Progression Dilemma Part 2: Pros and Cons

What’s the best option? Let’s list out the virtues of each path:

OPTION 1 - Establishing All Habits
Pros: Steadily working on things. Better regimentation. Circle of support. vortex forces are not in play (because you’re doing everything!). Accrual of long-term benefits, like writing “two shitty pages”, allows for great benefits simply because you’re doing it every day even though it’s in incredibly small amounts. This latter benefit only occurs in some skills…like writing or fixed skills like flossing.
Cons: Glacially slow progress. Incredibly difficult to regiment - overwhelming. problems with house of cards, problems with time, problems in willpower - you have to do ALL of it in one day. Vortex forces might actually be in play on another level because you aren’t progressing in everything - there will be times when the impatience in some skills will affect you. Depletion forces in play.

OPTION 2 - 1 Skill Progression
Pros: fast progress. lots of willpower
Cons: no support. no regimentation practice. Vortex forces definitely in play.

OPTION 3 - Family of Skills
Pros: Fast progress - arguably the FASTEST progress due to skills backing each other up (ex, diet AND exercise) Seeing fast progress helps with motivation, saves on vortex forces. Saving some on willpower, therefore fewer depletion forces. Targeted relevant support. A little regimentation practice.
Cons: Vortex forces in play (a little). downside of regularity to prevent things like writer’s block. Accrual of long term benefits a la two shitty pages not in play.

CONCLUSION:

Option 1 is definitely out - there’s just too much going wrong for it. I think the best option is the third - it seems to have the best of both worlds - the only real thing wrong with it is a lack of small accrual in certain tasks. 

What does all this mean for the future of the project? It’s something I’ll discuss in my next post. I think the important thing to remember is that these are three phases. Regimentation, habituation, and mastery. I think clarifying what success means and separating out these three vectors is critical for any further progress and discussion.

What is good for habituation isn’t necessarily good for mastery. And making decisions like that are what’s crucial for continuing this project - it also definitively signifies a turning point in this blog. What started out as a project on habituation has definitely outgrown its starting parameters. 

And that’s a good thing.

A Robust(er?) Model Of Self Improvement - Part II

This model is a sketch. I think there are a lot of variables that still need to be honed. But here’s what I came up with.

Regimentation is a daily practice with specific problems. You have to overome fear, you have to avoid procrastination, etc. You have to have daily recording sessions. You have to manage Willpower.

Habituation is a mid-range practice. You need to avoid danger zones, set up things like TinyHabits. You need to weather disruptions like travel. You need to manage Endurance.

Mastery is a long-range practice. You have to bust through plateaus to continually increase in skill.

Above is a rough graph of what this might look like. One plane is time, another is the SRHI, and another is GRIT. This is a real map of my meditation habit along time and the SRHI. I totally fudged it for Grit because I’ve only taken the Grit Scale three times.

Grit is what I’m using as a stand-in for the path to mastery since it’s defined as Endurance + getting over things like setbacks and plateaus. Habituation doesn’t care about plateaus. You can have a solid superhabit of playing the violin but not ever improve your skill at it. Grit seems to be the best scale for improvement, and it’s ability to predict success is one of the reasons why Duckworth was awarded the MacArthur Genius Grant.

Is it the best scale for this? I’m not sure. How does it play into Endurance? I’m not sure. But this graph seems to me the best model for all three variables - regimentation, habituation, and mastery.

A Robust(er?) Model Of Self Improvement - Part I

I went through my entire blog to dredge up what I’ve learned, and spent quite a bit of time last night listing out terminology, asking questions, making notes, and doodling graphs.

What I came up with is a model for the whole process of self improvement. See, my view is that self help generally doesn’t look at the entire picture. Either they’re looking at just one habit, or they’re looking at grit, or their looking at daily scheduling. But the real story is larger.

We don’t just want to be people who just eat right. We also want to eat right and exert self control in a dozen different habits. We want them regimented throughout the day, and we want to bust through any plateaus in progress. And we want all this to be happening as quickly and efficiently as possible.

What self help tends to ignore is how all these various projects interact with each other. There are so many examples of this - BJ Fogg has a program of habit formation that’s a few weeks long. That’s not enough to really get the whole story, nor is Lally’s experiments where she just draws the graph further to extrapolate that difficult habits may take up to 250 days. Duhigg’s Power of Habit essentially talks about hacking one habit - not eating donuts at work. You have to do the habits and figure out what happens a year out with other progression involved. And still, it’s not enough.

“Just do the work” and other cliches underscore this undercurrent that self improvement is all about simplicity. With the percentage of people who fail at basic habits and self improvement, this overly simplistic view seems to ring false. Self improvement is highly complicated.

The work of Lally, Duckworth, Baumeister and Verplanken and this movement to scientifically quantify all these …for lack of a better world…soft concepts..that’s all fantastic. But I want to crank it up even more. To me it’s still shocking that there is no accepted Willpower scale. 

