Formalizing a Tally Clicking 90 Day Food Challenge

Contrary to my earlier article on attempting two habits, I’m starting tally clicking away food urges today by itself. Over the weekend Lydia and I went through the protocols and realized that it’s quite a lot to handle. So at least at the onset it’s going to be this one thing alone (though I’m going to also start a planner habit soon).

IMPLEMENTATION INTENTION

Anytime I have an urge to eat off the plan for the next 90 days, I’ll click.

At the end of the day I’ll record the total number of urges for the day.

This is to satisfy my curiosity for the question “How many clicks does it take to remove the habit of wanting to eat non-clean foods?”

MENTAL CONTRASTING

A) Positives
Success in this has all manner of positive benefits. It will help me look better, feel better, and have less loss of energy. I’ll be able to finally make concrete progress on something I’ve struggled with for over 25 years, getting me very close to mastery over a major aspect of my life. That will in turn result in loss of guilt for feeling out of shape, and the ability to finally move on to other things like improved posture, reaping the benefits of working out, improved finances, and the confidence and base strength for other far more interesting athletic endeavors: advanced body calisthenics, martial arts, social sports, hiking, rock climbing, etc.

It will also (hopefully) shift me away from nighttime activities towards becoming more of a morning person. It will help me feel less judged and self conscious, especially in terms of helping people. Often people hook on to something to criticize in the one giving them advice, and this will help bypass that. It will also help bypass the guilt I feel going to foreign countries and being judges as a fat American.

I can be an example to help other people improve their life. This will give me better standing in terms of authority to help people because most people in the self help arena immediately turn to the most visually obvious thing about a person, which is weight.

And lastly, i want to prove this technique works.

B) Obstacles
The Fear of Missing Out when it comes to unique foods or experiences, social situations, feeling pressured by friends, embarrassment through passive aggression when some people make an overly big deal of my eating preferences. I’m afraid because I’ve always failed at this and nothing has really worked. I’m worried about lack of options, of letting Lydia down when I just want to give in to random food cravings as a mood lifter for her.

B-1) There are events coming up that I will have to navigate around. A trip to Albuquerque and Dallas for a birthday and a potential trip to Cincinnati. I’m going to a gathering in my college town, a potential road trip, Valentine’s Day, and Lydia’s birthday. There are also smaller events to account for, like movie nights (no popcorn!) and dinner with parents (no dosa or naan!).

I’ve created workarounds by listing out places that have healthy options near me, as well as a list of snacks to add as must-haves in my weekly grocery habit.

WHAT IS “CLEAN”?

For the purposes of this challenge, it’s going to be “primal” eating, according to Mark Sisson of Mark’s Daily Apple. That’s no sugar, no processed carbs like pasta, bread, naan (ouch!) or pizza. No cokes, no beer, and 2 servings of alcohol a day max.

There are fuzzy edges to all of this. Primal guidelines work according to the 80/20 rule, with some foods dubbed as “ok to eat once and a while”. Since tally clicking attacks the urges to eat in the hopes of rooting them out entirely, the 80/20 rule doesn’t really apply. Therefore I wont be eating rice, beans, potatoes and no sweet potato fries when I’m out. I won’t eat gluten free versions of products from the grocery store or at restaurants (like gluten free pizza or bread) unless we make it. No rice noodles common in Asian food. no popcorn. And no hummus.

UPGRADES

The picture above is a a beautiful old tally counter I purchased made in 1910 used to count train passengers in New York. It’s not only gorgeous, but it lies flat in my pocket, and has an incredibly smooth mechanism.

I’m also using a Google Drive spreadsheet rather than a series of notes. I made some annoyingly bad bookkeeping errors doing it the old way. It really is amazing how the small administrative functions have such a huge impact on adherence.

The last thing I want to do is to get a blood workup, record measurements of my body, and take before pictures this week just for metrics.

After 90 days are up I intend on reassessing everything like I did with cutting out beer: How I feel, what’s changed, if I really am missing out on experiences, etc.

Whew! Let the challenge begin!

PLANNED MEDIOCRITY: THE BENEFITS OF ORGANIZING INTENTIONAL IMPERFECTION

Every day people struggle to get to the gym. They look in the mirror and sigh, hoping that their sweat and tears finally etch themselves onto their body. Is that an ab line, or just a hope of one?

