Automatize Your Life

Sometimes it can be helpful to automatize our lives as much as possible.

As humans, we have a lot of limitations. We have a limited cognitive capacity. We have a limited amount of energy. We have a limited amount of self-control. We get tired, stressed out, hungry, lazy, and grumpy. A lot of times we have a tendency to make bad decisions.

If we can remove some of those decisions from our lives completely, we have a better chance to meet our goals and be the type of person we really want to be.

Let’s use health as an example. Probably the most important factor in losing weight (or maintaining a healthy weight) is to make consistent, healthy, eating choices over the duration of one’s life.

This is really difficult.

There’s a McDonalds right down the street. You’re in a rush. There’s a bottomless candy bowl at the office. Your co-workers always want to grab a few drinks and mozzarella sticks at happy hour. It takes a lot of time and energy to cook healthy food. You’re tired, and stressed out, and eating that bowl of ice cream makes you feel so good.

There are a lot of opportunities for you to screw up your goal to make healthy choices throughout your day.

But what if you tried to automatize your food choices? What if you organized your life in such a way that there wasn’t even a decision to be made? For example, what if you removed junk food from your home? What if you didn’t even have it around? When you are tired, stressed out, and on the verge of making an unhealthy food choice… there isn’t even a decision to be made, because there’s no ice cream in the freezer.

If you are struggling to make a change in your life, think about whether there might be a way to automatize something in your life that forces you to do the thing you want to do. Watching too much television? Cancel your cable. Wasting too much time browsing the Internet? Cancel your Internet at home. Struggling to make healthy choices at the grocery store? Make it a rule to only buy food at the perimeter of the grocery store. And so on.

Discussion: What is one thing you are struggling with in your life? Is there a way to automatize this issue in your life, so that it is impossible for you not to live the way you want?