How to use habit stacking & daily resets to get things done

If you take a close look at your day, you will likely find many little habits that pull or push you through the motions of everyday life. You get the coffee going before you go to wake up the kids, you make your bed after you get dressed, you empty the dishwasher after breakfast, you get gas on Sundays after church. Whatever these things are, they are built into your day(s) so much that you don’t even have to think about it.

So what is a reset and what does it have to do with your daily habits? A reset is a combination of tasks that are bundled together to be completed at a certain time. How resets can help you varies depending on your needs and your ability to be consistent with them. This post will focus on daily resets - stay tuned for monthly resets coming soon!

Morning Reset

Every morning after the kids go to school, I walk around the house, turn off the lights, wipe down the bathroom counter, flush toilets (ugh - whyyyyy?), and take care of any random things that are where they shouldn’t be (that sock!!!). I also push in the dining room chairs, tidy the kitchen, make our bed, and throw in a load of laundry. Then the best part: I get my cup of coffee and I sit in my favorite chair and read for 15-20 minutes. Now this reset will not work for everyone, but for me, it’s second nature. Total time I’m doing my reset pre-coffee - probably 5-10 minutes total. That productive start to my day feels good and rewarding myself with some quiet reading time gets my day off to a good start. I’ve reset my brain & my home in order to move on to the next part of my day. Your morning reset might look completely different depending on your day. If you work outside the home, it might not be punctuated with quiet time reading but maybe you treat yourself with listening to your favorite podcast on your way to the office!

Evening Reset

Our evenings are pure chaos. If we all get to eat dinner together on a weeknight we are lucky. My husband and I are driving in different directions - taxiing the kiddos to their activities. So our (I say “our” because my husband & kids are part of this too!) evening reset happens as we are cleaning up after everyone is home and has eaten. The kitchen gets put back together (counters cleared, sink empty, floor swept), water bottles get filled for the next day, and we do a general sweep of the house. These things are important to me for a few reasons. I like to wake up in the morning with a clean slate. Walking into a kitchen with dirty dishes on the counter is just not how I want to start my day. My tolerance for clutter in my home is clearly low, and I know that about myself so I chose to be proactive. You might not feel the same way - but there is likely something that you do or can do at night to make mornings more enjoyable. Maybe you work out every morning. If you set out your gym clothes before bed, that’s one gift to yourself that you might appreciate. You might have the coffeemaker set at night to brew just before you wake up.

Habit Stacking

Do you see how a reset might be able to help you? Let’s talk about one way to set one up. First - ask yourself what you already do without much thought. What about the things you actually want to do but keep getting forgotten or overlooked? We are going to use something called habit stacking - a strategy popularized by the book Atomic Habits. We are going to take the new things we want to eventually become habit and stack them with the habits that already exist. This doesn’t work overnight, but if you practice your resets and stack those new habits onto the ingrained ones, you will find that they start to become mindless. Consistency is key.

Here’s an example: You want to be able to do a split (me!). You never remember to stretch, so you need to use something that’s already working for you in order to get the stretching to be a regular part of your day. You decide that every night when you are reading to your kids, which is something you do every night, you are doing your stretches. Or you want to be better about laundry. A common example of household grunt work. It always sneaks up on you when you have the least patience for it - as the kids are getting ready for school or heading to soccer practice with no clean shorts (ew). What habits do you already have that you can “snuggle” the laundry task up next to? Besides in my morning reset, I love to throw in a load of laundry before bed and use the delay start function. It washes at like 4am and is ready to put in the dryer when I wake up. Or maybe you have the kids set the table for dinner and throw in a load then, ready to put in the dryer after dessert. Whatever it may be, you are more likely to be successful if you use what is currently working for you as a starting point vs. reinventing the wheel.

Building a Reset

Now let’s get to work. First take a sheet of paper and fold it in half the long way. On the left side break down your day in a way that makes sense - maybe morning, afternoon & evening or before work, during work, after work. Now under each timeframe quickly jot down the habits that are part of that segment of your day. Don’t spend a lot of time overthinking this. Remember - we are going to use the brainless parts of your day to help with the things that might need a little more work. On the right hand side jot down the tasks that don’t seem to fit into your day naturally. Don’t worry about the time of day yet, just write them down. Finally look at the right hand side and see if there are any tasks on the left side that might naturally be a good fit. Break this down into small wins - pick one habit to work on at a time vs. trying to do all the things at once. Burning yourself out at the get-g0 isn’t going to help you!

Be Kind to Yourself

This might not come naturally to you. Some ideal habits might not naturally stack with your current ones. You might need to rearrange things or put one aside for now and try something else. What is most important is that you are kind to yourself. You are not a magician, and life happens. Your house is not a museum - you live there. Not every day is exactly the same. Sometimes something will fall through the cracks and that’s okay! Let it go to the best of your abilities, move forward and try again the next day.

Get Things Done

Picking a daily reset or two can help you get things done. You can make new habits and find joy in having more time and/or less stress. You might even eventually get that split :)