How we think · Micro-commitments
Small promises, kept daily: the psychology of micro-commitments
Big resolutions are satisfying to declare and hard to sustain. Micro‑commitments—small, specific promises you can keep even on an average day—tend to be quieter but much more reliable. Over time, they do something important: they change what you believe about yourself.
Why small commitments beat dramatic declarations
Dramatic goals are tempting because they sound like a clean break with the past. “From now on I'll…” is an attractive sentence. The problem is that these promises depend on conditions being unusually good—plenty of time, energy, and willpower.
Micro‑commitments, by contrast, ask: what is the smallest promise I can keep even on a tired Wednesday? They trade theatrics for reliability. That reliability is what starts to rebuild self‑trust.
Micro-commitments as identity signals
Every time you keep a small promise to yourself—drinking a glass of water, opening a document, sending one honest message—you collect evidence about who you are. The action is small; the story sounds like “I am someone who tends to follow through, even when it is not dramatic”.
Conversely, when you regularly over‑promise and under‑deliver, the story drifts toward “I never stick to anything”, even if you are working very hard across other parts of your life. Designing for micro‑commitments is partly about protecting that story.
What makes a good micro-commitment?
Useful micro‑commitments tend to share a few properties:
- Specific. “Open the notebook and write one sentence” is clearer than “write more”.
- Context-aware. It fits the constraints of your real day, not an imagined ideal schedule.
- Binary. You can tell whether you kept the promise without debate.
- Emotionally honest. You can say “yes” to it without feeling a knot of dread about the future.
How Nudge uses micro-commitments in practice
Nudge is built around micro‑commitments. Instead of asking you to design a perfect plan on day one, it helps you choose a small, honest next step and nudges you once or twice a day to keep it. If a commitment turns out to be too ambitious, you adjust it together rather than quietly abandoning the whole project.
Over time, that pattern—small promises, kept regularly—does more for identity than any single grand gesture. You become someone who quietly follows through, one micro‑commitment at a time.