Temptation Bundling: The Lazy-Smart Way to Do Things You Avoid

There’s a stretch of admin in my business that I would rather chew glass than do. Reconciling invoices. Chasing the unpaid ones. The kind of work that is never urgent on any single day and quietly catastrophic if ignored for a quarter. For years I fought it with resolve — Monday morning, first thing, fresh coffee, this week I’ll stay on top of it — and for years the resolve lasted until roughly the second invoice.

Then I changed one thing. I found a podcast series I was genuinely hooked on — the kind where you catch yourself inventing car journeys to hear the next episode — and I made myself a single rule: I am only allowed to listen to it while doing the invoices.

The transformation was almost embarrassing. Within a fortnight I was looking forward to invoice time. Not to the invoices — I’m not a lunatic — but to the episode. The dread had a treat stapled to it, and the treat won. The admin got done not because I became more disciplined, but because I’d rigged the game so that avoiding the work meant denying myself something I actively craved.

I later discovered this trick has a name, a researcher, and a proper evidence base. It’s called temptation bundling, and it’s one of the most cheerfully lazy ideas in behavioural science.

The Hunger Games experiment

The name comes from Katherine Milkman, a behavioural scientist at the Wharton School, who — with colleagues Julia Minson and Kevin Volpp — published the idea in 2014 under one of my favourite academic titles ever written: “Holding the Hunger Games Hostage at the Gym.”

The setup was elegant. Milkman had noticed her own version of my invoice problem: she wanted to exercise but skipped it, and she loved trashy audiobooks but felt guilty indulging in them. So she chained them together — the novels were only allowed at the gym. Wanting to know what happened next in the story literally pulled her through the door.

The study tested this on students. One group had iPods loaded with tempting audiobooks — The Hunger Games and similar page-turners — that were locked away at the gym, accessible only while working out. A second group was merely encouraged to restrict their own listening to workouts, keeping the audiobook on their own devices. A control group just got a gift voucher.

The group whose audiobooks were held hostage at the gym attended roughly half as often again as the control group in the early weeks — a substantial lift for such a simple trick. The honest footnote, and I’ll always give you the honest footnote: the effect faded over the semester, and a Thanksgiving break knocked it down badly, as breaks knock down most routines. Temptation bundling is a powerful ignition system, not a perpetual-motion machine. But two findings from that research stuck with me. First, the bundling worked while it was maintained. Second — and this is the delicious part — when later offered the chance, a clear majority of gym members in a follow-up were willing to pay to have their audiobooks restricted to the gym. People will pay money to have their own temptations used against their own avoidance. That tells you something deep about how well we know our own machinery.

Why it works: borrowing dopamine

Strip the story away and the mechanism is simple. Every behaviour you avoid has a payoff problem: the cost is now and the benefit is later. Exercise pays out in months. Invoices pay out in never — they’re pure loss-avoidance. Your brain’s motivation circuitry, which runs on anticipation — the dopamine-driven pull toward an expected reward — has nothing to grip. No pull, no action, and no amount of self-scolding changes the wiring.

A temptation is the exact opposite: all pull, instant payoff, and usually a small tax of guilt afterwards.

Temptation bundling solves both problems with one move. You take the anticipation the temptation generates — the wanting, the lean-forward feeling — and you attach it to the avoided task, so the craving fires when you think about the task. You are, quite literally, borrowing dopamine. The task doesn’t become more pleasant; it becomes anticipated, which is what actually moves behaviour. And the guilt evaporates from the indulgent side of the bundle, because the trashy audiobook is no longer a vice. It’s part of your system.

Notice what you are not doing: you are not trying to want the treadmill more, summon discipline, or become a better person. That approach fails for reasons I’ve unpacked fully in why willpower fails — conscious effort is the most expensive, least reliable fuel you own. Bundling routes around it entirely. It’s environmental design for motivation.

The rules of a bundle that holds

I’ve built bundles for myself and clients for years, and the failures are as instructive as the wins. Four rules separate them.

1. The temptation must be genuinely tempting

This sinks more bundles than everything else combined. People pair the dreaded task with something they approve of rather than something they crave — a worthy documentary, an improving podcast. That’s not a bundle; that’s two chores holding hands. The test is simple: is this something you already sneak, binge, or feel a small tug of guilt about? Reality TV, crime podcasts, airport thrillers, a specific fancy coffee, a long hot bath. The lower-brow, the better. You want pull, not virtue.

2. The pairing must be exclusive

The whole engine is scarcity. The moment you let yourself listen to the podcast in the car “just this once”, the bundle is dead — the craving no longer needs the task to get fed. Guard the exclusivity like it’s the mechanism, because it is the mechanism. Milkman’s gym-locked iPods outperformed the honour-system group for exactly this reason: the lock did what willpower wouldn’t.

3. The two halves must be physically compatible

You need to be able to do both at once, or in tight alternation. Audio pairs beautifully with physical or repetitive work — exercise, cleaning, admin, cooking, commuting to something you avoid. Video pairs with the exercise bike or folding laundry. Deep cognitive work pairs badly with anything; for that, bundle the session rather than the minutes — the fancy coffee you’re only allowed to order while writing the report.

4. Make the rule stupidly explicit

Not “I’ll try to save the series for the gym” but “I only watch this series on the exercise bike, full stop.” One sentence, written down, absolutely binary. Fuzzy rules invite negotiation, and you already know who wins negotiations with your own cravings at 9pm.

Build yours now: the two-list drill

Here’s the drill, and it takes five minutes with a piece of paper.

Draw a line down the middle. On the left, list your shoulds — the recurring tasks you chronically avoid. Not aspirations; recurring avoidances. Exercise, invoices, tidying, that weekly report, calls to a difficult relative.

On the right, list your cravings — the things you’d happily do more of, ideally with that faint tang of guilt. Series you binge, podcasts, audiobooks, games, particular treats.

Now play matchmaker. Find one pair that’s physically compatible and feels almost mischievous — the bundle should make you smile slightly, like you’re getting away with something. Write the rule as one binary sentence. Then enforce the exclusivity for two weeks before you judge it.

One bundle. Not five. Get one running so smoothly you stop noticing it, then add the next — the same one-at-a-time discipline that makes habit stacking work, and for the same reason: systems set like concrete only if you stop stirring them.

The honest limits

Temptation bundling is brilliant for tasks that are boring, repetitive, and avoidable — the grey middle of life. It’s weaker for things that are genuinely hard or frightening, and, as Milkman’s own data showed, it decays if you let the exclusivity slip or a holiday breaks the rhythm. When a bundle wears out, don’t mourn it; re-bait the hook with a fresh temptation. The structure is permanent even when the treat isn’t.

And there’s a quiet gift hiding in the whole approach, which is why it belongs in the wider habits system on this site. Every bundle you build is an act of self-knowledge: an admission that you are not a creature of pure will, and a decision to work with your machinery instead of issuing it commands it will ignore. That mindset — engineer, not drill sergeant — is worth more than any single technique.

Real change isn’t magic. Sometimes it’s just a trashy audiobook, held hostage in exactly the right place.

---

Want more of this? My free 7-day email course, The Reset, walks you through building habits that run without willpower — one short, practical email a day. No fluff, no manifesting, just mechanism. Start here and join The Reset →

— David Watts