Better elevator trick: tell all your friends that, if one of them catches you on the elevator, you will give that person $50 (or whatever amount would deter you).

My newest attempt to install the habit of moving more since I sit down at my computer and surfacing only to grab a soda and go back to work is I set up my outlook calendar to remind me every hour to move. 5 min appt. Hit snooze so I don’t have to sit there and make the appointment fill every work hour in. It works. I get up, stretch. Move. Jog a bit. Lame…but my back and legs seem much happier at the end of the day.

ive actualy been using the alarm trick for quite some time and i must say its very effective. put your alarm so far away with the most annoying tone and youll JUMP out of bed. caution on using annoying tones on your phone as your work mates might use them and nothing sends chills down my spine like hearing my morning tone during the day.

When we were first married my wife and I would often go out in downtown DC, only to discover that she hadn’t brought her purse (with her driver’s license inside), or I had forgotten to fish her license out before we left. We weren’t able to get into the bar or club we were going to since she couldn’t prove she was over 21. We’d do a time-wasting roundtrip to get her license, or just call it a night.

The solution was simple, foolproof, and cheap: I went to the DMV web site and ordered a “replacement” license (specified reason for license — “Other”). It only cost $5. She put this new license in her purse, and I kept her old license in my wallet. Being a typical man, I ALWAYS have my wallet with me, and therefore always had both of our IDs.

At age 15, with a morning paper route and extracurricular activities that kept me in a state of permanent exhaustion, my morning (pre-dawn) wake-up procedure included the following:

1. Boom box (10-inch speakers, sonic devastation) on full volume, with “Play” button pressed
2. Lamp timer (typically used to turn lights on and off when on vacation, etc.)
3. Chairs from the kitchen
4. French Horn case
5. Music stand
6. Other furniture

I would plug the lamp timer into the electrical outlet, then plug the boom box into the lamp timer. The lamp timer would be set to the target wake time. Then I would stack the kitchen chairs and other furniture on top of one another, put the music stand and the French Horn case near them, and put the whole thing between my bed and the boom box.

When the boom box turned on at the appointed hour, it would scream at full volume and risk awaking not only my parents and brother, but the entire neighborhood as well. So I instantly shot out of my bed, desperate to shut it off. The kitchen chairs, music stand, and French Horn case naturally got in my way, and so I would dive right through them on my trajectory toward the boom box’s “stop” button. I generally wound up lying amongst a pile of overturned furniture, bruised, scraped, panting, naked, and sometimes even bleeding — but always very much awake. My first life hack.

Making it easier

Having read this post over at 43 folders about "installing a new good habit" I was interested enough to read through to