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Routine: ______________________
Add one step every two days. Keep your wake-up time.
Rules for the fourteen days
These rules protect you from the usual failure of a morning routine, which is starting too big:
- Keep your current wake-up time for all fourteen days. Changing the time is a separate challenge for later.
- Add exactly one new step every second day, never more, even when you feel motivated.
- A day counts when you did every step that is on the plan for that day, in any order.
- Prepare the night before: lay out clothes, put the glass by the sink, leave the book on the chair.
- If you are ill or travelling, do just the first step and mark the day.
The 14-day build plan
| Day | What you do after waking |
|---|---|
| Days 1 and 2 | Step 1: drink a glass of water before looking at your phone. |
| Days 3 and 4 | Steps 1 and 2: add opening the curtains or window and taking five slow breaths. |
| Days 5 and 6 | Steps 1 to 3: add making the bed in under a minute. |
| Days 7 and 8 | Steps 1 to 4: add two minutes of stretching or walking around the home. |
| Days 9 and 10 | Steps 1 to 5: add washing your face and brushing your teeth before checking messages. |
| Days 11 and 12 | Steps 1 to 6: add writing the three things you want to finish today. |
| Days 13 and 14 | Steps 1 to 7: add a short pleasure, such as tea or a page of a book, as the last step. |
Why add steps so slowly?
A routine made of seven new habits at once fails because each step competes for willpower at the same moment. Adding one step every two days lets the earlier steps become close to automatic, so each new step has the previous one as its cue.
This is a form of habit stacking: each step is attached to the end of the one before it. Attaching a behaviour to a specific cue is also how implementation intentions work, and Gollwitzer's research found that this kind of if-then planning improves follow-through.
After day fourteen
Fourteen days will not make a routine permanent. The Lally study reported a median of 66 days for a behaviour to reach a plateau of automaticity, with wide variation. Use the last day to decide which steps are worth keeping, remove the ones you resent, and continue with a thirty-day sheet.
If you want to move your wake-up time, do it afterwards in steps of ten to fifteen minutes. The routine you built will carry across.
Track it for free
Mark each day on a free chain in your browser. Nothing is uploaded and no account is needed.
Open the free habit trackerCommon questions
- Do I have to wake up earlier for this challenge?
- No. The challenge deliberately keeps your wake-up time the same, because changing the time and adding steps at once makes failure more likely. Move the alarm later, in small steps.
- What if my mornings are different every day?
- Attach the steps to waking up rather than to a clock time. Even a shortened version, with just the first one or two steps, still counts as a mark.
- Can I swap a step for something else?
- Yes, as long as the new step is small and has a clear end. Swap it at the start of its two-day block, not in the middle.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from:
- Implementation intentions: Strong effects of simple plans, American Psychologist, Peter M. Gollwitzer, 1999
- How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world, European Journal of Social Psychology, Lally, van Jaarsveld, Potts and Wardle, 2010