When I’m trying to adapt a new habit into my life, I like to separate the process into these two categories. That is the social-external aspect of it (culture) and the internal-process aspect (system). While this separation definitely may actually have intersection and also may not cover all aspect of creating habit, I find thinking about it this way helped in my adaptation especially at the start.
This thoughts come out when I’m trying to write about writing and journaling. When evaluating this past year and planning for next year, I found that I’ve used this separation quite a lot. Let’s explore :)
Culture
When I’m changing myself (adapting habit will change a parson consciously or not) I found that collaborating with people around me, and also conditioning myself on what their response might be can be really helpful to create habits that stick. This category also includes things that maybe out of our control and how we might think and feel about it.
For example, in keeping a catchall It’s not rare for me to suddenly stop for a moment to write something on my catchall. So I conditioned myself to normalize the feeling of not going with the flow of people and feeling okay to just stand and write something before continue walking. Or when walking with my wife (who can be too focused on the surrounding that she doesn’t realize i’m falling behind) I may requested her to accompany me for a moment so that I’m not too hurried while writing or just find having someone near when writing in public feels fine.
Another one is when around my coworker and friends, I gradually explain to them that I loved taking notes of ideas when talking. So they won’t get offended when I suddenly switch focus, or worse yet lost their train of thoughts because of me.
Those are just some example of cultural aspect that I thought of when I’m adapting habits of writing. You might find yours different based on how you’re feeling and the context of your surrounding.
System
While culture usually plays role in mitigating the risk of losing habit because of other people or the social environment around me, while also enforcing the habit with the help of our close relations. The system part talk about how we might “program” ourself to help making things easy or lessen the effort for the nitty gritty of an activity. This “ourself” doesn’t need to be exclusively our mind and body, but also things under our control. An explicit example is using stuff like Zapier to automate things. But it can also include other conditioning, for example how we set up our physical environment, where we put things, how we assign a context to a certain space, and many more.
For practical example, the thing you may hear a lot and popularized by C - Atomic Habit Book is that we can anchor new habit to another habit with similar context. In my case if I want to incorporate morning journal to my writing habit, I could anchor it with morning coffee. i.e. when brewing my coffee I could create habit of clearing my desk and setup my book, then after it finishes I could sit there and immediately write my morning journal.
Another example of system is how we reduce options and reasons and making things autopilot (mentioned by Cal Newport in his podcast). This is significantly useful for me because I tend to fall into the trap of Analysis Paralysis and fall victim to paradox of choices. So limiting myself to a set of predefined and small amount of option that I have committed to can help me in starting without too much musing. For example I want to start using journal as a self-mastery tool, using a predefined template on how I wrote down my plan for the day and its time blocking can help a lot rather than using a more flexible bullet journal approach.
And there are also many other example of system aspect that I can’t fit into this snippet of thoughts. One thing to be mindful of when setting system is to not make it too rigid. I believe everyone has their own tolerance to system rigidity, and it’s hard to find the sweet spot. So when setting system make sure to also prepare for escape hatch and tolerate some level of in-compliance of the system.