My goal is create as scientific of a model as I can using the data I can get from myself. I’m going to coin terminology that I think best fits, and keep evolving it. I think creating a technical jargon has immense uses in “soft” arts. It allows our minds to grab hold of concepts. I’m reminded of magic, where (if you really get into it) every twist and turn of the hand has a name - a principle, a theory. And it seems to create a space in your  mind - suddenly you’re not just waving your hands, you’re executing a highly defined protocol. 

I want the same for this.

A New Protocol for Work, Pavlov/Click Training Style!

A New Protocol for WorkWork just isn’t progressing well enough, and I think it’s mostly because I don’t have a solid trigger.

Now normally my triggers are sequential ones, using bookending. I have my stable daily event - waking up. I wake up, I take a shower, I meditate, I do my bodyweight training, I write, and….by that time I’m a little mentally tired.

I end up dithering online for a while. Making coffee. Reading emails, whatnot. I need a bit of a break.

Earlier I had thought about incorporating a unique sound, just like Pavlov’s dog, to become a trigger. I rejected a time based alarm because my schedule changes day to day. But what if I did a timer and set a specific sound?

So today I started this. After I finished writing I gave myself 25 minutes

I selected a unique sound - “Waves” - to set my habit to.

After 25 minutes (the pic shows it counting down) my timer went off and I immediately started opening all the pages I need open for work. Now it’s “crisp” - I’m tying it to this particular unique sound at my choosing.

I think this will work, but we’ll see. My minimum is still set at 20 minutes of work. I finish, record and write on this blog, then finish up with the rest of work. But what if I set each time I start on work to the same ring tone? The trigger is still there, but now it’s going off twice, maybe multiple times a day.

My hope and hypothesis is that I will be able to really vanquish this habit in record time because of this. Why? Because I’m practicing the habit multiple times a day, it becomes triggered more often, and automaticity gets practiced more. Frequency shoots through the roof. Length of time is already maxed out, so the only thing that would need more points is identity questions.

We shall see!

Old School Habits: Habituation Notes from Highschool

I’ve been obsessed with habit formation for a long time. I remember trying to encode habits in middle school.

Yesterday when I was cleaning out my parent’s garage I found a bunch of old schedulers from high school (1994, 1995, 1997)….and it has been really interesting reading these again!

Here I basically talk about how I need to set habits - and interestingly enough I do the exact same thing I did in the first iteration of this project - start one task, then add another after a week. This obviously doesn’t work very well.

The check-list variant of habit formation. Not really that much different than what I do now.

A more robust iteration of the checklist.

Here you see more of a strategy of regimentation.

Again, very cool to see this, but it really underscores the importance of something like the SRHI to gauge the strength of the habits. It also underscores the need of a more robust program to keep up with all this, as well as a slower progression.

In the last picture I’m really going after a lot of things, but because I didn’t understand how willpower/endurance works, it was inevitable that, despite my ambition, I would fail.

I remember doing this a lot - going through eternal cycles of trying desperately to form a bunch of solid habits, forgetting, remembering a month or so down the line, and then going back to the same tasks. I felt after every cycle that if I just wanted it MORE, I’d eventually succeed. Which is often why the next cycle would be even more ambitious and encompass more tasks.

It’s also interesting to note how similar the activities were - waking up early, meditating, exercise, music….these are things I STILL want to master…only now I have a much better understanding on how to do so. 

Oddly enough looking back I feel really good about this project. I see exactly what I did wrong and I’m glad I finally zoned in on this old interest of mine, to research and experiment on it, and to do it right.

Thoughts on Meditation Techniques

Way back in THIS post I mention a little bit about what meditators influence me. 

The difference between these guys and regular “single pointed” meditation is that I feel their techniques are more directly applicable to the real world. 

In the fantasy book I’m reading, one of the characters is part of an elite warrior group, whose teachers trained and trained her to go on the offensive when attacked. People naturally have the opposite reaction, so it takes hundreds, if not thousands of hours of practice to instill a new instinct. It becomes a muscle memory, you react before even thinking.

I want to practice the martial arts of meditation.

I mention a lot of people who are very unorthodox - Hypnotica, Steve Piccus, Shinzen Young, Ross Jeffries. A lot of these guys come to meditation in an incredibly unorthodox way. But all of them work in a method that’s more about changing mental protocol rather than having a bracketed time in which you practice gently focusing on a single thought.

What do I mean?

When I get depressed, as I am wont to do, I want my first reaction to be to do mood-lifting mental gymnastics. Shinzen Young advocates an old Buddhist technique to shift away from specifics, and focus on bodily sensations of emotions. In this way you step back and get a grip. Ross Jeffries goes further and talks about transforming that basic energy, transforming it, and taking it back in as an energy of positivity and transformation. I was very skeptical about this when I first tried it, and after a year of doing it more and more it has the ability to completely turn around my mood.

I am a fearful person, especially when it comes to writing endeavors. Steven Pressfield talks about procrastination as the loadstone by which you know what you need to do most. Hypnotica advocates a  program by which you immediately do the things that scare you for a couple of weeks so that you rewire yourself to be someone who faces fear.