Imagine instead if you knew that it took 10,000 crunches to gain a 6 pack. Or if you needed to deny 230 urges to become a non-smoker?

Feels more manageable, doesn’t it?

WORKING PROFESSIONALS

My partner Lydia has always been an organizer. And that’s a good thing - as a Senior Editor at USA Today’s online travel site 10 Best, and the production manager for their Readers’ Choice Awards, she’s got a lot on her plate. The Readers’ Choice is a national award that’s highly sought after. Cities have written articles and put out TV ads to help turn out votes. She’s responsible for promos, newsletters, producing YouTube videos, contacting experts, sourcing photos, updating PR contacts, assigning articles, weekly strategy sessions, and writing articles herself. In her spare time, she writes for another publication, is an officer in the Society of American Travel Writers where she helps organize conferences, and volunteers as a Crisis Text Line counselor. 

She does all of this, week after week, seated next to me as though it’s nothing. It is mind boggling.

For her, organizing is a necessity and one that gives her “control over the chaos.” Which makes sense on many levels. In one study on sleep hygiene, writing tomorrow’s to-do list actually helped off-load worry, helping subjects sleep better. Her Sunday planning session is a relaxing ritual.

When things are finite, long-range planning like this allows you to measure the void.

The so-called “hardcore” or “pragmatic” dharma movement applies similar approaches to Buddhist meditation. According to them, practitioners tend to get lost, floating around for decades without any real progress because no progress is ascribed. While they may come and do the work, forward momentum is never quite reached. It’s a feeling I’ve likened to churning in the mud. Lots of daily work is done, but the percentage towards completion isn’t ever clear. And so completion may never come.

This is the opposite ethic of true working professionals.

The high mark of mastering a craft means delivering products on a schedule. Most experience this in tasks with clear objectives, those often handed down by bosses in normal jobs. But it starts to disappear once things get vague - like in the arts, with self development, freelancing, getting in shape, or with writing.

The process writers tend to emphasize deadlines. Legendarily productive science fiction writer Brandon Sanderson does this visually with percentage bars at the top of his site. They clearly denote how far along he is with drafts, outlining, or proofing. Writing author and teacher Holly Lisle can estimate with high accuracy when she’ll complete a novel. She writes everything, as writing coach Donald Murray would describe, “to deadline” by measuring, with buffers, how long projects will take.

George R. R. Martin, on the other hand, has famously had problems with this over the years. 

In an interview with Stephen King, this difference becomes clear.

“How the fuck do you write that many books?” Martin asks. “I’ve had a really good 6 months [and] I’ve written 3 chapters and you’ve written 3 books in that time!”

King responds that he tries – despite entropy and real life intruding – to get 6 pages done a day, no matter what. And he sticks with it.

While George and I aren’t on par as writers – I find him to be an amazing one – I do get how he feels. Unlike Lydia, I’m not a natural planner, nor was I forced to be one. This seeps into almost every aspect of my life - from writing to travel planning. And while this suggests a certain freedom, it really means that I feel I’m running around with my head cut off most of the time. There’s a panic that no matter what I do in a day, it will never be enough. I just have to blindly (and rather hopelessly) march on and on.

What Lydia advises is to write down all tasks and break them into components. Estimate a time for each task, then estimate a timetable for them using a basic understanding of how you work in a day. Include flex time. Include additional tasks if you exceed expected deadlines. And adjust timings as you get a better grasp of how long they will take across projects.

She helped me to do this with the massive task now in front of me - a book proposal. The first proposal I completed was excruciating, taking 9 months to complete. I didn’t know what to do at all.

This is my third or fourth proposal. I know exactly what needs doing, and thanks to process writing, I know how to do it. And yet, it still feels equally uncertain. I can’t answer basic questions regarding a timetable. And it feels like it will last forever. And when I switch tasks, I feel totally lost.

I broke up everything with her help, overestimating the amount of time for each task, using my 20 minute Pomodoro sessions and deep focus protocol.  Of course the calculations will be off the first time, but when we inputted a buffer, took out weekends and my upcoming birthday this massive, behemoth task ended up taking…16 days.

I’m still stunned.

Why haven’t I done this before? 

