Measurement Drives Behavior, Even in the Shower

A tool for behavioral change?

Sometimes lasting change comes from very small adjustments… and a little understanding of how our brains are wired.

My natural pace in the morning is slow. I’m one of those people who always seems to take a good long time picking out clothes, showering, getting dressed, etc. And this used to make me late a lot. But in the past year, I’ve turned the situation around. The new element: wearing a waterproof watch with a stopwatch function.

By starting the timer when I step into the shower, I’ve completely changed my dynamic. I haven’t made any conscious effort to speed up (seriously, none), but that’s what has happened anyway. The only effort has been to look at my watch from time to time. That’s where my brain’s wiring takes over. It can’t see a sequence of times, day in and day out, without looking for patterns. I developed a pretty good idea for how long I should take at the various tasks: showering, toweling off, getting dressed, coming down to breakfast, etc. (A five-minute shower is about average, and eight minutes is slow.) Now I can’t help noticing when I take longer than usual; I find myself taking corrective action without much thought. Slow at one step, and suddenly I speed up at my other tasks. Now, when I have everything laid out the night before, the whole sequence of getting out of bed and out the door is less than 25 minutes.

There’s a basic idea that underlies this change: Measurement drives behavior. Just by the act of measuring something and paying attention to the results, people begin to change what they do. This idea is critical in the business and management world. But there’s no reason it can’t work at the level of personal change, too. The hard part is picking the right things to measure and getting the whole process started. That seems to be what’s going on with my morning stopwatch. Looking at a timepiece was not hard to turn into a habit.