One trigger is a cue. A chain of triggers is a life.
You already run chained triggers every day. You just haven't designed most of them.
Think about the last time you picked up your phone to check a notification. That check completed, and the completion — the screen already in your hand, the app already open — triggered scrolling. Scrolling completed with a dopamine hit that triggered another scroll. Twenty minutes later, you looked up and wondered where the time went.
That wasn't a single decision repeated twenty times. It was a chain. The completion of each micro-behavior created the conditions for the next one to fire. You made one decision — to check the notification — and the chain did the rest.
Chaining is the most powerful pattern in trigger design because it converts a single activation into a sustained sequence. You don't need the motivation, the environmental cue, or the conscious decision at every step. You need it at step one. After that, each completion becomes the trigger for what follows.
The behavioral science: chains are how complex behavior works
B.F. Skinner identified chaining as the mechanism by which organisms build complex behavior from simple components. In his framework, a behavioral chain is a sequence where each step serves a dual function: it reinforces the previous behavior (because completing it was the goal of that step) and it acts as a discriminative stimulus — a trigger — for the next behavior in the sequence.
This is not a metaphor. Skinner demonstrated experimentally that a discriminative stimulus not only sets the occasion for the behavior that follows but also reinforces the behavior that precedes it. The completion of step A is simultaneously the reward for having done A and the cue to begin B. That dual function is what makes chains self-sustaining.
Applied behavior analysis (ABA) formalized three methods for building chains:
Forward chaining teaches the first link, then adds each subsequent link one at a time. You learn step one until it's automatic, then learn step one flowing into step two, then one-two-three. The advantage is behavioral momentum — the chain always starts from the strongest, most practiced link.
Backward chaining teaches the last link first, then works backward. You experience the reinforcement of completing the full chain immediately, because the final step (the one closest to the reward) is the first thing you master. Everything before it gets added in reverse order.
Total task chaining teaches every link simultaneously, with support at each step that gradually fades. You practice the whole sequence from day one.
The insight for your own behavior design: most people try total task chaining when they're building new routines. They attempt the entire morning routine on day one. This is the hardest method. Forward chaining — nail the first link, then extend — has the highest reliability for self-directed behavior change because each new link rides the momentum of every link you've already automated.
From Skinner to your morning routine
James Clear built the practical application of chaining into a technique he calls habit stacking: "After I [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT]." The formula looks simple. The mechanism underneath it is Skinner's chaining principle — the completion of one behavior acts as both reward and trigger.
Clear's contribution was making the chain explicit and intentional. Instead of letting chains form by accident (check phone -> scroll -> scroll more -> feel bad), you design them:
- After I pour my morning coffee, I will open my journal.
- After I write one page, I will review my task list.
- After I review my task list, I will begin the first task.
Four behaviors. One decision point — pouring the coffee. Everything after that is a chain where each completion creates the trigger for the next link.
BJ Fogg, whose research at Stanford's Behavior Design Lab preceded and influenced Clear's work, formalized this as the Tiny Habits recipe: "After I [ANCHOR MOMENT], I will [TINY BEHAVIOR]." Fogg's key insight was that the anchor must be something you already do reliably — a behavior with near-100% consistency. Brushing your teeth. Sitting down at your desk. Closing your laptop at the end of the day. These existing behaviors have completion events that happen every single day, which makes them reliable triggers for whatever you chain to them.
Fogg's research showed that the chain strengthens through what he calls celebration — a moment of positive emotion immediately after the new behavior. The celebration acts as the reinforcer that Skinner identified: it solidifies the link between the anchor's completion and the new behavior's activation. Without it, the chain is structurally complete but emotionally weak. With it, each repetition builds automaticity.
Why chains work: the decision cost problem
Every behavior you initiate from scratch requires a decision. Decisions consume willpower, attention, and time. Roy Baumeister's research on ego depletion — while debated in its strongest form — established a practical truth that subsequent work has largely supported: the more decisions you make, the worse your later decisions become.
Chains solve this by converting N decisions into one. A five-link morning chain (shower -> dress -> coffee -> journal -> first task) costs the same as a single behavior if the links are strong enough. You don't decide to journal. The completion of making coffee puts you in the chair, and the journal is where you placed it last night. The chain fires.
This is why people who "have incredible discipline" often don't experience their routines as effortful. They're not making five disciplined decisions every morning. They made one decision once — to design and install the chain — and now the chain runs itself. The completion of each link is a trigger that requires no willpower to follow, only a physical environment that supports the transition.
The anatomy of a strong link
Not all links in a chain are equal. A strong link has three properties:
The completion event is unambiguous. "After I finish exercising" is weak because "finish" is vague — you might cut the workout short, or linger, or check your phone. "After I put my running shoes back on the rack" is strong because it's a discrete physical action with a clear endpoint.
The transition is physically short. The less distance — spatial, temporal, or cognitive — between the completion of one link and the start of the next, the stronger the chain. Placing your journal on the kitchen table next to where you drink coffee creates a physical bridge. The completion of pouring coffee puts the journal in your visual field. The chain doesn't rely on memory; it relies on proximity.
The next behavior starts small. Fogg's research is unequivocal here: the behavior attached to the anchor should take less than 30 seconds in its initial form. "After coffee, I will write for one hour" is a chain that will break. "After coffee, I will open my journal and write one sentence" is a chain that will hold. You can extend the behavior after the chain is solid. You cannot extend a chain that never forms.
Invisible chains are running your life already
Here's the part most people miss: you don't need to install chains. You already have them. The question is whether you designed them or whether they designed themselves.