INTENTIONAL IMPERFECTION

Backing up a moment into theory, I initially thought that creating “Finiteness” – therefore predictability in long-term goals – might be another Element of Change. It allows our minds to grasp and lock on to discrete things. In that it’s similar to metrics. This “chunking” bakes in the pressure to actually complete the task in the requisite amount of time - and try to beat it. It’s an odd sense of gamification and self-competitiveness that all good metrics encourage. 

If I were to think of it as another combination of elements it would be:

Intentional Imperfection, or “shittyness” is the element I ended up adding to the Elements of Change. Anne Lamott includes a chapter in Bird by Bird (her book on writing) on “Shitty First Drafts”. I am a huge fan of this concept. Like Tiny Behaviors, which drop quantity, Intentional Imperfection harnesses lowered quality to gain consistency. By creating a System of preplanned (Bypassing Decisions) Tiny Behaviors that you can define Metrically, you gain Momentum. Writing down what you need to do (Implementation Intention) and planning on less than optimal times for task completion (Intentional Imperfection) you suddenly have the ability to plan in advance. Adding a system of check marks or progress bars can act as a Reward.

Just the idea of such a timetable seems eminently relaxing. It makes me want to trust the process more when there are not only waypoints and progress reports but an end clearly in sight. The giddiness of seeing that number – 16 days – is unparalleled. And it doesn’t derive simply from making molehill out of a mountain. It frees me up to plan 3 or 4 steps down the line instead of hoping and praying that the task in front of me actually gets done. This also builds in the pressure to conform (Conformity is another element I’ve thought about adding), so that I can actually do the next step. I’ve always wondered how freelance writers could pitch an article about an event months in advance, and also take into account a 3 month lead time for publication after submitting the article. 

I guess that’s called “strategy”.

As with all elements or new techniques, I like to see how they can be applied to other processes. With eating well, like with writing and meditation, it would be great to actually create a map of mastering eating based on the research I’ve done on quitting other habits. Financial planning in long-term steady investment strategies like the Bogelhead philosophy, gifts predictive power - rather than hoping you’ll be rich or poor if your investments fluctuate, you know how much money you’ll probably have in X number of years. For body building it’s macrocycles - being able to shift from bulking to cutting and knowing when to do it.

I have never used planners. And anytime I’ve attempted it I’ve abandoned them in short order, just like with habits as a kid. It’s almost like I grow bored or forgetful of them. Lydia believes this has to do with confronting fear. She says with planning you have to write all the things you have to do up front, and that idea is something that engages all my well honed avoidance measures. But she thinks it will ironically result in the greatest LOSS of fear in my life. When I wondered out loud how I could could counter that avoidance she gave me a measured look as if to say …isn’t your whole project about habits? Have you ever made a habit of this?

The obstacle is the way and the only way is through.

PLANNED MEDIOCRITY

I have already fallen far behind the mark of 16 days. I think the biggest reason why is that I wasn’t planning for the less than optimal. And I think this is the key to the entire process, and why I’ve always abandoned planners. In the past, I used planning as a visual intention of optimism. I COULD get everything done by next Thursday. If I put maximal effort in, I COULD finish my project TOMORROW. When I inevitably failed at the task, the next ones I had lined up collapsed, as did my adherence to the planners.

As with Tiny Habits and lowered minimums, planning for under average performance nets greater gains through predictive power and consistency.

At some point I will have to sort out a planner. Lydia tried the Savor the Success Planner from Angela Jia Kim. She didn’t like it as much because it had too many bells and whistles and was too zoomed in on each day. But I like how Kim includes the 3 Ships concept from Chellie Campbell’s The Wealthy Spirit. This is particularly helpful for entrepreneur’s (whom the organizer is geared towards) and could be adapted easily to people who are pitching, like me. Lydia settled on the Ink + Volt planner, which she has been using for at least 4 years. She likes that it is relatively minimalist and has a built in revisiting of yearly and monthly goals.

Whatever the planner, the important thing for me is to formalize a planning habit. As I mentioned before, for Lydia this involves a Sunday morning ritual with coffee, writing a to-do list for the week, first of repetitive tasks, and then adding others, including anomalous events.

