Brief transcript of Ramit Sethi answering a viewer question about maintaining the habit of flossing. Ramit explains why simple systems fail (busyness, shifting focus), recommends scheduling automated quarterly reviews to diagnose and repair broken habits, and suggests focusing on behavior first to rebuild momentum.
Oh, hello. Got a question from Claire who wants to know about flossing. And she asks. I started flossing my teeth every day for several months after I heard the floss one tooth trick. After I left a comment saying I had successfully changed this behavior, my flossing dropped off. What do you do when you start ignoring the system? Why do simple systems not work? Sometimes these. The example of putting keys in the same place brought to mind women who lose their keys five times per day. Why is it women, I don't know why One former roommate had a dedicated keyboard on a table right in front of the main door, but could not find her keys half the time. Okay, this is a good question. I love these psychology questions. So a few things that you want to do here. First of all, systems fail because we are people and sometimes we simply get really busy and, and we stop doing it. Like I might do a launch and it might take up all my time and some of my systems just completely shatter so I have to go back and rebuild them over time. The other thing is sometimes, you know, we just start focusing on something else. So what can you do about this? What I like to do is set up a quarterly review, put it on your Google calendar, and just once a quarter. All right, that's it. You say, here are the systems I've implemented. Let me just make sure I'm on track. So when that month comes around, when April comes around, you're going to say, wow, I'm supposed to be flossing and I just realized I haven't flossed in three weeks. Or I'm supposed to be working out three times a week and I haven't gone in two months. What's wrong with me? At that point, it's a direct reminder to go back, look at the system and diagnose where things went wrong. Often it's something as simple as I ran out of floss. Alright, in that case, very simple. Buy some new floss, back on track. Other times, psychologically, we know that momentum builds momentum. So if you have not gone to the gym in two months, it's going to be tough. It's going to be tough. But focusing on the behavior and then letting the attitude follow is one of the classic things that I teach when it comes to behavioral change. So focus on a quarterly review. Make sure that that's automated in your calendar. And when the time comes to revisit why you've stopped flossing or stopped working out or stopped cooking or whatever it may be, you will have a reminder you can diagnose what went wrong and you can quickly fix it and get back to changing your behavior again. Thanks for the question, by the way. I remember to floss by doing it between every single one of these takes.
