When you get up in the morning, you don't think carefully about whether there is a more efficient way to make your coffee. You don't experiment by brushing your teeth with your nondominant hand. There is a lot of your day-probably most of it-during which you're on autopilot. You do things the way you always do them. This isn't laziness. When you experiment with something new, the result is sometimes good but is often a failure. Doing a task on autopilot is not creative, but if the outcome in the past has been acceptable, being on autopilot means you'll get the acceptable outcome again. More important, for truly habitual actions we not only have an unthinking, routine way of doing them, we often don't need to think about starting that routine. You don't procrastinate doing routine actions because there's no act of choosing.↵
Ideally, starting your work session will become as habitual as flossing before bed. When sitting down to a work session becomes habitual, there's no chance of procrastinating, because you're not making a choice.↵
How can you make an action into a habit? Consistent repetition is the answer, but if you ensure that the repetition has a few key features, the habit will develop more quickly.↵
First, it's easier to establish a habit as a sequence of things you do rather than at particular times. Habits are like memories in that they are cued. Something happens in the environment that cues a mental action plan: Do this now. You have a routine in the shower-a sequence in which you wash your body, shampoo and condition your hair, shave, whatever. Finishing one action in your shower routine cues the next one. The cue is not It's 6:35 a.m. Time is a bad cue because you don't monitor time that closely. In contrast, completing an action is obvious to you — it's hard to miss that you've just rinsed your hair. To develop the habit of working, start by considering what might serve as a cue. You must ensure that the trigger is certain to be done each day.↵
Another way to speed the development of a habit is to choose the context wisely. Schedule your consistent time for studying in a part of your day when you can be consistent. Don't schedule it for when I get home from school if you frequently want to socialize after school. But note that it's fine to set your time as after my Saturday workout even if your workout time varies. Just as you can wake up anytime and stumble into the shower on autopilot, the routine will be the same as long as the cue is consistent - arriving home from my Saturday workout.↵
How long does it take to develop a habit? In one experiment researchers paid subjects to develop a habit of their own choosing that related to healthy eating or exercising. The new behavior felt habitual after an average of 66 days, but that figure varied a lot — between 18 and 254 days. The number surely depends on the particular habit you're trying to develop, your personality, and the fit between the two. (-)↵
Treating your learning time as a habit sounds great, but you still have the on-ramp of sixty-six days (or whatever it ends up being) when you do have to rely on willpower. Willpower is an unreliable ally in ensuring that you work. It fluctuates with your mood, your physical state, and the environment.