Engineering Your Environment

Hey all,

I've been at home for the past couple of weeks, and I've been thinking a lot about how different it feels to be in my hometown now that I've been at college.

One thing that has struck me is how impactful all the little changes of moving out of the house have been on me and my habits.

The most prominent example of this has been my laptop setup, where, now that I have to use my laptop as my desktop computer while I'm out of the dorm, I've been way less productive than usual. Granted, part of the reason for this is that I'm on break for the first time in a while, but I think another part is that now, to go out and work, I must exert extra effort packing my laptop into my backpack first.

That may seem pretty stupid, but I've found that my habits are often solely based on what my brain finds "easy." For example, I find it much easier to eat healthy when the fruit is in front of me, and I'm way better at drinking water when I have a full cup at my desk.

And so the lesson I'm taking away from this is that I should try to engineer my environment to better suit myself.

For example, taking YouTube off the bookmarks bar on my laptop helped me stop watching YouTube so often, and bringing my Kindle with me wherever I study has helped me remember to read before I go home. Merely taking bad things out of sight and moving good things to be easily visible has helped me a lot.

Still, we can engineer our environments in more ways than merely changing the objects around us.

For example, socially, you can obviously start interacting with people who will positively impact you. Personally, though, I think this is a cynical way of looking at life, grouping people into "good influence" and "bad influence" buckets. Something better might be to tailor how and where you interact with people to take more of the good they offer and less of the bad. (Something that comes to mind is sectioning off different friend groups for different categories of activities like sports or academics and choosing to learn different lessons from different groups of people.)

Of course, our jobs, homes, and neighborhoods can also be engineered to fit our goals, but I'll leave evaluating those aspects of life to all of you.

In general, though, I think the lesson is to mind your environment and evaluate how each little thing you do, place you're in, person you hang out with, or object near you can influence who you are becoming. As James Clear (author of Atomic Habits) says, all these little things are "votes" towards who you wish to become. So vote consciously and thoughtfully.

Anyways, that's all I have for today. If you have any other suggestions or ways you've engineered your environment to be more productive, let me know!

Thanks for reading, and have a great week!

-Ethan