Your frenemy, sludge.
How to use remove and leverage sludge for your goals.
Welcome to EFFIGIES, a weekly newsletter offering actionable insights from my journey through reading and writing comics, designed to inspire you toward building a better life. To become our best selves, we must burn away who we are today.
What’s Inside:
What is sludge?
How to use sludge to promote good habits.
How to inject sludge to stop bad habits.
Last week, we talked about nudges, the little reminders or pushes we can incorporate into our goals to guide us toward making the right decisions. This week, I want to talk about the flipside of the coin and discuss “sludge” – the things that gum up the works and make achieving our goals harder. While sludge can be a major hindrance, I think it’s worth reframing the concept as a tool that can make life better, too.
What is sludge?
In their book Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein introduce the concept of "sludge." While nudges are subtle changes that encourage positive behaviors, sludge refers to the barriers and frictions that make certain actions more difficult. Sludge can be anything from complicated forms to excessive wait times or confusing instructions. Essentially, sludge is the stuff that slows us down and makes tasks unnecessarily hard or harder.
In your life, you’ve absolutely encountered sludge. If you’re reading this newsletter on your phone, you were definitely given, and probably didn’t read, the Terms and Conditions from the service provider. That’s sludge. Ever try to get out of a gym membership? Chances are you had to navigate a bunch of unnecessarily complicated red tape. If you went to college and applied for financial aid, those dozens of pages of forms you needed to fill out just to know if you qualify were sludge.
The above examples come from the world of bureaucracy, but sludge exists everywhere you look. If you’ve got a goal you want to achieve, or a habit you want to form, your secondary goal needs to be to make the process as sludge-free as possible.
The power of sludge removal.
When sludge is stopping you from hitting your goals, it’s the enemy. Removing sludge can significantly simplify the process of building good habits or reaching a goal. When we eliminate unnecessary obstacles, we make it easier to perform the behaviors we want to encourage, and success comes that much easier.
When it comes to your personal habits and goals, all you need to do is ask yourself two simple questions around sludge:
What is making it harder for me to form this habit or achieve this goal?
What can I do to eliminate the sludge?
Last week, I mentioned that I weigh my proteins religiously. I used to get the scale out and put it away every time I’d eat. And while that’s such a minor inconvenience, it made remembering to weigh my food that much harder for me. It was sludge. So now, I leave the scale on the counter near the fridge. It costs nothing (other than a tiny bit of clutter on the counter) and has the double impact of removing sludge and acting as a nudge to remind me to weigh my proteins.
Here’s another example. I like to write in the morning – it’s when I have the most energy and am the most productive. I also have some responsibilities and to-dos that need to be taken care of before I can start writing. Waffle, my dog, needs to be fed and let out and I need to make coffee. In my world, both of these things were non-negotiable, but they were also sludge slowing me down from getting to my desk each morning.
Luckily, removing these instances of sludge, as is often the case, was pretty simple.
With the coffee, I set the pot to auto-brew and get everything ready before bed the night before. Now, all I have to do when I wake up is walk through the kitchen and pick up my cup. Waffle’s needs, on the other hand, can’t be taken care of in advance or deferred. In our household, my wife and I split the workload evenly, with one of us taking care of Waffle in the mornings (me) and the other taking care of her in evenings. Because I knew it wouldn’t be any additional effort on anyone’s part, I simply asked my wife to swap times of day and now I take care of the dog in the evenings. Now, when I wake up, I just swing through the kitchen to grab my coffee cup and head right into my office with no sludge slowing me down.
I know it seems small, but sludge can prevent you from building momentum. What’s more, the more sludge you have to navigate, the harder it’s going to be to perform that habit or hit your goal. By removing sludge, you create a smoother path to achieving your goals.
Injecting sludge into bad habits.
While we often see sludge as the enemy, I like to think of it as more of a frenemy – an acquaintance who has their uses. As we discussed above, we can reduce sludge to make goals and habits simpler by asking a couple of simple questions. We can use sludge to our advantage, as well, to make bad habits more difficult.
Here are a couple of questions to ask yourself if you want to make a habit harder to perform:
What bad behavior is making it harder for me to form this good habit or achieve this goal?
How can I introduce sludge that makes it harder to perform the bad habit?
To illustrate the power of creating sludge, I’m going to turn to one of my favorite behavior science experiments. At Google, behavior scientists undertook a clever initiative to address a common workplace challenge: the excessive consumption of candy by employees. This effort was part of a broader strategy to promote healthier eating habits, and a key element involved manipulating the visibility of snack options – specifically, by creating sludge.
In this context, they created sludge by making certain choices less visible and, therefore, less tempting. In Google's offices, candy had traditionally been displayed in clear glass jars, making it highly visible and hard to resist. The behavior scientists recognized that the simple act of seeing candy could trigger cravings and increase consumption.
To counteract this, they moved the candy into opaque containers. By obscuring the view of the candy, they effectively reduced its visibility and appeal. At the same time, healthier snacks such as nuts and dried fruits were placed in clear containers. This visibility swap (nudge) made healthier options more enticing and accessible.
I love this experiment because it’s so simple and so effective. And often, it is easy to make bad habits harder. All it takes is a little effort to yield very positive results when adding sludge to a bad habit.
By now, it should be clear that sludge is a kind of lever you can pull to help achieve your goals. Removing sludge can make it easier to form positive habits that support your goals, much the same way cutting out a toxic person can improve your life.
On the flipside, sludge can be actively added to help reduce instances of poorer behaviors that stand in the way of achieving your goals. Like a good friend’s partner who you don’t exactly get along with but who has a pickup truck on moving day? I admit, I may have let the metaphor get away from me at this point.
My point is, though, that the key is to ask the simple questions above. If sludge is blocking you, identify it and figure out how to reduce it. Or, if you’re struggling with a bad habit, imagine how you can inject sludge to make that bad habit harder to perform. With just a little bit of critical thinking and some creative, yet simple, solutions, sludge can be a powerful option for making your goals easier and your bad habits harder.
- Frank
I’m Frank Gogol, writer of comics such as Dead End Kids, No Heroine, Unborn, Power Rangers, and more. If this newsletter was interesting / helpful / entertaining…
You can also check out some back issues of the newsletter:
After credits scene.
When I restarted this newsletter a few months ago, there were two core reasons:
The first was my desire to break free of the algorithm- and AI-driven noise of social media. It’s been a long time since social media has delivered me the content I wanted.
The second reason was another failing of social media — a lack of community. Because my feeds were full of ads and non-relevant recommendations, rather than the people I wanted to connect to, I’ve had less and less reasons to keep up with social media.
One of my dreams for this newsletter is to reclaim some of what’s been gutted from social media. I want to build a place that I (and you) choose to come to and flesh out a community, even if it’s a small one. Connection is important, and the digital avenues we’ve had for making connections are diminishing by the day.
So, in the coming weeks, I’ll be trying some new stuff in this space to see if I can start bringing these ideas to life. I am absolutely open to feedback, so if something is working (or not) or you have ideas, I am all ears.