HLTH 4300 Week 7 Routine Redesign Example

Janelle's Recorded Tuesday, Hour by Hour, and the Same Day Rewritten: Three Changes, Each Justified, and Everything Else Left Alone

Student Name

Walden University

HLTH 4300: Personal Health and Wellness

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Janelle's Recorded Tuesday, Hour by Hour, and the Same Day Rewritten: Three Changes, Each Justified, and Everything Else Left Alone

Why Start From a Recorded Day

A plan written in general terms can fail on the details of an ordinary day. This paper starts from one recorded Tuesday, September 29, in the life of the course's invented dispatcher, and rewrites the same day to make room for the walk planned in week 6. The rule is to change as little as possible. Every change must be justified by something in her records or in the evidence, and every part of the day that already works is left alone. Changing many parts of a routine at once makes each change harder to sustain, and, as Fogg (2009) frames it, lowers ability by making the day more complicated.

The Recorded Tuesday

Table 1

Tuesday, September 29, as Recorded

Roughly 13.5 hours of the day were spent sitting, including 10 hours at work, 70 minutes driving and evening time at home.

The Three Changes

Change 1: The Drive Home Ends at the Park, Not the Driveway

Recorded: 5:00-5:35 commute home; 5:40-6:05 parked in the driveway, scrolling.

Rewritten: 5:00-5:31 commute to the Cedar Park exit; 5:35-5:55 walk the lit loop; 5:55-6:00 drive home.

Justification: Janelle's evening log showed that sitting in the parked car was the routine that most often displaced a walk, triggered by the cue of arriving in her driveway. Habits are triggered by context cues and can run with little deliberation (Wood & Neal, 2007). Rather than trying to resist the cue each evening, this change removes it: on walking days she does not arrive in the driveway until after the walk. The 25 minutes in the parked car become a 20-minute walk and a 5-minute drive, and she arrives home at about the same time as before.

Change 2: Shoes and Jacket Move to the Trunk the Night Before

Recorded: Walking shoes kept by the front door.

Rewritten: At 9:30 p.m., shoes and a light jacket go into the car trunk.

Justification: Under the recorded routine, a walk after work would require going home to change, which brings her into the driveway and back to the cue that leads to scrolling. Moving the shoes removes a step between the prompt and the walk. Making the behavior easier at the moment of decision is the main way Fogg's model recommends raising the chance it occurs (Fogg, 2009). This change takes about one minute and is attached to an existing nightly step, locking the car, which itself serves as its cue.

Change 3: The Phone Goes in the Glovebox for the Walk

Recorded: Phone in hand from parking until 6:05.

Rewritten: At the park lot, phone goes in the glovebox; she retrieves it at 5:55.

Justification: The phone was the object of the competing routine. Leaving it in the glovebox for 20 minutes removes the temptation to check it before starting, and her evening log showed that the one workday walk she took without prompting happened on a day she had left her phone at work. The phone still records steps if carried, so on days she wants a record she can carry it in a zipped pocket; the default is the glovebox.

Changes Considered and Rejected

Two other changes were considered and rejected. Walking during her lunch break would add activity without touching the evening, but Janelle's lunch is 30 minutes, often interrupted by calls, and taken at her desk because her supervisor prefers dispatchers to stay near the board; it would conflict with her job. Waking 20 minutes earlier to walk before work would mean an alarm at 4:40 a.m. after a 9:45 p.m. bedtime, cutting into sleep that is already short. Both were rejected because they would require changing something her records showed was fixed or already strained, which the rule of changing as little as possible forbids.

What Is Left Alone

Everything else stays as recorded. The 5:00 a.m. alarm, the morning routine, her son's drop-off and pickup, the work shift, dinner and bedtime do not change. These parts of the day either work or are set by her employer and family. Changing bedtime, for example, might be worth doing for sleep, but it is not necessary for the walk, and adding it would complicate the day.

The rewritten day still includes about 13 hours of sitting. The walk reduces the evening sitting stretch by about 20 minutes. Combined cohort data covering over a million adults found that long sitting carried little or no added mortality risk for those who were most active (Ekelund et al., 2016). Janelle's walk alone does not reach those levels, so the rewritten day addresses sitting only slightly; that limitation is stated rather than hidden.

The Rewritten Tuesday

Table 2

Tuesday Rewritten

The day changes in three places and gains a 20-minute walk without moving any fixed commitment.

Conclusion

Janelle's recorded Tuesday showed where the walk could fit: in the 25 minutes she spent in her parked car. The rewritten day changes three things, where the drive ends, where her shoes are kept and where her phone sits during the walk, and leaves everything else alone. Each change removes a step or a cue that her records showed was standing between her and the walk.

References

Ekelund, U., Steene-Johannessen, J., Brown, W. J., Fagerland, M. W., Owen, N., Powell, K. E., Bauman, A., & Lee, I.-M. (2016). Does physical activity attenuate, or even eliminate, the detrimental association of sitting time with mortality? A harmonised meta-analysis of data from more than 1 million men and women. The Lancet, 388(10051), 1302-1310. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(16)30370-1

Fogg, B. J. (2009). A behavior model for persuasive design. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Persuasive Technology (Article 40, pp. 1-7). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/1541948.1541999

Wood, W., & Neal, D. T. (2007). A new look at habits and the habit-goal interface. Psychological Review, 114(4), 843-863. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.114.4.843