I Hate Pay Walls, But I Use Them to my Advantage

What Uber Eats can teach us about behaviour change. 

I don’t know about you, but having to retype my payment info in is a great way for me to realize it’s not worth the effort. 

Do you remember how hard it used to be to order food? The contrast in effort from ordering food today to ordering food even 10 years ago is a worldly difference. 

Imagine picking up the telephone, calling your favourite restaurant, placing the order verbally and then having to physically pay the delivery person at the door. 

Today’s version of this is drastically differn’t. But more importantly, remarkably easier. 

Today that same task can be done with the effort level of around 5 taps on my smartphone.

Tap the delivery app. Tap “orders”. Go to my favourite meal and tap “reorder”. Tap that “I’m sure I want to make this purchase” and then tip the delivery person. 

Then, voila — my favourite meal is on the way. 

Okay, maybe that was like 7 taps. But I think you get the point. 

The term I like to use here is friction. Which I got from how James Clear uses it in his works around habit formation and behaviour change. 

There is essentially zero friction in the act of ordering food to your door today, yet there was plenty of friction even just 10 years ago. 

A very simple illustration of how friction works.

Take this image here. Friction force is the force driving down on the angled surface. If it’s strong enough, the block won’t move. Even though gravity would dictate that the block should move down based on the angle. 

If you put oil on that angled surface, that block would slide down. 

If you put sand on it, it might just stay put or at least, move much slower. 

Companies like Uber have figuratively lubricated the hell out of that surface in terms of making ordering food significantly easier. 

Good on them. If their goal was to drive profits, this was a genius tactic. 

Yet, if your goal is to eat more nutritious foods or spend less money on take out, this may be less than ideal for you. 

Here is the good news though, you can throw some sand on that surface. 

I did this a while ago with several apps I was using too much. Instagram and Uber Eats being the main ones. 

I would simply delete them off my phone after every use. That way, if I wanted to use them again, I’d have to download them and retype in my log in info. 

You obviously don’t need to take it that extreme, but deleting them off your phone during times when you don’t want to be distracted can be quite helpful.

I can’t tell you how many times I just went looking for them on my home screen and when I realized they weren’t there, I just moved on. 

It was clear my habits were formed around just mindlessly using them. Checking IG every time I felt bored or scrolling uber eats whenever the idea of my normal dinner seemed bland or less stimulating than I’d like.

Yet, once these habits met some friction, they died down drastically. 

Every time I checked instagram it would be because I really wanted to or to actually post some of my content, not because it was just there. 

Every time I ordered food, it was more mindful before hand. As opposed to the result of mindless scrolling that was very convenient. 

Interestingly enough, every time I forget to re-delete my instagram app, I find myself falling right back into old habits. 

This obviously isn’t the case for everyone, but in general, falling back into old habits is often incredibly easy. 

How We Can Use This to Our Advantage?

Here is a simple rule you can think of: 

If you want to do more of something, strip away as much friction as you can. 

Simply put, Make it hard to NOT do. 

Conversely, if you want to do less of something, add as MUCH friction as you can. 

Simply put, Make it incredibly hard TO do. 

Say you want to workout more. I think that’s fantastic (I’m also a personal trainer and clearly biased). 

Instead of just riding the high octane motivation of your new goal on day 1, aim to streamline your process. 

It’s obviously going to be easy when you’re highly motivated. So don’t focus on that. Focus on how easy it will be for you to do when you’re feeling flat and unmotivated. Since, that eventually will happen. 

You essentially want to prime your environment so that you actually have to go out of your way to NOT workout. 

This means that your workouts are planned in your calendar. Ideally you could also have a training parter, a class to go to or a coach that can keep you accountable. 

Accountabilty and knowing what your plan is are the key variables. If you have no accountability and no plan going into the gym, bailing becomes very easy to rationalize and execute. 

If you cancel with accountability, you have to tell your friend, call the gym or tell your coach you can’t make it. There may even be a financial penalty for that. 

I used to work at a gym where if you reserved a spot for a class and late cancelled repeatedly, you could lose your class booking privileges for a certain period of time. 

This is often a powerful driver for you to stick to your workouts. 

Not to sound elitist here, I know hiring a coach is just not that accessible for everyone. But if you have a friend or even community to help keep you accountable, I really suggest using that to your advantage.

Having to cancel on a friend is often a hard thing to do. That alone can add so much friction into missing your workout. 

You’ll also want to prime your environment by preparing beforehand. 

Let’s use the example of needing your gym clothes to go workout. 

In that case, keep that gym bag with your clothes ready and in an extremely visible place. 

Here is an example of your gym back near your front door. In this case, you’d have to openly walk past it and not grab it. Alternatively, if if was tucked away somewhere, it would be much easier to forget about.

An old strategy I like is to actually place something you NEED in the bag. Your keys are a great example. Since you have to grab your keys as you leave the house, you’re probably going to just grab your gym bag. As to not grab it would mean deliberately grabbing your keys from your gym bag and not grabbing the bag. 

This makes it harder to not bring your bag than it is to simply bring your bag. 

On the contrary, you can also use this to make the behaviours you want do less of, significantly harder. 

Say you can’t stop snacking on delicious foods while watching TV.

The first place I would go, is to make those foods highly unaccessible. If there is a bowl of chips on the table in where your remotes are, good luck. 

It’s just so damn convenient and they’re delicious. You’ll probably spend more energy than you’d like just resisting the urge to eat it OR you’ll just give in. 

If you’re aiming to reduce that behaviour, this example would have set you up for failure. 

Instead, keep that food in an incredibly inconvenient place. Perhaps all the way downstairs. Or up in a cupboard that takes a lot of effort to reach. 

This may sound silly, but any ounce of friction helps with this. 

Think about it, if a bowl of chips is right in front of you VS downstairs and tucked away, which scenario is more likely for you eat them mindlessly?

Which example do you think will result in eating cookies on a less frequent basis?

The former, of course. As the latter would require a lot more effort and mindfulness. 

You’ll probably notice that changing your behaviour becomes much easier when your environment makes it easier to do so. 

These are what I call metaphorical pay walls. You know, when you’re going to buy something, but then realize you actually have to grab your wallet, type in the info and pay. 

I think we’ve all been there when we realized it wasn’t worth it after all in that moment. But if we really wanted it, we’ll get up and grab our wallet. 

It’s the on the fence incidents that this strategy will help with. And who knows, you may realize a lot of your behaviour was just a product of habits and convenience once you make them harder to do. 

If you have to retype your payment info into Uber Eats or when online shopping, you can imagine that your purchases might reduce. 

If that’s your goal, this makes this strategy a no brainer. 

Remember, we all hate pay walls and any sort of friction between the things we want. 

So we can use that toward propelling our behaviour change. 

If you want to achieve something or change a behaviour, make it so that you have to rebel against your environment in order to NOT do that behaviour. 

Just like how if you wanted to drink less, you’d want to reduce your time spent in a bar right?

This rule expands to almost anything. 

Make the things you want do less of much harder to do and make the things you want to do more of much harder to NOT do. 

Cheers🍻

-Coach Dylan