TL;DR: A habit is a routine that has become automatic - where the scaffolding is not needed. Conversely, a routine is a habit with the scaffolding still built in. It’s great temporary assistance for creating habits, and in the long term for supporting complex ones. If your dopamine system is impaired for any reason (cough - ADHD), think of routines as the replacement for habits. No matter how simple or complex, that scaffolding is here to stay.
I love the idea of habits. James Clear, in Atomic Habits (Clear, 2018), gives us a great understanding of what they are, how they work, the formula for creating them, and why they’re important. And he’s very, very convincing. Obviously, the productivity world is obsessed with habits, and rightly so. There are a couple of ways, though, that habits don’t form the automaticity that is the hallmark of habit success.
- You’re doing it wrong. You mis-design the context, cue, response loop and it just doesn’t work. Or, you don’t practice it enough to make it stick.
- You try to make it do too much. Habits are small, atomic things, and that automatic nature breaks down if the behavior you’re trying to encode is too complex.
- Your dopamine system is impaired.
I was listening to a Huberman Lab episode on ADHD when I finally understood why James Clear’s habit advice had never worked for me. The core of the problem is that if your dopamine system is impaired, that reward in the response loop just isn’t there. And so the encoding never happens. (That man Huberman has been a godsend to me, helping me to understand why I am the way I am - which then helps me better understand how to become what I want to become. Of course, now I can’t find the exact citation, so what I’ll have to recommend is that you just watch everything that he’s ever put out on YouTube. I do actually really recommend that.)
I’d read Atomic Habits. The logic is clean: repeat a behavior in a consistent context, attach it to a cue, let the dopamine feedback loop encode it, and eventually the behavior becomes automatic. The scaffolding - the reminder, the checklist, the calendar block - is temporary infrastructure. With enough repetition, the internal cue takes over and the external structure can come down. For me, the habit never became automatic. I kept needing the reminder. I kept needing the checklist.
So now I have a system of routines. And it occurs to me that while this is something that I developed specifically because of the dopamine issue, it also has a larger function - both for the creation of habits (the scaffolding that you need to remind yourself while you’re building that automaticity) and for behaviors that are just too complicated to really get to that habit, not-thinking-about-it level.
Habits vs. Routines: What’s the Difference?
The cleanest way I’ve found to think about the distinction: a habit is a routine where the scaffolding is unnecessary. A routine has the scaffolding still built in. For simple behaviors in stable contexts, the scaffolding can eventually come down and what’s left is what we call a habit. For complex behaviors, and for anyone whose brain doesn’t run the encoding process reliably, the scaffolding stays.
When I started calling them routines instead of habits, I stopped waiting for the scaffolding to become unnecessary - and started thinking about how to build a good routine system.
How habits actually form, and where they don’t
The habit formation model has genuine backing. Phillippa Lally, a health psychology researcher at University College London, established in a 2010 study in the European Journal of Social Psychology that simple behaviors become measurably more automatic over weeks to months. (Lally et al., 2010) Wendy Wood, a psychologist at the University of Southern California, and David Neal confirmed that habitual behavior operates through procedural memory - context-response associations that fire without deliberate intention. (Wood & Neal, 2007) At the neural level, the mechanism is dopamine-based: the cue triggers anticipatory dopamine, the routine runs, the reward reinforces it, and with enough repetition the dopamine response shifts from reward to cue. The behavior becomes self-propelling.
This works for simple, consistent behaviors in stable contexts. The mechanism is real, for that population and those behaviors. But “that population and those behaviors” is a narrower slice of real life than the habit advice usually implies.
Too Complex: Daily planning, the gym circuit, your writing practice: these aren’t cue-response pairs. They’re sequences of decisions and actions complex enough that no single cue can trigger the whole behavior, and no context stays stable long enough for encoding to take hold. The habit mechanism can’t carry it. What sustains these behaviors - in anyone, regardless of neurotype - is a routine held in place by scaffolding. For me that scaffolding has been a recurring checklist. And that’s worked pretty well.