Yoga has classically been defined by Patajanli as the “cessation of the fluctuations of the mind” - as such the end product of all this is to “bump back” - the instinctually turn around bad moods or fits of frustration in order to be a generally positive and unshakably calm individual. 

I’m still thinking about HOW exactly I’m going to apply all this - these are all varied techniques that need a lot of repetition to become a habit. I’ll discuss my thoughts on that in another post.

Since Last Time....Kettlebell Status Update

I pegged the kettle bell exercise habit at 250 days to habituation - I estimated this based on Philippa Lally’s paper on how many days different habits take to reach automaticity. The paper estimated that it would take 250 days to form a habit of doing sit-ups in the morning. 

So for my theory, at the halfway point, 125 days, things would start to get easier. Days 62 - 125 would mark the most difficult time for the process.

So far I’ve had multiple problems. I went on several trips and moved to a different city. I started developing back problems because of it - I’ve always had a sensitive back, but it’s caused me to stop doing kettle bells for swaths of time. Instead I replaced it with a series of back stretches that worked in the past. 

Now it’s going well. I’ve bookended it immediately after my 750 words and I’ve incorporated the stretch routine as part of the process. I keep trying to remind myself that it’s not about the kettle bells, it’s about bracketing a spot for physical exercise - and that’s the thing I’m trying to habituate.

The other thing that’s different about this from 750 words is that I am not using gamification yet - my theory is that gamification can be used to lower the threshold of discipline needed for a habit - which would work best during the ¼-½ way mark. When I hit that point, I’ll probably be using Fitocracy.

This is day 35. Consistency has been sketchy, and I haven’t even gotten to the hardest part, at least according to my theory. AND, I’m going on another trip today!

A New Plan for Habit Progressions Part 2 - Assessing Tasks

So I’m going to just attempt a rough estimate to peg ½ points of automaticity based on difficulty. I’ll divide my tasks into 3 levels
Easy - Reading (Goodreads), Daily meditation, flossing
Medium - Khan Academy course, Duolingo, 750 words
Difficult - Working out, eating right, not drinking alcohol or coffee, music

Flossing is a simple task, reading is something I like and do regularly anyways, and daily meditation is itself very simple and takes very little time.

Courses tend to take more energy from me - especially if they require homework, and 750 words though is enjoyable, sometimes takes a long time depending on the day

Working out is difficult even according to Lally’s data, as is eating right over time. Alcohol and coffee are such an easy thing to indulge in here and there because it tends to be cemented with socializing.

Two things I didn’t include are social events and quantifying my finances. Socializing is hard to start off, and I think it should be left until the end, especially since it’s often difficult to eat right - so it should be done after automaticity is achieved with that. And Finances….I have no idea how difficult that will be especially since initially it would be just a matter of observing my finances, not doing anything about them. So roughly speaking, I’ll rate the actions from 1 (easiest) to 10, then roughly rate the number of days to reach automaticity, and then half it.

Flossing - 1 - 18 days - 9 day midpoint
Reading - 2 - 30 days - 15 day midpoint
Meditation - 3 - 40 days - 20 day midpoint
Finances - 3 - 40 days - 20 day midpoint
750 - 4 - 50 - 25 day midpoint
Duolingo - 5 - 66 - 33 day midpoint
Khan Academy -  5 - 66 - 33 day midpoint
Music - 7 - 100 - 50 day midpoint
Not drinking coffee/alcohol - 10 - 250 - 125 day midpoint
Working out - 10 - 250 - 125 day midpoint
Eating Right - 10 - 250 - 125 day midpoint
Socializing - ?

I’ll have to take into account that these numbers may change as I evaluate them with the automaticity index.

Phillippa Lally and the Number of Days to Form a Habit

Common consensus seems to suggest that it either takes 21 days or 30 days to form a habit.

Based on my own observations, this is clearly not true - and Philippa Lally’s study in the European Journal of Social Psychology seems to suggest otherwise.

The study analyzes a group, has them perform various tasks, and asks them at what level of of automaticity they are at with these tasks every day.

The study suggests that some tasks take less time and some tasks more time before they are considered a habit, but the average is 66 days.

This brings up a number of interesting points:

1. Perhaps I should use an index like she did in order to assess my level of habituation for any given task.

2. Perhaps programs like Level Me Up, which use a number of hours to determine mastery, are not as good as a program that functions by checking out a daily practice of a skill. I’ve already begun to have doubts about Level Me Up - this might be it’s death knell.

3. What are the tasks that are easier and take longer to form into habits? I’m assuming this has to do with those that take more willpower. If habituation can be indexed by a questionnaire, perhaps I could come up with a willpower index in order to attempt to find some sort of correlation between willpower expenditure and “automaticity” - what the studies are using as the technical term for the progression of habit formation.

This is some really exciting stuff, because it’s the first real testing as to the mechanics of habit formation in scientific conditions.