Action Prompts are so much more useful than Person Prompts and Context Prompts that I’ve given them a pet name: Anchors. When talking about Tiny Habits, I use the term Anchor to describe something in your life that is already stable and solid. The concept is pretty simple. If there is a habit you want, find the right Anchor within your current routine to serve as your prompt, your reminder.

Power Move: Start with Anchors: Ready for a twist? You can create successful recipes in Tiny Habits by starting with an Anchor. It’s basically a flip of what we’ve been doing. Instead of starting with a habit you want to create and finding a place for it, you begin with the routines you already have and find new habits to plug in.

When you rehearse in Tiny Habits, you are both training muscle memory and rewiring your brain to remember. And you can drill and wire in a habit quickly if you have an effective celebration.

Three moments for celebration: The moment you remember to do your new habit; while you are doing your new habit; immediately after doing your new habit.

Success leads to success. But here’s something that may surprise you. The size of the success doesn’t seem to matter very much. When you feel successful at something, even if it’s tiny, your confidence grows quickly, and your motivation increases to do that habit again and perform related behaviors. I call this success momentum. Surprisingly enough, this gets created by the frequency of your successes, not by the size. So with Tiny Habits you are shooting for a bunch of tiny successes done quickly. Not a big one that takes a long time.