What is habit stacking?

It's doing a new habit straight after one you already do, written as "After I [current habit], I will [new habit]." The habit you already have becomes the reminder, so you don't have to remember the new one.

Who came up with habit stacking?

BJ Fogg, who calls it anchoring in his Tiny Habits method. James Clear wrote it up as habit stacking in Atomic Habits, and he credits Fogg for the idea and SJ Scott for the phrase.

What is the difference between habit stacking and implementation intentions?

An implementation intention ties a habit to a time and a place, such as five calls at 9:15 at your desk. Habit stacking ties it to something you already do, and Clear calls it a special form of implementation intention.

How many habits can you stack?

Start with one. Add the next link only when the first runs without a push, and stop at three or four links, because a long chain has more places to break.

How long does habit stacking take to work?

Months rather than days. In Phillippa Lally's study, people took anywhere from 18 to 254 days to reach their own peak, and missing one day made no material difference.

What are good habit stacking examples for work?

For a seller, the strongest is typing the next step and its date after every call you hang up. Dialling the first name before you open email works for the first call of the day, and picking Friday's one stalled deal works for the pipeline review.

Habit stacking: the formula and examples for a sales week

What habit stacking is

Habit stacking is doing a new habit straight after one you already do every day, so the old habit reminds you. You write it as one sentence: "After I [current habit], I will [new habit]." For someone who sells, the best current habits are the ones your day hands you anyway, such as hanging up a call or pouring the first coffee at your desk.

So "I should follow up faster" becomes "After I hang up a call, I'll type the next step and its date before I dial again." The first line is a wish. The second tells you when to act and what your hands do.

James Clear wrote the formula up in his book Atomic Habits, and the habit stacking chapter is free on his site. He credits the idea to BJ Fogg, who calls it anchoring because the old habit holds the new one in place, and he thanks SJ Scott, whose book gave him the phrase. The formula runs both ways. "Before I open my inbox, I'll make the first call" is a stack too.

Fogg created the Tiny Habits method and directs the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford University. New to building habits on purpose? Read how to build a habit first, for picking a trigger and how long a habit takes to form. Stacking picks up from there. It's about where to hang the habit and how to chain several, plus what to do when your week knocks one over.

Why it works: the plan makes the decision

A stack works because you decide before the moment arrives. When the anchor happens, there's nothing to weigh up. You already said you'd do it.

Psychologists call that kind of plan an implementation intention, and Clear calls habit stacking a special form of one. Peter Gollwitzer named the idea. In a 1999 paper in American Psychologist, he described it as a plan that ties a situation you expect to a response you've chosen, so that when the situation turns up, it sets off the response without a fresh decision.

One British study shows the gap between wanting and doing. Sarah Milne, Sheina Orbell and Paschal Sheeran put 248 people into three groups for two weeks. One group tracked their exercise. A second also heard a talk on why exercise matters, and the third heard the talk and then wrote down when and where they'd exercise. After the talk, people meant to exercise more and didn't. Writing down when and where got them moving, by a margin the authors call dramatic. In James Clear's account of the results, 91 percent of the planning group exercised at least once a week, against 35 to 38 percent in the other two groups.

It wasn't a one-off. In a 2006 review, Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran pooled 94 independent tests and found a medium-to-large effect of these plans on reaching goals.

Selling has the same gap. Every rep wants to follow up faster. In that study, the people who heard the talk exercised no more than the people who didn't, and the ones who wrote down when did.

There are three ways to write that plan, and each fits a different job:

Plan	How you write it	A seller's version
Habit stack	After I [habit], I will [new habit]	After I hang up, I type the next step
Time and place	I will [habit] at [time] in [place]	I make five calls at 9:15 at my desk
If-then backup	If [problem], then [response]	If a client eats 9:15, I call at 1:30

Use a stack when the new habit belongs to an event and a time-and-place plan when it belongs to the clock. The if-then line is for the day either one breaks. A stack also carries its time and place inside the anchor: you hang up at your desk, so the new habit happens at your desk.

Find your anchors with two lists

Before you write a stack, spend five minutes on two lists. Clear suggests the same pair. The first holds what you do every working day without fail. The second holds what happens to you every day without fail. A seller's pair looks like this:

What you do every day	What happens to you every day
Open the laptop	A new enquiry lands
Make the first call	A call goes to voicemail
Hang up a call	A client reschedules
Walk out of a client meeting	The Monday huddle ends
Get back into the car	A deal moves stage
Close the laptop	A lead goes quiet for a week

Most of a seller's best anchors sit in the right-hand column. You can't plan when a voicemail or a silent week arrives. You can plan what you do the moment it does.

Then put each candidate through four tests:

Test	Strong anchor	Weak anchor
As often as the habit	Hanging up, for an after-every-call habit	The Monday huddle, for a daily habit
A clear end	Closing the laptop for lunch	"At lunch"
A pause after it	Walking out of a client meeting	Joining back-to-back video calls
The same place	Sitting down at your desk	"When I have a minute"

Hang a daily habit on a weekly anchor and nothing sets it off for six days out of seven, which is why Clear says the two should match. Clear's own push-up stack started as "when I take a break for lunch" and kept slipping, because it never said whether that meant before lunch or after, or where he'd be standing. Tying it to the moment he closed his laptop fixed it.

The pause test is the one sellers break most. When the next call is booked for one minute after this one ends, the moment you hang up only has room for a tick in the log. Hang anything bigger on a moment with room after it.

Write the stack in one sentence

Name the anchor first, then the new habit as something your hands do. Keep that habit to its first two minutes. "Review my pipeline" is a topic. "Open the pipeline and read the three oldest deals" is an action you can start before you've decided whether you feel like it.