As a skeptic and cynic, depressed and anxious, the horizon has always held a vague sense of potential menace, just waiting to be unleashed. But Lydia’s planning, with all of its progress bars and completion times, is a tool to chop and dice the infinite. And for once I feel oddly relieved.

photocred: planner by Duc Ly, chess by Tristan Martin

A Better Way to Write: The Process Theory of Composition

The Writer sits at his computer, struggling to channel the Muse onto the depressingly empty page. It worked before, but today, everything typed ends up deleted. It was all so perfect the other day!

A common belief of writing is that it is an unchanging extension of the soul. Either we can write or we can’t.

In the opening lines of A Writer’s Coach, journalism professor and editor Jack Hart says:

“Novices sometimes imagine writing as a dark magic, something known only to some mystical inner circle. They pick up a professional’s finished work, marvel at its seamless perfection, and think, I could never do that.”

Later in the introduction he adds:

“The invidious mystique of writing taints the curriculum in almost every school. In literature classes, you read a great works and marvel at the genius of the writers who produced them. In composition, you struggle to knock a few clumsy sentences together. Nobody expects you to see any connection between the diva’s aria and your Neanderthal grunts.”

A better method is one that takes focus away from divinity. In the words of James Clear, an author and writer on habits, it is better to create long-term systems rather than short-term goals:

“Achieving a goal only changes your life for the moment…We think we need to change our results, but the results are not the problem. What we really need to change are the systems that cause those results. When you solve problems at the results level, you only solve them temporarily. In order to improve for good, you need to solve problems at the systems level. Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves.”

I thought I was a good writer. My natural abilities got me far. As a columnist for National Geographic Traveller, my writing appeared in publications like Esquire, GQ, Vogue, and Conde Nast Traveller.  But at several stages of writing I’d often be beset by writer’s block. I’d procrastinate, I’d obsess with one article, but more importantly, I was always uncertain. 

In the newsrooms of the Oregonian, Jack Hart discovered that many veteran journalists had this problem. He, along with with a cabal of writers, coaches, and professors like Janet Emig, Peter Elbow, Chip Scanlan, and Donald Murray, emerged at the forefront of what became the Process Theory of Composition. Process composition championed the idea that writing, even at a high level, could be treated like any other craft.

The key is reducing tasks to component parts. Author Timothy Ferriss emphasizes this in his book The 4-Hour Chef, detailing a methodology to reverse engineer any skill. 

He describes the first step, Deconstruction, as asking “what are the minimal, learnable units, the LEGO blocks, I should be starting with?” This prevents anxiety by eroding the scale and impossibility of complex behaviors. When applied to writing, it becomes clear that many issues originate from executing multiple processes at once.

As a nonfiction writer, my process involves layers of Creativity, Structure, Transitions, Ledes and Kickers, Research, and Polishing.

Over the course of this article, I’ll tackle each stage and offer general tips and tools. In the Appendix I’ll also provide a meta document with all of the layers I used to create this very article, which should provide a bird’s eye view of the process.

CREATIVITY

The blank page is always the first challenge for any creative. Perhaps the best methods to generate ideas surprisingly come from the world of advertising. On Madison Avenue, artists and writers were, perhaps for the first time, forced to adhere to corporate deadlines where millions were on the line. One powerful idea generator unlocked creativity by lowering standards, setting time limits, and increasing output. The key, however, is to treat it mechanically:

Creativity is a physical process, not a mental one. It's also something that can be easily taught through certain exercises. While some people are naturally more creative than others, those that aren't can make up for their lack of creativity through simple processes.

This activity, described to a Redditor by Rory Sutherland (an executive of Ogilvy Advertising) is called "scamping":

“The trick is to think as little as possible, and work as fast as possible. You'll probably start out with some dumb ideas. That's fine. The goal is to bounce from one dumb idea, to a less dumb idea, and so on. You'll soon find nuggets within these dumb ideas, and start building upon them. Personally, I wouldn't stop until I'd gone through an entire stack, which would take about two hours.

Once you're finished, it's simply a process of elimination. Go back through all your ideas and start sorting them into two piles: good and bad. Once you've done that, take the good pile and sort them again by good and better. Keep doing this until you've narrowed it down to five ideas.”

Game designer Nick Bentley describes a version of this as the 100:10:1 Method. Either method bypasses the muse – or at least summons her when and where you want. And though the idea of the tortured artist desperately searching for ideas appears ubiquitous today, it wasn’t always so.

In fact, in “Blocked", The New Yorker describes how it originated in a certain place and time.

