Week One Is Instrumentation Not Habit Formation

Today’s story is more of a ramble on a topic I’ve mulled over for a while

So it won’t directly influence your coaching business - but if you coach people and want to change behaviour, I think it’s interesting.

As an industry, health and fitness has held habits up as the most important thing that anyone could ever do, think, have or say - ever.

I’m surprised there haven’t been religions formed around James Clear, given the adoration he receives (Maybe there has and I’m not aware of it)

Previously I’ve contested that yes, habits are important - but they’re not always the thing we should focus on - habits require repetitive environments, behaviours and the cognitive capacity to maintain them

All things that are slowly bleeding out of us in 2026

Until recently, I hadn’t thought that AI could ‘fix habits’ for us

Now I think there’s an interesting way it could.

A habit, as I’ve said - requires people to repeat behaviours consistently, to the point where they become wired in, cognitively cheap default decisions, freeing up bandwidth for other stuff

What gets in the way of habit formation? Life.

People start off highly motivated to change, doing lots of things that they know they should do - but this is temporary.

Before you know it - life has got in the way, things fall off and people revert back to old patterns.

But in those first 2-3 weeks? People are happy to collect data.

They’ll track everything, log everything, tolerate friction that they would normally not tolerate.

That window is the only time that tedious stuff is cheap - and we can use that.

If we capture their normal - food, training, sleep etc - we have a baseline which we can then work on sustaining.

Will this happen right now? Definitely not.

But in a not-too-distant future where agents are part of the everyday workflow - the food shop arrives matched to the plan, the sessions are in the calendar around the week they actually have etc.

That baseline is what the agent runs on.

Instead of clients repeating a behaviour until it’s automatic, the environment is made to be automatic on their behalf.

AI might not fix habits, it might replace what habits were for - habits were never ‘the goal’, cognitively cheap default decisions were the goal - and now instead of the biological method (repetition), we have an external way of arriving at the same destination.