Mentavo
Four months in, training happens three times a week. It works, but it feels the same every time: it takes a decision.
The usual conclusion is that it hasn't become "a proper habit" yet – as though some state were overdue.
What the sentence actually describes is something else. It isn't a habit. It's a routine. And routines run on different rules.
Habit: the cue does the work
A habit in the narrow sense is a behaviour set off by a situation and then carried out largely without conscious steering.
The marker isn't frequency but the absence of a decision. Nobody decides in the morning to go to the bathroom after getting up. The cue – getting up – is enough.
That's both the strength and the limit. Habits cost almost no attention but are hard to steer deliberately. Which is why they also fire when you'd rather they didn't: reaching for your phone while waiting isn't a plan.
How much the surroundings decide this is covered in the piece on how your environment shapes your habits.
Routine: repetition with a decision in it
A routine is a recurring sequence that is planned and kept to – but needs a push every time.
The Saturday shop, Tuesday training, the Friday afternoon review: all repetition, none of it automatic. If the decision doesn't happen, the action doesn't happen.
That isn't a shortcoming. For many undertakings automaticity isn't available at all, because the behaviour is too long, too complex or too dependent on circumstances. An hour of training contains too many sub-steps and preconditions to become something that simply occurs.
Knowing that, you stop waiting for the wrong state – and start making the decision easier instead.
Ritual: the form is the purpose
A ritual differs from both through something that has nothing to do with automaticity or planning: meaning.
In a ritual the form isn't the most efficient route to an end; it is the point. Sunday coffee in the same cup, a shared meal in the same seat, the same sequence before going on stage.
That's why shortcutting feels wrong with rituals and sensible with routines. A routine may be optimised; a ritual loses its purpose in the process.
| Habit | Routine | Ritual | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Start | cue | decision | occasion |
| Attention | barely any | required | deliberately sought |
| Purpose | the outcome | the outcome | the sequence itself |
| Shortcutting | happens on its own | sensible | destroys the thing |
| Example | brushing your teeth | Tuesday training | Sunday breakfast |
Why the confusion wears people down
Conflating the three has a concrete consequence: people mark working routines down as failed habits.
"I should be doing this automatically by now" is a statement about an expectation, not about the behaviour. The behaviour is happening – it just still feels like effort.
Out of that grows an unnecessary doubt about your own consistency, even though the thing has been running for months. A related mechanism is covered in the piece on why you often don't notice your own progress.
What can become a habit – and what can't
Whether a behaviour can become automatic depends heavily on its shape. It helps if it:
- is short and has few sub-steps,
- runs the same way every time,
- is tied to a fixed, reliable cue,
- happens in a consistent place.
A glass of water after getting up meets all four. Marathon training meets none.
So the more useful question isn't "how do I make this a habit?" but "is this even a candidate?" If it isn't, what's needed is not automaticity but a dependable point of decision – a fixed time, a fixed order, a fixed place.
How to turn that into a criterion is covered in the piece on setting decision criteria in advance.
Where the "66 days" comes from
A fixed number circulates for how long it takes. It deserves some context.
The figure comes from a study in which participants took up a new everyday behaviour over a number of weeks and regularly reported how automatic it felt. The widely quoted value is an average across that group.
What usually gets left out is decisive: the spread between participants was very large, from a few weeks to periods extending beyond the study itself. Also, the behaviours involved were simple ones, not complex undertakings.
As a rule of thumb for your own life the number is close to useless. What is usable is the more general finding: automaticity takes considerably longer than popular accounts suggest, and it varies a great deal between people and behaviours.
The common belief that a single missed day undoes the build-up also finds no support in that form.
What this changes in practice
The distinction has three concrete consequences.
For habits, the work worth doing is on the cue and the environment – not on motivation. The piece on small habits takes that up.
For routines, the work worth doing is on the frame: a fixed time, as few preconditions as possible, as little as possible left to decide. It isn't the activity that has to get easier, it's getting started.
For rituals, no optimisation is worth doing at all. They're the part that doesn't have to be efficient.
In Mentavo the relevant area is deliberately called "routines" rather than "habits" – because ticking something off records a decision rather than asserting an automatic pilot.
What this article doesn't claim
The three terms aren't sharp categories. A routine can take on habit-like qualities over years, and a ritual can grow out of a routine. The boundaries are fluid.
Nor does this piece claim automaticity is the goal. For plenty of things a conscious decision is the better form – particularly when circumstances change.
In short: work out what it is first
Most abandoned undertakings don't fail on consistency. They fail on a mistaken expectation about what keeping going is supposed to feel like.
Working out in advance whether something can become a habit or will stay a routine saves you waiting for a state that was never on offer for that particular action.