“Writer’s block is a modern notion. Writers have probably suffered over their work ever since they first started signing it, but it was not until the early nineteenth century that creative inhibition became an actual issue in literature, something people took into account when they talked about the art. That was partly because, around this time, the conception of the art changed. Before, writers regarded what they did as a rational, purposeful activity, which they controlled. By contrast, the early Romantics came to see poetry as something externally, and magically, conferred.”

Another technique for circumventing blocks is to disassociate yourself from them. You can do this by framing the work as an explanation to a friend (that’s how this article got its start for me), or perhaps an argument with an enemy. Legendary journalist John McPhee’s advice is to write a letter to mom:

“You are writing, say, about a grizzly bear. No words are forthcoming…You are blocked, frustrated, in despair… What do you do? You write, ‘Dear Mother.’ And then you tell your mother about the block, the frustration, the ineptitude, the despair. You insist that you are not cut out to do this kind of work. You whine. You whimper. You outline your problem, and you mention that the bear has a fifty-five-inch waist and a neck more than thirty inches around but could run nose-to-nose with Secretariat. You say the bear prefers to lie down and rest… And you go on like that as long as you can. And then you go back and delete the ‘Dear Mother’ and all the whimpering and whining, and just keep the bear.”

STRUCTURE

If the ideas are the blood and guts of a story, then structure is its bones, the organizational principles that make it stand.

Most of us were taught outlining as children, but a better method that interfaces with scamping comes from Shani Raja, a former editor at the Wall Street Journal, Economist, and Bloomberg. In his Udemy course “Editing Mastery: How to Edit Writing to Perfection” he describes specific steps to construct a logical scaffolding for any article.

The steps are simple:

1. Atomize the ideas and list them out, one per line.

2. Tag each one with a general family marker.

3. List out all the families.

4. Rearrange the families in an order that works best.

5. Physically move the points to the families.

6. Physically rearrange the points within each family.

Jack Hart further talks about this in A Writer’s Coach where he dubs the process a “jot outline”:

You go through your notes and list the main topics you want to cover, jotting them down or typing them on the computer screen as you find them. If you’re using a computer, you then block-move those broad topics into logical order. 

The act of writing down your few main topics, in order, gives you a step-by-step approach to the chaos of details you often face when information gathering ends. It relieves panic because it allows you to ease into the writing incrementally. It creates some distance between you and the story. And it’s a relaxing ritual.

If you’re facing a deadline, you may think you don’t have the time to outline. But you probably don’t have time not to.  -A Writer’s Coach, p. 35

TRANSITIONS

When BBC documentarian David Attenborough transports you from Amazonian rainforests to the icy Himalayas the way he did it is what you forget. It seems effortless, like a wizard whisking you to another, far distant land. 

Shani Raja describes them as “narrative turns.” They offer a smooth intro to each new section, forming a secondary infrastructure within the article.

And as a viewer you accept it, almost unconsciously.

Great writers, documentarians, and especially stand up comedians use them to elegantly shift from one, seemingly unrelated topic to another. In this blog post CEO and Kibin Co-Founder Travis Biziorek describes how transitions make or break standup routines. 

Transitions are so important that Conan writer Laurie Kilmarten shared a compilation of them used as a go to reference for fellow professional writers on the show.

Categorization is key to breaking down processes, and in composition it allows writers to hone in and practice elements of the craft. By analyzing a number of articles, and how writers move from one topic to the next, we can classify transitions into categories. Luckily, there doesn’t seem to be that many of them. Over the years I’ve only been able to identity about 20, which I’ve listed in the Appendix.

LEDES AND KICKERS

Beginnings and endings are another stumbling block, even for highly advanced professionals. John McPhee even wrote an article in the New Yorker discussing his difficulty finding good endings. 

But many of the process “wise guys” have solved this in the same manner that I solved transitions. Jack Hart had his “Lexicon of Leads” (Hart, p. 49), and Chip Scanlan describes his “Encyclopedia of Endings” in an article for the Poynter Institute.

The key is to simply analyze, categorize, and keep the lists as cheat sheets. I’ve included my expanded versions of both in the Appendix.