Consider the chain that fires when you sit on the couch after dinner. Sitting down completes the transition from kitchen to living room. That completion triggers reaching for the remote. Turning on the TV triggers settling in. Settling in triggers your phone coming out. Phone in hand triggers opening a social app. Each link is a completion event that triggers the next behavior. You never decided to spend two hours on your phone. You decided to sit on the couch. The chain did the rest.
Or the chain that fires when you receive a Slack notification. The sound triggers a glance. The glance triggers opening the app. Opening the app triggers reading the message. Reading triggers responding. Responding triggers checking the next channel. Checking triggers seeing something interesting. Twenty minutes of focused work is gone. The entry point was a sound. The chain carried you the rest of the way.
Designing chained triggers isn't just about building new chains. It's about seeing the ones you already run and deciding whether they serve you. Every chain has an entry point — a single trigger that starts the cascade. Control that trigger and you control the entire sequence.
The AI parallel: pipeline architectures
Software engineering has independently converged on the same pattern. A CI/CD pipeline is a chain where the completion of one stage triggers the next: code is committed (trigger), which starts automated tests (link 1), whose successful completion triggers a build step (link 2), whose completion triggers deployment to staging (link 3), whose completion triggers integration tests (link 4), whose completion triggers production deployment (link 5).
The structural parallel to behavioral chaining is exact. Each stage's completion is both the proof that the previous step succeeded (the reinforcement) and the trigger for the next step (the discriminative stimulus). No human decides to advance from testing to building to deploying. The chain handles it.
Agentic AI architectures in 2025 and 2026 have extended this pattern further. In a sequential pipeline workflow, the output of Agent A feeds Agent B, which feeds Agent C — resembling what Anthropic and others call "prompt chaining," where each LLM call processes the output of the previous one. An orchestrator agent breaks a complex task into steps, each agent completes its step, and that completion triggers the next agent in the sequence.
The pattern is identical at every level of complexity — from your morning routine to a deployment pipeline to a multi-agent AI system. The principle doesn't change: the completion of one process creates the conditions that activate the next.
Designing your first intentional chain
Here is the practical method, synthesized from Fogg, Clear, and the behavioral chaining research:
Step 1: Identify your anchor. Pick a behavior you already do every day with near-100% reliability. Not something you aspire to do — something you actually do. Brushing your teeth. Pouring coffee. Sitting at your desk. Closing your laptop. This is link zero — the existing behavior whose completion will trigger your chain.
Step 2: Attach one link. Using Fogg's recipe: "After I [anchor completion], I will [tiny behavior]." The tiny behavior must be under 30 seconds and require no setup. If it requires willpower, it's too big. Shrink it.
Step 3: Engineer the physical transition. Place the materials for the new behavior at the exact location where the anchor completes. If the anchor is pouring coffee and the new link is journaling, the journal lives next to the coffee machine. Not in the other room. Not in a drawer. At the point of completion.
Step 4: Celebrate the link. Immediately after the new behavior, generate a moment of positive emotion. Fogg's research shows this is not optional — it is the reinforcement mechanism that solidifies the link. A fist pump, a quiet "yes," a moment of genuine satisfaction. The emotion wires the connection.
Step 5: Run it for a week before extending. Only after the two-link chain (anchor -> new behavior) fires reliably for seven consecutive days should you add a third link. Each new link is chained to the completion of the previous one, using the same formula. Extend slowly. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and a link is only strong after repetition makes it automatic.
When chains break
Chains break at their weakest link, and that break kills everything downstream. If link three in a five-link chain fails on Tuesday, links four and five don't fire. This is why forward chaining — building from the first link outward — is more robust than attempting the full sequence from day one.
Common chain-breaking patterns:
- Ambiguous completion events. If you can't tell exactly when link two ended, link three has no clear trigger. Make completions physical and observable.
- Environmental disruption. Travel, weekends, or changed contexts remove the physical cues that support transitions. Chains are environment-dependent — rebuild them deliberately in new contexts.
- Inserted delays. If you check your phone between link two and link three, the phone becomes a competing chain entry point. It has its own chain (open -> scroll -> scroll more), and that chain is very strong. Guard the transitions.
- Overloaded links. If any single link requires more than a few minutes of effortful behavior, it becomes a point of resistance. Keep individual links small. Let the chain's length create the cumulative effect.
The meta-lesson
Individual triggers are powerful. Chained triggers are transformational. The difference between someone who journals occasionally and someone who journals every day is usually not motivation — it's chain design. The journaler has a reliable anchor, a physical environment that bridges the transition, and a link that has been reinforced through hundreds of repetitions until the completion of coffee simply means the journal opens.
You are already a chain-running system. Your morning has chains. Your evening has chains. Your response to stress has chains. The only question is whether you built them or whether they built themselves through the path of least resistance.
This lesson connects directly to what follows. Once you have chains, you need to calibrate their sensitivity — how easily each link fires and how much signal it takes to activate the sequence. That's trigger sensitivity calibration, and it's where chain design becomes chain tuning.
For now, the work is simpler: see the chains you already run. Decide which ones serve you. Design one that does.
Sources
- Skinner, B.F. The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis. Appleton-Century, 1938.
- Clear, James. Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones. Avery, 2018.
- Fogg, BJ. Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020.
- Baumeister, Roy F., et al. "Ego Depletion: Is the Active Self a Limited Resource?" Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74, no. 5 (1998): 1252-1265.
- Slocum, S.K., and Tiger, J.H. "An Assessment of the Efficiency of and Child Preference for Forward and Backward Chaining." Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis 44, no. 4 (2011): 793-805.
- Fogg, BJ, and Euchner, J. "Behavior Design." Research-Technology Management 62, no. 3 (2019).
- Semaphore CI/CD. "CI/CD Pipeline: A Gentle Introduction." Semaphore, 2025.