Transcription
If the healthy habits that you want to do only seem to happen when you have willpower, you have an environment problem. If you're making more unhealthy choices than healthy choices in your day, you have an environment problem. If being consistent feels hard for you because you kind of forget to do the things that you said you want to do, you have an environment problem.
The secret to making your vision board happen this year isn't more willpower, it's making willpower less necessary. In this video, I want to talk about how to design your environment to make healthier choices feel more effortless. And I want to do that by showing you how I'm designing my own environment to make the healthy choices that I want to make feel more effortless.
Step number one, the daily life vision board. There's been a meta-analysis of goal setting studies and here's what they found. Process goals beat every goal. They have the largest effect on your performance. Performance goals have a moderate effect and outcome goals have the worst effect. So an outcome goal might be get 100k subscribers on YouTube. A performance goal might be get an average of 10k views per video. A process goal might be upload a video every Friday.
To design your environment, you want to think about your process goals. These are the things that you do daily, weekly, or monthly that get you closer to the life that you want. Hence, the daily life vision board. So, here is my vision board filled with all of the daily, weekly activities and routines that will help me to feel the way that I want to feel and reach my goals.
I've created a bunch of vision boards before and a lot of the time I get to the end of the year, I look back at my vision board and I go, "I can't believe that that happened." Not for everything, but sometimes it'll be the most oddly specific things that will have been brought to life throughout the year. I'm talking about things like find someone that you can consistently co-work with, or find an exercise that feels flowy, enjoyable, and easy to start. These are really specific things that I usually start the year going, "Well, I don't really know how that's going to happen. I just know that that's what I want." I'm gonna put it there as a kind of intention and see what bubbles up. And as the year goes by, I'll almost forget about it. But by the end of the year, I'll be like, "Huh, look what I did. Look what happened. It worked out for me."
So my vision board is broken down into context, time of day, time of week. For example, what are the activities that I want to do in my morning routine that will get me towards my goals or that I just want to do more of to feel good. And this is all focused on the process, not the outcome. So here are the specific things that are on my board. If you're wanting some inspiration or you just are nosy, at the top here, we have driving. The only thing that I want to be doing differently in my driving routine is I need to be wearing my glasses at night. I keep on leaving my glasses at home. I'm not technically required to wear these while driving, but at night it definitely feels safer.
I've got my things that I want to do throughout the day. This is more during the week when I'm working. I've even got mindlessly painting my nails. This one is hyper specific, which is a gradual no willpower true loss of interest in sugar. Currently, I'm a sweet tooth and I know that I could try to white knuckle change, cut out all sugar, but if I'm honest with myself, that's not what I want. I want to figure out how to have a loss of interest in sugar.
And this leads me to one of the first questions that you want to ask yourself as you're designing this board, which is, why don't I want this? For example, I could have written cut out sugar completely. But if I then asked myself the question, "Why don't I want that?" It would be, "That sounds like a full-on willpower method. That sounds like dieting, something that most people can't stick to for the rest of their life." So, I don't want something that feels like constant effort and willpower. So, what do I want?
This is the one step of creating vision boards and setting goals for myself that I wish I knew earlier on in life because it's changed everything. And that's not something I say lightly. It is so much easier to get what you want than the things that you want to want.
Over here, I have my morning routine. I've got a one-click dance sesh. This is my favorite way of moving. It's usually just me picking up my little 1 kilo weights, putting on my playlist, dancing around the house.
Moving on to my evening routine. In here, I have all of the activities that I want to do at night or in the afternoon night that aren't scrolling on my phone. This is something I've gotten so much better at in the past year, and I've made some videos about that. It's so much easier to stop the scrolling habit, to stop the mindless media consumption habit when you have other things that you want to be doing during your evenings, afternoons, or whenever you usually scroll. For me, I have things like digital journaling, doing my little word searches, idea meditation, watching the sunset with Luke. Christmas tree crafting, I'm already thinking about my 2026 Christmas tree.
And I beg of you, if you create something like this, and you're designing your evening routine, don't just put a bunch of little hobbies that you're like, "I should want to do that. That should be fun for me. I should enjoy that." Put things down that you know in your soul will be fun for you that are also good ways to spend your time.
I've got a section for weekly resets and weekends. I really want to figure out a way of planning date nights with Luke that works for us both. And I think I have an idea, which leads me to the next set of questions that you want to be asking yourself as you create this vision board, which is, why am I not doing this already? What's hard about this? And how could I design my environment to make this easy, to make this something that I'm more likely to do?
Your daily life vision board doesn't need to look anything like mine. But if you are part of the intention community, mine is there as part of the membership as a template for you if you want to use it. And if you haven't joined the membership, the link will be down below. It's $9 a month or it's $54 a year. You can sign up using the link down below.