And when confronted by an actual article, follow Don Murray’s advice:

“Draft a dozen leads, or two dozen. Just the first line or so. Do it quickly – a matter of one minutes for each one – until you find the lead that focuses the story. Then develop that lead.”   - Writing to Deadline, p. 135

RESEARCH

In the past, first drafts were the initial high wall to hurdle over and I often couldn’t make it. With the mechanics of the article sorted, the bar to jump is a lot closer to the ground. All the mechanics are at play, smoothly guiding you from introduction, families of points, transitions, all the way to endings. 

However, research can easily become endless, especially when you’re writing nonfiction. That is why it’s best to do it at this phase. This stands in contrast with the usual method, with potentially endless research at the beginning. While I think research is often a necessary precursor if you don’t know what you’re saying or have absolutely no knowledge in the first place, the problem is that it can end up becoming a time drain. Perfectionism and completism, two traits all-too-common in writers, function to make this a dangerous stage where many never emerge.

If you’ve done some initial digging and know what you have to say, then follow the preceding stages first. Holes can clearly be marked with the tag “TKTK” - the traditional journalistic method for indicating that further information will be added later

Afterwards, fill in the gaps. With this, research is hemmed in and highly targeted. It’s more like a puzzle piece with clearly delineated borders than an infinitely deep, time-sucking maw.

POLISHING

While you might have the full article complete, it’s much like, as Stephen King describes in On Writing, a fossil that you’ve found, still buried in the earth.:

“Stories are relics…the writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground as intact as possible…To get even more of it, the shovel must give way to more delicate tools: air hose, palm-pick, perhaps even a toothbrush.” - On Writing, p. 163 - 164

I find polishing to be a matter of repetition. As with scamping, the key is writing and rewriting with minimal in-the-moment editing. Keeping a synonym finder open, continue changing small elements without really stopping, using intuition and gut reactions to know if a word or fragment is correct. 

Done correctly it’s very similar to the adage of monkeys on typewriters producing Shakespeare. 

The only difference is you’re using discernment to know when you’ve managed to hit on the well turned phrase. 

Visually, this takes the form of a miniature bit of evolution, with the constant writing, synonym finder, and repetition acting as a genetic drift across successive generations. Meanwhile, your instinct in keeping fragments acts as natural selection protocol. The key is, like scamping, to make the process mechanical and continuous. This is a knack to be developed through practice, and I’ve mentioned methods to develop it in the Tools section.

But for Shani Raja, polishing is all about adding another layer, especially with implanting thematic elements and evocative verbs. He uses this stage to goes on a hunt for common mistakes, like redundant phrasing and passive voice. With Jack Hart, this layer can also mean adding similes, detail, and color.

GENERAL TIPS

While the nitty gritty is very important, here are some general suggestions for the overall process.

One great tip is what Hart calls his First Law of Writing Improvement:

“A problem visible at any one stage of the writing process usually results from something that happened at the immediately preceding stage.” - A Writer’s Coach p. 7

I have noticed this to be very true. In his MasterClass, James Patterson advises moving quickly from one draft to the next to prevent inertia from gunking up the system. While Stephen King doesn’t usually do as many drafts as Patterson, he does advocate finding the outlines of a story as fast as possible. 

Don Murray harnesses this for problems with writing beginnings and endings. And while it may sound tedious to write so many, it tends to save time in the long run:

“Drafting leads or last lines can be a good technique for meeting a deadline. The time invested to draft just a half a dozen leads pays good returns if you find the right lead instead of stumbling through a piece following the false direction of a bad lead”. -Writing to Deadline, p. 11

All of these techniques put continuous focus on the mechanics of the entire process rather than individual stages.

PERSONALITIES

Another useful technique is to see each stage as recruiting different personalities.

According to Jack Hart:

“Somehow they’ve [productive writers] learned what appears to be the secret to successful drafting – operating with a split personality. They have one mind-set when they’re getting through a first draft. But they adopt a completely different approach when they go back to polish the copy into finished form.

The happiest, most productive writers approach their rough drafts as a literary version of Mr. Hyde. They cast civilized restraint aside, letting an uninhibited process of creation carry them quickly through the first version of the story. They don’t stop. They don’t revise. They don’t look back…

Only when they’ve finished with the draft do they slip back into a Dr. Jekyll persona. Then they sweat each detail, checking facts for accuracy, revising sentences for rhythm, and scrutinizing words for precise meanings.” - A Writer’s Coach p. 38

I tend to to use a few more personalities.