Here are six stacks for a sales week, one for each place a week tends to leak:

After I sit down at my desk, I will dial the first name on today's list before I open email.

When a lead goes seven days without replying, I will send one short question that's easy to answer.

After I hang up a call, I will type the next step and its date before I dial again.

Before I close the laptop on Friday, I will pick the one stalled deal I'll move next week.

After I finish a prospecting block, I will write tomorrow's first five names and numbers.

When a 1:1 with a rep ends, I will write down the one thing they agreed to and its date.

A lead going silent happens to you, and it still makes a good anchor. A quiet lead doesn't need a third "just checking in". A real question, sent to that one person, gives them something to reply to. The sales follow-up process has the wording and the timing for it.

Write the sentence by hand on a sticky note and put it where the anchor happens, on the edge of the monitor for a desk stack or the dashboard for a car stack. A stack you only keep in your head is easy to lose on the day you need it.

Chain stacks into a routine

Once one stack runs without you pushing it, hang the next habit on the end of it. Each finished habit becomes the cue for the next one, so three small habits in a row become a routine. Clear points out you can also slot a new habit into the middle of a routine you already run.

Here's a first hour built that way. You sit down and open today's follow-up list. Opening the list is the cue to send the oldest follow-up on it, and sending that is the cue to dial the first prospect. Logging the first call is the cue to dial the second.

The first call of the day is the one most reps put off, and in this chain it's the third link, after two that take a minute each. By the time you reach it, you're already moving. If you dread the call itself, read sales call reluctance next.

Slotting works for the Friday pipeline review too. If your review already ends with closing the laptop, put one habit just before it: write Monday's first three calls on a sticky note. Friday then sets up Monday morning without a separate plan.

Three rules keep a chain alive:

Add one link at a time, and only when the link before it runs without a push.
Stop at three or four links. A long chain has more places to snap.
When a link breaks, restart at the next link instead of from the top.

Plan the bad day with an if-then line

Sales days get taken over. A client rings at 9:10 and your 9:15 block is gone. A stack with no backup dies that day, and two dead days turn into a dead week.

Clear's answer is an if-then line: if this happens, I'll do that instead. Under each stack, write one backup aimed at the way that stack breaks:

If a client call eats the morning block, then I make five calls straight after lunch.
If the next call is already ringing, the next steps wait for the end of the hour.
If a quiet lead ignores my question too, then I set one last date two weeks out and stop chasing.
If I miss Friday's review, it moves to before Monday's first call.

Keep the backup smaller than the stack. Its only job is to stop one missed day from becoming a missed week.

A missed day does less harm than it feels like. Phillippa Lally and colleagues tracked 96 volunteers who each chose a daily eating, drinking or exercise habit tied to the same moment, such as after breakfast, and kept it up for 12 weeks. Skipping one chance made no material difference to how the habit formed. The fastest reached their own peak of automatic in 18 days and the slowest took 254, so give a stack a few months before you judge it.

Arjun's first three weeks

Made-up example: Arjun sells office fit-outs to small companies, in a team of six. His trouble is follow-ups. After a site visit he means to send the next step, and days later he's forgotten who wanted what.

Week 1, one stack: after I get back into the car after a site visit, I send the client one line on what happens next and set the date. He does it after 7 of 10 visits. All three misses come on Tuesday, when the visits run back to back.

Week 2, one backup: if the visits run back to back, then I send all the lines from the car park after the last one. He gets 11 of 12, and his quotes stop waiting for Thursday.

Week 3, one link: after I send the line, I read my last note on the next client before I drive off. He walks into the next visit knowing what they said last time.

He doesn't add a fourth link yet. Picking Monday's three oldest follow-ups on Friday can wait until the car stack runs on its own.

Stacks for a sales team

You can't install a habit in a rep, but you can make the anchors obvious and ask each rep to write their own sentence.

Use the meetings you already run as anchors. After the Monday huddle ends, each rep names the one deal they'll move this week and its next step.
After each 1:1, write down the one thing the rep agreed to and the date you'll check it, then open the next 1:1 with it. The one-on-one meeting template has a slot for exactly that.
Let reps pick their own new habit. A stack someone else wrote turns into a rule, and rules get kept when the manager is watching.
When a rep's stack keeps failing, skip the talk about effort and run the anchor through the four tests with them.

Why stacks fail, and the fix for each

Most broken stacks break in one of six ways:

The anchor is vague, like "in the morning". Name the exact moment, such as sitting down at your desk.
The anchor happens less often than the habit. Match them, or move the habit.
The new habit is too big. Cut it to its first two minutes and grow it later.
You started three stacks at the same time. Keep the one tied to the habit that slips most and drop the others for now.
The stack sits right before a rush. Move it to an anchor with a pause after it.
You're counting results. Tick "sent the line" and leave "got a reply" off the sheet, because only the first is yours.

Track the stack where the anchor happens

What you tick is the new habit itself, and the tick belongs where the anchor happens. A note stuck to the dashboard works for a car stack. For a desk stack, a page from the daily sales routine template with the sentence at the top and a box for each day is enough.

If your anchor sits at a fixed hour, like the 9am huddle or the Friday review at 4pm, ActivityTracker can hold the stack as a routine with that time. If it isn't done when the time comes, the assistant sends you a nudge on Telegram. You tap Done in the message, and once you've built a streak, the nudge tells you it's on the line.

Give a routine the hour your anchor happens. If it's still not done by then, ActivityTracker's assistant nudges you on Telegram, and Done is a button in the message.

See how routines work

What to do first

Write the two lists. Pick one anchor from either list that happens every working day and sits right before the habit you keep missing. Write the stack sentence, then its if-then backup underneath, and stick both where the anchor happens. Run only that stack until it goes without a push, then add the next link.