Designing Your Physical Environment

When most people talk about setting their environment up for success, they think of their physical environment. Of course environment is much more than that, involving internal and external factors, but your physical environment plays a critical role in deciding the direction of your life.

When it comes to physical environment, there are 2 different things to consider: What’s easily accessible and what’s present. 

What’s accessible in your physical environment determines a lot of your unconscious action. This is true for both objects and places. For example if it’s easier to grab a vegetable snack than sugary sweets, you’re more likely to eat healthy. If your phone is on the table next to you while you work rather than tucked in a drawer downstairs, you’re way more likely to get distracted and use it. 

As for spaces - if your gym or favorite fast food restaurant is around the block, it’s way more likely you’ll go in then if it’s across town. The accessibility of objects and places determines what’s easy and provides a favored path forward.

Then there’s what’s present. There are certain actions we don’t even remember to take until we’re visually prompted to. If you see that sugary sweet on the counter, it makes you crave it. But if you didn’t see it you wouldn’t have even thought about it. 

Our physical environment prompts our awareness based on what’s present within our senses - visually, audibly, etc. Our attention is so finite that we can’t reasonably think about everything. Your physical environment brings certain things top of mind so that they’re more likely to be acted upon.

When it comes to designing your environment, you want to make good things more accessible and good behaviors more obvious. The latter is James Clear’s first law of behavior change in Atomic Habits. And for good reason, we unconsciously follow the path of least resistance, which is the path determined by the accessibility and presentation of our environment.

If you want to improve your unconscious direction, you need to improve your environment. And the best way to do that is to take intentional action in the present such that it shapes future environments in your favor.

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