For scamping, imagine a part of yourself that’s a confident yet Whimsical Creative. I know several of these personality types, the ones that are free spirits, who often don’t have a lot of new or unique things to offer, yet boldly proclaim them as though they’re god’s gift to literature – spelling mistakes and all. Fundamentally, they believe that they are special and should be heard. Or alternatively, it’s the monkey on a typewriter, never stopping, gleefully pounding away to the music of the keyboard.  This is perfect for scamping, rough drafts and some level of polishing, where cynicism is just not useful.

The Analytic is perfect for mechanical aspects of the process. He’s the guy who doesn’t like the confusion of soft skills, but loves puzzles and is utterly enthralled with simple tasks with discrete rules. Or, the Architect, focussing on the big picture, like Tony Stark amusedly designing the first Iron Man suit. Playing with concepts, he throws this away, keeps that, changes it up to look at different configurations on a whim with none of the urgency for a final product. The entire article is like a jigsaw puzzle, carved so every piece is unique and fits just so. This is perfect for the organizational phase, where word choice is inconsequential.

The Magician is trying to pull a beautiful fast one on the audience. His hand movements may be highly technical, his tricks may involve complicated bits of string or false thumbs that look oh so mundane in the light of day. But to the audience he’s effortlessly whisking them from one place to the next. These are transitions - there are only a few, they are very mechanical, but when done right you don’t even know they’re there.

The Archivist loves diving into facts and figures. She’s also a bloodhound and a detective, sleuthing for details. Bookish, she has to be held on a tight leash, but when reigned in she targets searches and comes back out again with summaries to be placed neatly into the holes carved out for her by The Analytic.

And lastly The Queen is the editor, she who must be appeased above all else. She’s arrogant, anal retentive, the ultimate fashionista with unquestionable taste, demanding the highest of standards. And if she doesn’t like what she sees, she banishes the section to another one of her earlier underlings. She’s the one in charge of the details and formatting.

The other steps are combinations of these personalities. The Monkey-Creative pounds on the keyboard to get through the first draft and for polishing a turn of phrase, though it works with the Editor/Queen to know what to keep. The Analytic works with the Magician for transitions, because really there are only a few and it’s a largely an act of matching the two together. The same occurs with beginnings and endings - there are only a few categorically, but the Magician makes it hit home with the panache of an entertainer, and the editor presides over it, making sure it all hangs together. The researcher is like a hermit searching for truth, but has to be hemmed in to prevent him from wandering off forever.

TOOLS

Luckily we don’t have to just rely on smoke and mirrors to recruit different skills.

Scamping can be practiced. National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is a program that focuses on word output rather than content, with a supportive community and a gamifiied system in place to fuel mastering the art of pounding on the keyboard. While that was the system that really helped me master it, Write or Die is another method. It offers a mode where the program starts deleting words if typing stops for a few seconds, forcing users to write with, as the Guardian put it, “a virtual gun to the head.”

Writing coach Don Fry suggested writing with the screen blank if you’re encountering resistance completing a first draft. Complete a jot outline, print it out, position it on your computer monitor, and begin typing. This forces you to ignore typos or grammatical errors. Since you don’t know where you are you have to go all the way to the end (from A Writer’s Coach, p. 40).

Online synonym finders are incredibly useful for discovering that word that’s the perfect choice but just outside your mind right now. Some offer visual similarity and meaning maps, with options to select for length or starting letters.

Brainy Quote is a great tool for beginnings and endings. While the quote-beginning or quote-ending is somewhat passé, it is definitely a great welcome addition, and can spur on thought on other avenues to begin and end pieces.

Having a list of Transitions, Ledes, and Endings on hand is key for those sections. I’ve included these lists in the Appendix.

Scrivener is a fantastic program for layering drafts, and easily moving back and forth between them. You can view split screens of different drafts, which is handy when, say, writing a first draft while looking at a skeletal outline. It also has a cork board feature where you can move categories around visually.

When looking at the big picture you have to learn to “kill your darlings” - get rid of smaller aspects that you might really like in order to further the work as a whole. Shani Raja says that he used to either print the article out, or change the font and size to act as though the piece you toiled over is someone else’s, subject to brutal objectivity.

