The Invisible Work of Making Life Feel Easy

I don’t know why I find it so embarrassing to admit this, but I recently listened to a podcast about building and breaking habits.

Perhaps because “habit podcast” sounds perilously close to “I’ve started thinking of myself as an optimized individual.”

Many of us have become suspicious of the self-help genre. There always seems to be a man in a fitted T-shirt telling us that if we simply took an ice bath, drank mushroom coffee, and journaled our intentions while doing Bulgarian split squats, all our problems would disappear.

Still…I listened. And yes, there was the predictable advice to make your bed in the morning, exercise, and track something in your life.

But I found myself intrigued by the premise that you can build—or break—a habit by understanding how one is formed.

Every habit has three parts: a trigger, the habit itself, and a reward. Your brain, apparently, is wandering around all day looking for little rewards, whether that’s the coffee after a run, checking Instagram, eating a cookie, or pouring a glass of wine while making spaghetti Bolognese.

This immediately explained something about myself.

I’ve long suspected that my brain gives me a tiny hit of dopamine every time I find something I’ve misplaced. Which means I’m not absent-minded at all.

I’m addicted to losing things.

Why else would I spend fifteen minutes every morning searching for my glasses—which are, more often than not, on my head? Or my earphones, which have developed an impressive ability to migrate into coat pockets I haven’t worn since Easter?

But the thing I kept thinking about afterwards wasn’t really the reward. It was the habit itself.

The great advantage of a habit is that eventually you stop having to think about it. You don’t have to remember, decide, negotiate with yourself or reinvent the solution every time. You just do the thing.

And it occurred to me that this is also the secret behind households—and people—whose lives seem to run with enviable ease.

The ease isn’t effortless at all. It’s the result of dozens of small decisions that have already been made.

The birthday presents have already been bought. The sunscreen lives by the door. The lunch boxes have the little containers. The running shoes are waiting by the bed. Someone knows where the corkscrew is.

The hostess gift isn’t being purchased from the gas station while muttering, “A candle counts as thoughtful, doesn’t it?”

There’s an enormous amount of invisible work involved in making life feel easy. But the clever bit is figuring out how to do that work once—or turn it into a habit or system—so you don’t have to keep doing it from scratch.

This is what I’m after.

Not optimization. I have no desire to squeeze another seventeen productive minutes out of my day.

I want fewer stupid emergencies.

I want to get out the door without losing my temper. I want my run to happen even when I’m busy. I want to remember the birthday present before we’re actually driving to the birthday party. I want enough order that there’s more room left over for pleasure.

So I’ve compiled the helpful habits and little systems I’ve accumulated over the years—and the ones I’m still attempting to acquire—that make life run a little more smoothly.

Some are shopping practices. Some are household systems. Some are simply admitting that you are never, ever going to remember where you put your keys and buying the AirTag.

Here are 32 pieces of invisible work that make life feel easier.