With enough practice, your brain will pickup on the cues that predict certain outcomes without consciously thinking about it. One such example that Clear refers to is the Japanese rail conductor, in which they verbalize and point to each action that they perform. This is referred to as pointing and calling or verbalizing your actions. This allows us to raise actions from the unconscious to the conscious memory. This verbalization can allow us to create an awareness of our good and bad habits. This exceptionally hits home not just in a doctorate journey, but in the IT field as well. Both of these (at least for me) are essentially task-driven elements of my life. The more I procrastinate, the more I get behind. The more I get behind, the more that is forgotten and/or dropped. Thus, creating a habit scorecard, as Clear suggests, is a good template to rank my behaviors and focus on changing or eliminating bad habits in the process.