Too New: Even for simple tasks, automaticity is only formed after a series of repetitions. And it looks like this number is highly variable and can be anywhere from 18 to 254 days of repetition to make a habit. (Lally et al., 2010) So routines can also work here to build the repetitions needed to make a habit truly automatic. And again this looks to me like a checklist on your daily or weekly planning system.
Too Spicy: And then for those of us whose dopamine system doesn’t work in the typical way, we just need the scaffolding pretty much forever for tasks of any level of complexity.
What my scaffolding actually looks like
I have a set of routines that live as checklists in Obsidian. Every morning, my daily planning routine is a literal checklist - I open it, uncheck every box, and work through it. My gym routine has each item in my current training cycle: the exercise, the weight, the reps, a checkbox. Meal planning is a checklist. Several other recurring things are checklists.
The daily planning routine is the hub. It surfaces and resets everything else. I don’t rely on remembering that Tuesday is a training day - the planning routine tells me, and the training checklist is there when I open it.
Barkley’s clinical framework for ADHD behavior management describes this as the central principle: the cue must come to the person, not require the person to remember to look for it. (Barkley, 2015) The other principles follow from the same logic - overhead low enough that maintaining the system doesn’t consume the executive function the system is supposed to conserve; decisions made upstream so the execution moment is clear and bounded. The decision was already made.
I think this works much better for some kinds of routines than others. Having menu planning on my daily planning checklist, for example, is super helpful. I decide in the morning what I’m going to make for dinner, I know if I need to take anything out of the freezer or get anything from the store, and I create a task that I have to check off if either of those things are true. It also helps me understand how much time I’m gonna need to make that dinner and set myself a reminder to get up and start making dinner at the appropriate time. This has made a huge difference in the amount of thought-out, home-cooked meals I’m able to get on our table. The difference between having a plan and executing it one step at a time, and arriving at 5:00 PM and thinking “what am I gonna do for dinner?” is, in practice, a really big difference.
But I don’t want to oversell here. Having a routine with scaffolding that makes me notice that I’m supposed to go to the gym at 4:30 on a Tuesday afternoon is certainly helpful. I make sure to schedule my day in such a way that that is possible, I don’t plan on working during that time, I schedule meal prep early, etc. I set my alarm so that I notice at 4:25 that I need to get ready. All that said, I still have to get my butt in the car and go to the gym, and I often fail to do that. What the routine does help with, however, is - I never actually forget that I’m supposed to.
The system is universal. The exit isn’t.
Here’s why I think routine systems work for everyone: Even for people who are capable of building truly automatic habits, they need a scaffolding system while that habit is forming. The checklist and the reminder are not ADHD accommodations - they are how you establish any recurring behavior, regardless of whether it eventually encodes automatically.
The only variable is whether you ever get to retire the system. For neurotypical people building simple habits, the scaffolding may become unnecessary once the behavior is encoded. For people with ADHD, or for complex behaviors in anyone, the scaffolding may stay active indefinitely - not as a failure to build the habit, but as the mechanism that runs the behavior.
And even when the habit does become automatic: you can keep the checklist on the shelf. If you drop the cycle for some reason, if life disrupts the context, if you fall out of the routine for a few weeks - you can pull it back out and restart immediately. The system that got you there the first time will get you there again.
The scaffolding is not evidence of failure. For many people doing many things, it is the correct mechanism. The only question is whether it’s well-designed.
The Best-Designed System Is in the Making
And here I’m going to close with a quick plug. I’m currently designing a productivity app that has this routine thinking built in. So if you’re either someone who likes to design and develop habits, or someone for whom habits don’t really work and you need that persistent scaffolding, I’d love for you to check out my new app which is very close to a closed beta release. If you’re interested I’m happy to send you a beta participant invitation, or wait till the app is released and send you a generally available notification. This is not a newsletter or anything like that, so only if you’re interested drop me your email in one of the above links, and I will send you two emails - and no more. The first to confirm your interest will come immediately, and the second will come whenever the release you’ve expressed interest in is ready.