Now is when you want to start making tweaks to your environment to make all this stuff on your daily life vision board way more likely to happen. I'm a big believer in the idea that small tweaks to your environment can change your life. And I say that because I've seen it in my own life. I've made the tiniest tweaks and they've made the biggest difference. If your environment is currently designed to nudge you towards scrolling, wasting your time procrastinating, that's what your year will look like. But if your environment is intentionally designed to help you to do the stuff on your daily life vision board, that's what your year is going to look like.
Let's start with this less serious section of my vision board, which is wearing my glasses while I drive. Although, is it less serious? Not really. It's just not related to my goals. Probably actually more serious. Last year, through my health insurance, I got these glasses that don't look the best on me. And this is not me begging for compliments. These are just not the most complimentary glasses for me. And I bought them on purpose because I thought by buying ugly glasses, they'll never leave my car. I won't want to wear these out and about. I was wrong. I wear them inside because I forget that they're on my face and then they don't end up living in my car.
So, I've been thinking about doing something insane, which is physically attaching these to my car with a piece of string so that I can't accidentally take them inside. We're at that point in the game. It's going to look a little crazy, but the only people that I drive around are people that I like, and I don't think they really care. So, come with me. This is what we're doing. This is working. This is fine.
So, I went to my car. I attached a piece of string to my glasses and it kind of worked. Actually, just found clear elastic. So, I'm going to go back to the car. But we're going to redo it while we're still here. We're in the spirit. We're taking off the green string, which technically was fine, but I just don't think it's the best solution. This stuff is probably more like floss. It's not a fabulous solution, but we're kind of at a point here where I just need to do something. And that I think it's going to work. I mean, it has to. I genuinely won't be able to take my glasses out of the car, which is good. One down.
Now, I want to design my environment to make it more likely that I use this. So, this is a backpod. It was specially designed by a physiotherapist to stretch your back if you're someone who works at a computer all day and you hunch on over. And the thing is, I love using it. So, when I asked myself, "Why am I not using this already?" My first thought was, it's in a really hard to reach place. My second thought was, it's ugly, so I don't want to move it and have it anywhere visible. Having this in plain sight in my room would wouldn't work for me. I love my room feeling nice and peaceful. This is not peaceful.
So, my solution is clean, freshly purchased socks. And I'm going to use them to make this less horrible. Less neon green. She's stretching. It's not easy, but it's working. It's definitely giving sock. Better than neon green object. Fits like a glove. Now for the other side. Okay. Better. I think 1 thousand times better. Something that wouldn't give me a fright. Bop bop bop bop.
Now I need to put this somewhere that is easy, which I feel willing to do because it's not neon green. Literally, that one question, "What's stopping me from using this?" will reveal miraculous answers that you've never really thought of before and make a huge difference when it comes to environment design. You almost can't design your environment without asking that question. Other ways to frame that question are, "What makes this annoying for me? What feels hard about this? What feels difficult about this? What am I not enjoying about this?" I'm thinking of having this just sitting on my vanity because if I'm using this, I'm lying on the ground right here. So, if I can just grab it, plunk it down here, that kind of works perfect.
Another thing on my vision board was making cooking meals, cooking dinner easy. Last year we got into meal kit deliveries and I cooked two days a week, Luke cooked two days a week for us, but I think with any meal kit you just get a bit sick of the food. So I needed a system. Firstly, we loved the recipe cards. So, I thought I would recreate that in a DIY way. I created a bunch of recipe cards on Canva, but I made them A5 size because sometimes A4 just felt really annoying. We have a really small kitchen. There's only so much bench space. I used recipes that we'd made before, or recipes that I was like, "I know that we'd like this." I laminated all of them. And then I attached this little magazine holder to the side of our broom cupboard with command strips and put the recipe cards in there.
Basically, the idea is every week we pick a few recipes from our recipe cards. Then I put this whiteboard up on the wall so that we could pick our meals for the week, chuck them on the whiteboard so we know exactly what we were making every week and we don't forget what we're cooking, which is honestly way better than what we were doing, which is just shoving our recipe cards here. To me, this feels uncomplicated. It feels easy. It feels doable.
Something I also wanted to design my environment to make easier is date nights with Luke. I feel like I've been saying this and it just hasn't been happening. So, I created a date night bingo card for us. I put it on this pin board. I feel like Luke is very much more spontaneous, unstructured, flowy, and I also kind of like the bingo card. I figure when we pick our meals for the week, we can also look at our bingo card and be like, "What what date night do we want to schedule in?" This whole situation feels very easy, very uncomplicated, and also aligned with what's worked with us before, which is always helpful.
Once again, when it comes to meal prepping or even productivity, you need to try a system or two, and then you need to reflect on what's not working and be like, "Why did I hate that? Why is that annoying?" All that failing to stick to a system does is gives you more data for a better system in the future or a better way of organizing things or a better way of doing things. Also, this looks like it took a second to put up. Creating these recipe cards took my evenings up for like a week and getting all the stuff together for the hallway took sweet time. So, don't feel pressured to do all this stuff in a day.
