What is environmental design for habits?

Environmental design for habits is a concept in personal epistemology: People follow the easiest path — make the desired path the easiest.

Example: You set a goal to journal every evening. Your journal is in a drawer in your bedroom, your pen is somewhere in a kitchen junk drawer, and the couch — with the remote already in reach — is between you and both of them. Every night, you sit down after dinner and the television is on within seconds. You never consciously decide not to journal. You simply follow the path that requires the fewest steps, the least searching, the smallest activation energy. Now imagine the journal is open on the kitchen table with a pen on top, and the remote is in a drawer in the bedroom. Nothing about your desire to journal changed. Nothing about your love of television changed. What changed is which behavior the environment makes easiest. You journal now — not because you became more disciplined, but because the path of least resistance shifted.

This concept is part of Phase 38 (Choice Architecture) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for choice architecture.