Temptation
Bundling
You keep meaning to walk more and to catch up on your favourite podcast. You skip the walk when it is cold, save the podcast for a free hour that never arrives, and reach the weekend having done neither. Both keep slipping, because each one waits on motivation you do not have.
What is Temptation Bundling?
Temptation Bundling is an execution method that pairs a task you avoid with something you enjoy, so the thing you want pulls you into the thing you should do. You allow yourself the pleasure only while doing the task, which ties the two into one habit. The task borrows the appeal of the treat, and starting gets easier because part of it is something you look forward to. The economist Katherine Milkman developed and named the method.
A dull task struggles because its reward sits far in the future, if it arrives at all. A pleasure you already enjoy gives an immediate pull, and bundling it with the task moves that pull to the exact moment you need it, the start. Gating the treat behind the task also hands you the pleasure and the progress together, so you stop having to pick one over the other.
How to use it
The method is a matching exercise followed by one firm rule. Five steps set it up.
- List the pleasures you keep coming back to.
Name the things you happily do anyway: a certain show, a podcast, a favourite coffee. - List the tasks you keep avoiding.
Name the chores and habits you put off: the treadmill, folding laundry, clearing admin. - Pair one pleasure with one task that can share the time.
Match a want to a should that can happen together, such as a podcast and a walk. - Make the rule that the pleasure only happens during the task.
The show plays only while you are on the exercise bike, the nice coffee comes only while you do your admin. - Keep the bundle honest.
Hold the rule so the treat genuinely waits for the task, or the pull that makes it work quietly fades.
Worked example
You want to use the exercise bike that sits in the corner gathering dust, and you are hooked on a drama you keep bingeing on the sofa. On its own, the bike loses every evening to the sofa. You bundle the two: the show is now only allowed while you pedal.
The first evening you climb on the bike to find out what happens next, and twenty-five minutes pass before you notice, because your attention is on the story. The exercise rode along on the pull of the show. Soon the theme music alone makes you want to get on the bike, and the habit holds, because you stopped asking yourself to choose between the thing you should do and the thing you want to do.