On my daily life vision board, I also had palette cleansers. Do you know that whole thing of when you sniff a few perfumes, then you have to sniff coffee beans to like cleanse your palette because otherwise your nose is still kind of carrying the scent of the last perfume? I kind of feel like tasks are similar. I think between each task, you got to sniff some coffee beans cuz otherwise you carry the energy of the past task with you, which is why I really want to do more little palette cleanses in between each activity, just when I'm at work, obviously.
And part of that for me means writing down how I'm feeling, getting things out of my brain. But I've noticed myself not wanting to do that. So I asked myself, "Why does this feel hard to me? Why does this feel annoying for me?" Because this is me usually just writing down completely random, useless thoughts. Writing them in an actual notebook felt like I was wasting the notebook and I was wasting paper. Then I saw these at Office Works. They are these little desk memo whiteboards. So, for example, I might have just finished editing a video. I grab out my little whiteboard. I might write, "I'm feeling," depending on the vibe of the day, "frustrated." And then I would just write down any other thoughts that came to mind. But these thoughts aren't that serious and they're going to pass. They don't need a permanent spot in my journal. So then I get rid of them. These have made doing my little palette cleanses in between each task so much easier, life-changing. For the people that didn't like to use their brand new stickers, for the people that don't like to mess up their brand new notebooks, try writing on a whiteboard. These are really cheap and they're from Office Works. I have one by my bedside table on my desk. They're everywhere.
The next thing on my daily life vision board that I want to think about is making it easier to do word searches before I go to bed. I made a whole video all about how overthinking and thinking too much can ruin your sleep. And not as in it'll just keep you awake and you won't be able to get to sleep, as in your brain uses more energy while you're sleeping if you're thinking too much before you go to bed. Which is why for me, I've worked really hard to create more of a wind-down routine for myself. And I have to be really intentional about making sure that I turn my brain off before I go to bed because I love to think. I love to think.
I actually redesigned my whole bedside table to make this more likely earlier in the year. My bedside table used to be taken over by a big chunky lamp and some tissues. I took the lamp away. I got a wall sconce which immediately created so much space. I put the tissues in a drawer. I got this little divider so that if I want to grab anything, I'm not knocking anything over. On this tray, I made space for wired headphones. Another way I like to turn my brain off before bed is listening to audiobooks and searching for AirPods will be the death of me. Wired headphones.
But one of the things that I tried to do was get this clunky tablet and install a word search outlet. I really wanted a device that would let me play my audiobooks using the Libby app, but I didn't want my phone right next to me, hence the clunky tablet. The other purpose for the clunky tablet was to install a word search app so that I could do word searches and wind down my brain before going to bed. As I've said, this is a clunky tablet. Using that app was torture.
So, we're redesigning. I got a physical word search book. It's going in my little divider space and it's replacing the journal that I originally put there because I put a journal there thinking that would be nice to do before bed. And I do like to journal in kind of the early evening but not before bed. So that's gone. And because it's a coloring word search, I have a bunch of textures too.
On this daily life vision board, I also put this 4-minute neck stretching routine because I work at a computer all day. And something you guys saw me try was putting QR codes on my little side table, but then I ended up putting direct links to those videos on my dodgy little tablet. They take a while to load, but now I can just click on my neck exercise video and it opens up for me. I can click on my 10-minute face massage video, which is also on my daily life vision board, and it opens straight up. They are so relaxing. If you have jaw problems, you have a little TMD, TMJ. So good.
I've been using my newly designed bedside table for a hot second now. I love it. But like I said, I made all these changes and then I realized, "Oh, that doesn't work. This doesn't work." And then I had to make tweaks. And that's what you'll find with any environment design change that you make. If anything, expect things to not really work at first, but also know that you are smart and that you will figure it out and you're a problem solver. You're watching this kind of content. Sorry. You solve problems. You can figure things out. If it doesn't work, you just need to pay attention to what specifically doesn't feel good. And then tweak.
Also, on my vision board, I have painting my nails more. I know it's just a little one, but I do love a painted nail. Last year, I painted my nails more than ever, and then I kind of just stopped. So, I asked myself, "What is making this hard for me?" And it's because this basket has gotten so cluttered up. This is my nail painting basket. There's so much stuff in here and I genuinely only use one nail paint. So, I'm thinking I declutter this.
If you like this video, you'll definitely like my video where I talk about, I think it's 18 ways to make your life easier. But that'll be on the screen. It'll give you some more examples of ways that I've designed my environment to make my life easier. This is my bread and butter. This is what I enjoy doing. I know you guys like seeing me do it as well. And I always have loads of ideas to share. So, if you're not subscribed already, make sure to click the subscribe button. I appreciate you so much and I'll see you.