When psychologists asked people to log what they were doing hour by hour, roughly 43 percent of daily behaviour turned out to be habit — done in the same place while the mind was somewhere else entirely

A thoughtful woman holding a coffee cup looks at her reflection in the mirror in a cozy indoor setting.

Wendy Wood, a psychologist, handed pagers to a group of undergraduates and asked them to record what they were doing, where they were, and what they were thinking every hour they were awake. Whe...