Something to readWorkload & wellbeing
No Magic Number for Time It Takes to Form Habits
A 3-minute news story on a study that timed two habits: gym visits and hospital handwashing
Why it’s worth your time
This short Caltech story reports a study that followed tens of thousands of gym members and hospital workers and found the time a habit takes varied with the behavior, from weeks to months. If a new routine still feels like effort a month in, that range can make the slow start feel normal.
Keeping a new routine going after a miss
The essay · 3 min · Free
How to get it
Opens their site. We don’t copy it here; we’d rather they get the read.
- Read the story.
Read for the two timelines, gym habits and handwashing, and for the paragraph on which factors did and didn't predict whether someone kept going.
- Shorten the gap after a miss.
Pick one routine you're building at work, like a Friday tidy-up or a short plan before your first meeting. The next time you miss it, do a smaller version within a day or two instead of waiting for a clean start.
Good moments for this: after a missed weekwhen a new routine still feels harda month into a new habit
Keep going with Truest
Small actions add up. Truest helps you find the next thing worth doing, make the space to do it, and keep a record of your progress. It’s a private place to work on your career, and it’s yours, not your employer’s.
- It actually happensDo it now, and you’ve invested in your career today.
- Part of the check-inThe end-of-day text asks for two scores and a line; this fits in it.
- It’s yours to keepEach thing you do is saved to your private record, there when your next review or job search comes around.
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Making it work for you
Every workplace is different. Here’s what to think about before you start, and what might get in the way.
Things to think about
Buyalskaya and Camerer's study looked at gym visits and hospital handwashing, two behaviors with clear settings. A work routine with fuzzier cues could take longer or shorter; the study can't say.
What might make this harder
Buyalskaya and Camerer's study followed individuals. If your routine needs a colleague, like a weekly sync, agree now on what happens after a missed week so the gap doesn't quietly grow for both of you.
Questions people ask
How long does it take to form a habit, according to the Caltech study?
It depends on the behavior. In the study this Caltech story reports, gym habits took about six months on average and hospital handwashing a few weeks. Camerer says the popular 21-day figure wasn't based on science.
What is No Magic Number for Time It Takes to Form Habits about?
A 2023 Caltech News story by Whitney Clavin about a study by Anastasia Buyalskaya, Colin Camerer and colleagues, published in PNAS, that used machine learning on gym and hospital data to estimate how long habits take to form.
How do I build a habit at work that sticks?
Give it months, tie it to a cue that recurs, and keep the gap short when you miss. A routine that still feels hard after a month may still be on track.
What it says, and how it holds up
Most habit research has leaned on people describing themselves in surveys, and the study behind this story took another route. Buyalskaya, Camerer and colleagues used badge swipes from more than 30,000 members of a gym chain over four years, and handwashing records from more than 3,000 hospital workers wearing tracking badges, then let machine learning find which details of a person's context predicted the next visit or wash. What came back was a range: about six months for the gym habit and a few weeks for handwashing. Time of day turned out not to matter for the gym.
The paper, published in PNAS in 2023, measures habit formation as behavior becoming predictable from context, seen from the outside. That's a strength, since nobody is guessing about themselves, and a limit: predictable isn't the same as effortless, and a gym chain and a hospital are two particular settings. The authors suggest gym visits may form more slowly because they're less frequent and more complex. For the parts of work that run on judgment, like giving hard feedback well, becoming more predictable isn't really the aim, and what may help is practice followed by someone's honest reaction.
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Picked by Truest and described in our own words. The original belongs to its creator. Last updated October 9, 2026. We sell a career membership; where that’s relevant above, we say so.