on the last of my saved money on the roof of a condo where I rented a room with Asian students, or in a guesthouse in Bali where a room cost $300 a month, or in a house in Thailand, or in a hotel in Amsterdam – I can do these exercises, it absolutely makes no difference.
And most importantly, it allows me to stay on this line, understanding that I’m at least monitoring myself to stay in shape, paying attention to it every day, every morning, I have this wake-up methodology.
And this is one of the morning rituals that disciplines – because if you do one thing every day, regardless of what’s happening in your life, it allows you to put yourself back on track, back on the path you’re following.
Because it’s something that remains unchanged, it means that even if you’ve gone off track somewhere, you continue going in the right direction. At minimum, that’s the feeling this approach gives.
This is more powerful than most people realize. Behavioral research emphasizes that much of our behavior is driven by habit rather than conscious decision. The classic habit loop of cue, routine, reward explains why micro-habits are so effective. Each repetition strengthens the association between the cue and the behavior in our neural pathways. For example, the sight of your workout clothes laid out (cue) leads to exercising (routine) because you anticipate feeling energized (reward).
When behaviors are repeated, the brain “chunks” them into automatic sequences to save energy – this is the essence of automaticity. Waking up and immediately doing 5 minutes of yoga can become as reflexive as brushing your teeth. The benefit is that automatic habits consume far less cognitive bandwidth and willpower than actions that must be consciously willed each time.
It’s Cleaning Time!
Probably the second similar reason I saw in childhood was regular cleaning. Every Saturday, my mom cleaned our house, and I helped her. That is, whatever I could do there, I don’t remember, vacuuming, dusting. The specifics aren’t important, but it was my responsibility. To clean and tidy up.
Because, as we know, the universal law of the universe is the tendency toward entropy. And this applies to your living space as well. If you don’t look after it for a long time, it will be subject to the tendency toward chaos. Consequently, all things start to be scattered, dust and dirt accumulate. And if you don’t make efforts to clean and clear all this out, over time it turns into a dirty mess that’s unpleasant to be in.
I wrote a separate article on how to organize your mind – “The Hidden Mental System Behind a Successful Life”, please read it. And an important part here is precisely organizing the space around you. Which is what such regular cleaning allows.
This formed another habit for me. I don’t always clean now, for example. I can, if I don’t have time for it but have money, pay a cleaner who will do it all for me. But I prefer to maintain order by distributing it into micro-systems.
For example, right after eating, I wash the dishes, thus keeping things tidy. And when I do this, I do it according to a certain system. For example, I have specific places for each item on the drying rack. For each procedure, there’s a specific algorithm of actions.
For instance, which items I wash first, which I wash last. They probably don’t have any special meaning in terms of logic or some impact on the result. But essentially, it doesn’t matter, because for me, it’s just a system that allows me to perform all these tasks without thinking.
I don’t have to think about them and somehow make decisions while performing these actions, what should I do. There’s a certain algorithm that I follow unquestionably, and there’s no variability here. It will be performed the same way each time, and each time it will bring the same result.
What does this give me? Besides the fact that I don’t have to worry about what I need to do and how I need to do it, my mental energy isn’t spent on this. All of this is performed on complete autopilot, and it means I can, for example, spice it up with something useful.
Like listening to a podcast, which I’m listening to now, and getting some new information I want. These are basic and obvious examples that give an understanding of how you can arrange your habits.
How To Create Micro-Systems
As soon as you’ve accumulated enough repetitions of the same action, it becomes automatic. This is the story about a certain number. Some think it should be 21, some 40 or 70. The specifics don’t matter.
It’s about how you don’t have any questions about doing it; you just train yourself. We have such an inclination. No matter how much we want otherwise, we are still animals by nature, and our brain is designed to seek safety and calm.
For it, the presence of such systems is equivalent to safety. Because it knows what to do, and it gets involved in this habit quite quickly, and even automatically develops this pattern, which allows us to do it all automatically.
Just as food is automatically digested once it enters the body, as long as the body is completely healthy and has no blockers that prevent it from performing this function.
A key cognitive reason to rely on habits is to avoid decision fatigue. Every time we make a choice, we tax our limited mental resources. Throughout a long day of decision-making, the quality of decisions can deteriorate. To combat this, many successful people eliminate trivial choices by routinizing them.
Former U.S. President Barack Obama once said,
“You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits… I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing because I have too many other decisions to make.”
This is a common strategy – Steve Jobs had his black turtleneck, Mark Zuckerberg defaults to a grey t-shirt – all to conserve willpower for high-priority work.
Perhaps, thanks to such self-training and these micro-habits or micro-systems, as I call them, I have no problems with developing new habits.
Let’s Go For A Walk
For example, not long ago, I started walking 10,000 steps every day, the proverbial number, and for me, it was very easy to adopt this new habit.
I didn’t do it from New Year’s, not from a new month, not from some key event in my life, not from Monday. I just decided one day that, okay, I want to walk every day now, I created a description and logical chain in my head of why this is important to me, why I will do it, such a self-justifying mechanism for myself.
And that same day, as soon as I made this decision, in the evening I went for a walk. That’s basically it. And since then, it’s been a daily habit without a single break.
I don’t need to endure 21 days for this, counting down, keeping track of streaks or anything else. No, it’s all done quite simply, and I simplify everything a lot. Someone might start complicating things, like “I need a pedometer, I need a tracker, I need special shoes to walk in.”
No, I put on my beach sandals and went for a walk without any pedometers, without anything. I really don’t care. And I’m not so fanatical about it that I count my steps every day.
But to achieve the desired results, one of which is straightening my own back, since I spend a huge amount of time at the computer every day. I want to do something preventive about this so that my back doesn’t break at some point.
And one of these exercises that strengthen the back muscles, the sacrum, is walking. And I’ve always loved, love walking around the city, especially when I arrive somewhere new, my favorite activity is to just walk on foot in a new place.
Go out and walk wherever I like, looking for new places. Exploring the area on foot is one of my favorite activities – looking at what’s happening around.
And thus I have this logical chain in my head, I don’t need anything else, I don’t need pedometers, trackers, cool shoes for this.
Just go and that’s it. You have two legs; basically, that’s all you need for this. Especially if you live, for example, in a rural area, you can do it even completely without shoes. And that would be even better. Here, the wish to touch grass is automatically fulfilled with the new habit.
That’s it for this article. Next time we will dive deep into the practical steps of a system on how to create micro-systems. Yeah, we’re going meta with this.