January tends to produce two kinds of resolution-makers: the person who picks a single change and commits to it fully, and the person who draws up a longer list and starts on all of it at once. Both are trying to use a burst of motivation to reshape daily life, but they're making a very different bet about how attention and willpower actually work when spread across more than one target at a time.
How Building One Habit Works
Building one habit at a time means concentrating effort on establishing a single new behavior before turning attention to anything else. The appeal of this narrower focus is straightforward: with only one change to monitor, it's easier to notice what's actually helping or getting in the way, and to adjust accordingly. Consistency also tends to be easier to sustain when attention isn't divided among competing goals, since there's less risk of willpower being stretched thin across several fronts simultaneously. In practice, this might mean fully establishing a new exercise routine before introducing a change to diet, or getting consistent with a reading habit before adding a journaling practice on top of it. The obvious tradeoff is pace: if someone has several changes they eventually want to make, building them one at a time necessarily delays the rest, and that delay can feel frustrating to someone who was hoping for broader change sooner rather than later.
How Building Several Habits Works
Building several habits at once takes the opposite approach, introducing multiple new behaviors together rather than sequencing them. When the habits in question are naturally related — say, meal planning and grocery list-making — they can reinforce each other, with progress on one making the other easier to sustain. This approach can also suit a broader lifestyle reset, where a person wants to change several things together rather than piecing reform together slowly over many months. The cost is in divided attention: managing multiple new habits simultaneously means consistency on any single one of them is more exposed to competing demands on time and willpower, and when something does go wrong, it can be genuinely difficult to tell which specific change is the source of the trouble, since several variables are shifting at the same time.
Potential Benefits
Building one habit at a time offers concentrated attention and a clearer read on cause and effect — if the habit isn't taking hold, there's little ambiguity about where to look for the problem. It also reduces the risk of feeling overextended, since there's only ever one new demand being placed on daily routine. Building several habits at once offers speed and potential synergy: progress happens across more fronts in the same stretch of time, and when the habits genuinely complement each other, the combined effort can feel more efficient than working through them strictly one by one.
Limitations to Consider
The single-habit approach's main limitation is simply slowness — anyone hoping for a broader, faster transformation may find the pace frustrating, and other desired changes sit on hold until the current one is established. The several-habits approach carries a higher overall risk profile: attention split across multiple changes can weaken follow-through on each individual one, and a higher likelihood exists of abandoning some or even all of the habits if the combined load becomes too much to sustain. Troubleshooting is also harder when several things are changing simultaneously, since it becomes difficult to isolate which change is actually driving a given result, good or bad.
What the Evidence Says
Both approaches carry a label of limited evidence, meaning the comparison itself has not been the subject of much direct, controlled research, even though related work offers some relevant context. Duckworth and Gross (2014), in their research on self-control and grit, point generally toward concentrated effort on fewer goals being easier to sustain than effort spread across many at once, which lends some support to the single-habit approach without directly testing it against building several habits together. Lally et al. (2010), whose research tracked how habits form through repetition in real-world settings, similarly focused on individual habits forming over time rather than comparing outcomes for people pursuing one change against those pursuing several simultaneously. The honest summary is that general self-control research leans supportive of a narrower focus, but the specific question of how many new habits someone should take on at once has not been settled by controlled studies.
Who Tends to Use Each Approach
Building one habit at a time may suit people who have previously struggled when trying to change several things simultaneously, or who are introducing a genuinely difficult or complex habit that benefits from undivided attention. It also tends to fit naturally when someone is adding a first new habit into an otherwise stable routine. Building several habits together may suit people with unusually high motivation at a given moment, those undertaking a broader lifestyle change where multiple pieces are meant to move together, or people who feel confident managing several changes at once because they've succeeded at that kind of combined effort before.
Making the Choice
There's no single right number of habits to take on at a time, and the better question is a personal one: has dividing attention across multiple changes worked out in the past, or has it tended to end with several things abandoned together? Are the habits under consideration related enough that progress on one would plausibly support the others, or are they genuinely independent efforts competing for the same limited time and motivation? How much current margin exists in terms of energy, time, and general life stability to absorb more than one change at once? Answering honestly tends to point toward a workable starting point more reliably than any general rule about how many habits is "too many."
Sources
- Duckworth, A. L., & Gross, J. J. (2014). Self-control and grit: Related but separable determinants of success. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23(5), 319–325.
- Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998–1009.