Training

The gym bag rule

The version of me deciding what to wear and finding clean socks at 6am is not a reliable person. He’s half-asleep and looking for reasons to go back to bed. So I never let him decide anything — the bag gets packed the night before, every item in the same order, sitting by the front door where I’ll trip over it.

This sounds too small to matter and that’s exactly why it works. You’re not relying on willpower at the exact moment you have the least of it. You’re relying on a decision made twelve hours earlier by a version of you who was fully awake and actually wanted this. Remove the decision, keep the habit.