How much of your day runs itself

Lesson 1 gave you a definition. This lesson asks how much of an ordinary day meets it, which is the first measurement in the course, and then does something the rest of this course will keep doing: it takes the number everybody quotes and puts it back beside the sentence it came from.

Two diary studies

Wood, Quinn and Kashy ran two studies in 2002 and reported them together.¹ What matters about the design is small and is exactly what goes missing by the time the figure reaches you.

Both were hourly diary studies with student participants. A prompt once an hour, and at each prompt the participant wrote down what they were doing, what they were thinking, and how they felt.

The two studies differed in one thing that turns out to matter: the form. Study 1 took one behaviour per entry. Study 2 let a participant list several behaviours at once.

This course has read the abstract and the diary-study results rather than the Method section, so the sample sizes, the length of the recording period and the details of how participants were recruited are not reported here. The one design fact the lesson leans on, the difference between the two forms, comes from the authors' own explanation of why their two figures differ, which is quoted below.

The criterion, which is where the number comes from

A diary entry counted as a habit if the behaviour was "performed just about every day and usually in the same location".¹

That is it. Every day, same place. Notice that this is a workable proxy for lesson 1's definition rather than the definition itself. Lesson 1's habit is an action triggered automatically by a cue. You can't see a trigger in a diary, so the researchers used the two things that produce one: repetition, and a stable context.

Any figure you ever meet about how much of life is habitual is a count against a criterion like this one, and the criterion is doing at least as much work as the finding.

What they found

The paper's own sentence, which is the one this lesson teaches from:

"[B]etween a third and a half of all behaviors listed were classified as habits, given that they were performed just about every day and usually in the same location. This estimate was greater in Study 2 (43%) than in Study 1 (35%)".¹

A range, then two figures, then a difference the authors explain.

The authors do not leave the gap between their two studies unexplained. Their account of it is that the Study 2 procedure of listing multiple behaviours "would encourage participants to include more activities performed habitually".¹

Read that twice, because it is the whole reason the two numbers differ. A diary asking for one behaviour an hour tends to catch the one you were paying attention to, and the thing you were paying attention to is the least habitual thing you were doing.

So the difference between 35 and 43 is a difference between two diary forms. Same kind of participant, same criterion, and the only thing that changed is how many behaviours a person could write down at once. The count moved by eight percentage points.

Worked: one hour, two forms

This case is constructed, and the two forms are the two the authors describe.³

A student at eleven in the morning is sitting in a library, reading for an essay, drinking coffee, with music in her ears. The watch chimes.

On the Study 1 form she has one line. She writes "reading for the essay", because that is what she is doing in the sense the question seems to mean. Reading for an essay is not something she does every day in the same place, so it is not counted as a habit. Her entry contributes one behaviour, and none of it is habitual.

On the Study 2 form she writes three. Reading for the essay. Drinking coffee. Listening to music while working. The second and third are things she does most days in the same place. Her entry contributes three behaviours, two of which are habitual.

Nothing about her morning has changed. The first form says she is zero percent habitual at eleven o'clock and the second says she is sixty-seven percent.

That is the whole mechanism of the eight-point gap, and it's worth sitting with, because it isn't a flaw in the research. The authors chose the second form deliberately, for the reason quoted above, and they told their readers what they had done. The loss happens afterwards, in transmission, when the figure arrives without the form attached.

What the studies found besides the number

The number is the part that travels and it is not the most interesting part.

People were thinking about something else. When participants were doing something habitual they "were likely to think about issues unrelated to their behavior, presumably because they did not have to consciously guide their actions".¹ When the behaviour was not habitual, their thoughts tended to match what they were doing.

That is lesson 1's second claim, measured. A habit is cheap to run, and the evidence for it is that people's minds were somewhere else.

And they were less stressed. The paper reports "lesser feelings of stress associated with habitual than nonhabitual behavior".¹ Not happier, and not more satisfied either. Less stressed, which is a narrower and more believable claim.

The most habitual domains were the ones you would guess. The behaviours most often classified as habits were "attending to hygiene and appearance and sleeping and waking activities".¹

Those are the behaviours most tightly tied to one place and one moment, which is what the criterion asks for, and that is lesson 1's point arriving from data rather than from a definition: what makes something count here is not how much of it there is but how fixed its context is.

Three things people get wrong about this figure

"Forty-three percent of what you do is habit." The paper says between a third and a half, gives two figures, and explains why they differ. The 43 is the higher one, from the study with the form that let people list more.

"Most of life is automatic." Backwards, on this criterion. More than half of what was listed was not classified as habitual.

"The studies observed people." They didn't. These are hourly self-report diaries, filled in by students at an hourly prompt.¹ The researchers were careful about it, and it is still people telling you what they did. Lesson 7 comes back to that, because the whole habit literature measures automaticity by asking, and it is the weakest joint in the subject.

Practice

Connections

Back. Lesson 1 defined a habit by automaticity rather than frequency, and this lesson is the first measurement of how common that is, along with the reason the measurement cannot be exact. Lesson 1's claim that a habit is cheap to run is the thought-and-stress finding here. From earlier Core courses: Time Management lesson 8 taught you to sort a claim and trace a figure, and this lesson is that move applied before the reader needs it; Logic and Argument lesson 5 gave you what a sample can and cannot support, which is why the scope of these two studies is in the second paragraph rather than a footnote; and Using AI Effectively lesson 11 taught you to ask what a claim was measured on and when.

Forward. Lesson 3 is what the cue is doing, and the behaviours you marked yes in the exercise are its raw material. Lesson 4 is how long a habit takes, and it contains the second of this course's three travelling numbers. Lesson 7 returns to the problem that automaticity is measured by asking. Lesson 7 puts all three numbers side by side.

Go deeper

• Habits in Everyday Life (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2002), posted by one of its authors. This course has read the abstract and the diary-study results. If you open it, read the Method section, which this course did not: how participants were recruited, how long they recorded for, and what each version of the form asked are what the number is actually made of, and none of it travels with the figure.

Sources

1. Wendy Wood, Jeffrey M. Quinn and Deborah A. Kashy, "Habits in Everyday Life: Thought, Emotion, and Action", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83(6), 2002, pages 1281 to 1297. Read in part: the abstract and the diary-study results; the Method section was not opened, and the body says so. Supports: that these were two hourly diary studies with student participants; the quoted criterion; the quoted result with both figures and the authors' quoted explanation of the difference, which is also the only thing supporting the one-behaviour and several-behaviour forms; the quoted finding about unrelated thoughts and the lesser stress; and the quoted statement of which behaviours were most often classified as habitual. Scope: student participants, hourly self-report diaries. The sample sizes and the recording period are in the Method section and are therefore not claimed here.
2. Benjamin Gardner, Phillippa Lally and Jane Wardle, "Making health habitual", British Journal of General Practice 62(605), 2012. Read in full. Cited here only for lesson 1's definition, which this lesson uses as the standard the diary criterion is a proxy for.
3. The student in the library is constructed, and the lesson says so where she appears. The two diary forms she fills in are the ones the studies used, and the eight-point gap her two entries illustrate is the gap the authors report and explain; the individual case is built to show the mechanism rather than taken from the paper. The reading of the figure as a floor rather than an estimate is also this course's own, marked as such in the checkpoint where it appears.