Cues, reminders and identity: how to make a new habit obvious

Tie the new habit to something you already do every day, and let that moment — not a notification — be what starts it. Reminders are useful scaffolding for the first weeks, but research on habit apps found that leaning on them helps you repeat a behavior without helping it become automatic, while cues tied to everyday events do (Stawarz, Cox & Blandford, 2015).

Here’s how to pick a cue, where reminders fit, what to make of “identity” advice, and how to set all three up in Stride.

Why the cue does the heavy lifting

Habits are, almost by definition, triggered by context. Repeat a behavior in the same situation often enough and the situation itself starts to prompt it, with less and less need for a decision or a goal in mind (Wood & Neal, 2007; Wood & Rünger, 2016). That’s why “I’ll read more” rarely turns into anything: it doesn’t name a situation, so nothing in your day ever points at it.

Writing the situation down helps. Plans in the form “when X happens, I will do Y”, which researchers call implementation intentions, had a medium-to-large effect on reaching goals across 94 tests in a meta-analysis (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006). They aren’t magic: a field experiment that prompted gym members to write down when they would exercise found no increase in visits (Carrera et al., 2018). A plan works best when the cue is one that reliably happens anyway.

How to pick a good cue

1. Choose something that already happens every day the habit is due — pouring your first coffee, sitting down on the train, finishing dinner, brushing your teeth.
2. Make it the moment right before. “After I pour my coffee, I write one line in my journal” beats “in the morning”, which is a few hours wide.
3. Keep the place in mind. If the cue is “after dinner”, put the book where you sit after dinner. The less you have to fetch, the less there is to decide.
4. Write it down as a sentence: “After [cue], I [habit].” If you can’t finish the sentence, the habit doesn’t have a moment yet.

Where reminders help, and where they don’t

In the study above, participants who relied on reminders kept repeating the behavior, but their sense that it was automatic grew less than for people who used an everyday event as the trigger. That makes sense: if the phone always tells you, the phone becomes the cue, and the day you silence it, the habit has nothing left to hang on.

• Use a reminder while the habit is new, timed to land just before your cue, not hours away from it.
• Treat it as a backup. The goal is to notice, after a few weeks, that you’ve already done the habit by the time the reminder arrives.
• Turn it off for habits that no longer need it, and keep it for the ones that still slip.

A word on identity

A lot of habit advice suggests framing a habit as part of who you’re becoming — “I’m becoming a reader” rather than “I want to read more”. Many people find that motivating, and you can try it at no cost. But treat it as a framing you might like, not a proven technique: a well-known study found that asking people to be “a voter” rather than “to vote” raised turnout (Bryan et al., 2011), and a much larger follow-up found no difference (Gerber et al., 2016). The cue is the part with stronger evidence behind it.

Setting a cue, an identity and a reminder in Stride

Every habit in Stride has three optional fields for this, on the same screen as its name and goal (tap a habit, then Edit, or fill them in when you create it):

• Cue: the moment you’ve anchored it to, such as “After dinner”. It shows under the habit’s name on Today and on its page, and it’s included in the habit’s reminder.
• Identity: finish the sentence “I’m becoming…”. The habit’s page then counts each check-in as a vote — “375 votes for a reader” — and checking it off on Today says so.
• Reminder: a switch per habit. Reminders arrive on the days the habit is due, at one time you set for all of them in Settings → Reminders.

With reminders on, Stride can also send two kinds of nudge: an evening heads-up when a streak of a week or more is on the line and today isn’t done yet, and a morning note the day after a habit slips. Both are free, and both stop with the Reminders switch. If a slip does happen, there’s a plan for the day after in missed a day? How to keep a habit going.