One of the best pieces of writing advice comes from fantasy author Brandon Sanderson, whose excellent writing classes are recorded on Youtube: Always be working on something. It’s echoed by many other prolific writers. It helps in terms of pitching and in disassociating to maintain objectivity in edits. Sometimes you get too close to your work, and taking time off, ideally by working on something else, is key. For that I use Trello.

Often touted as software for collaboration, I find it useful to visually keep track of multiple projects. With it I can enter into any writing stage and know exactly where I am and what I need to do. If I get tired of one stage of the writing process, I can go and work on another stage with a different article.

CONCLUSION

This manner of writing is dramatically different than the traditional method.

For one, there’s a reliance on external tools. When you’re constantly referencing lists of ledes, or robotically reordering thoughts to produce structure, you emphasize how mindless the entire process can be. And that has clear benefits. Overthinking is perhaps the leading cause of writer’s block. And idea generation appears to be fueled by NOT being so attentive. The ability to push forward on writing despite being tired or distracted results in constant forward momentum.

The line between mindless and mindful also offers a great diagnostic tool. When discussing Olympic lifting in his book Becoming a Supple Leopard, physical therapist Kelly Starrett explains that stressors reveal faults in the process. Add more weight or faster repetitions and a coach can clearly see the weaknesses in the mechanics of the lift. When adding stressors  – writing while tired, with distractions like a TV on, or writing for time – the process writer can spot weaknesses in the procedure. The cure is often more training or breaking down the process into greater detail.

The process method offloads weight from needing to think really hard about any one thing. This results in greater output and the ability to write virtually anywhere. More output allows for more opportunities to practice, rather than being cramped and stymied by needing a commission or a perfect place to concentrate. It also prevents the biggest problem in writing - psychology. Writer’s are often crazy alcoholics, drug addicts, or depressed - even the successful ones end up committing suicide. There’s a reason for this. There are no metrics for good writing. Almost any other type of learning has something our minds can latch onto to improve. And if we can’t clearly improve – or assume writing is a function of who we are – happy writers become the exception.

Over the last few months I’ve experimented heavily with this method, and it feels weird.

As you can see by my Trello board, I’ve worked on 13 projects at the same time, at various stages of the process. When asked asked what subject I wrote about that day, I usually draw a complete blank. But I can describe what steps of writing I was working on. Before, I was obsessed with one article because it was make or break. Now, it’s not the subject that’s important. I’ve already noticed a dramatic improvement in each step - the smoothness and ability to create 3 transitions between each two sections, or come up with 10 ledes. Once you start actually practicing – something I realize I never did – you adapt quickly.

I learned a lot about writing from visiting the Picasso Museum in Barcelona a few years ago. Rather than only showcasing his famous pieces, the museum displayed an encyclopedic catalog of the artist’s life, where each room was a phase of his creative development. I was lucky enough to go with an artist friend, who beckoned to a realistic sketch of a hand. “This,” he said, “is where you knew he was going to be great.” Each room demonstrated Picasso mastering a vocabulary, a specific, almost surprisingly commonplace, style. These were the solid building blocks used to fully express himself in the unique manner we all know today.

In writing we all-too-often minimize the discrete skills. And yet, only when process is king and the humble steps mastered can we make the leap towards art.

APPENDIX

Here’s a list of tools and resources mentioned in the article (and a few additional ones thrown in for good measure):

PROGRESSIVE LAYERS FOR THIS ARTICLE:

Scrivener File

WORD FILES:
Jot outline with labels
Categories listed
Categories reordered
Points moved
Rearranging points within categories
Adding transitions
Ledes
Kickers
First draft
Research
Second draft

CHEAT SHEETS:

A Lexicon of Ledes

A Tome of Transitions

An Encyclopedia of Endings

BOOKS and ARTICLES:

Jack Hart, A Writer’s Coach: A Complete Guide to Writing Strategies That Work

Timothy Ferris, The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life

Nick Bentley, The 100:10:1 method – the heart of my game design process

The New Yorker, A Critic at Large, Blocked: Why Do Writer’s Stop Writing?

John McPhee, The New Yorker, Draft No. 4 (Also a book by the same name)

John McPhee, The New Yorker, Structure: Beyond the Picnic Table Crisis

Don Murray, Writing to Deadline: The Journalist at Work

Chip Scanlan, The Poynter Institute, Putting Endings First

Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Steven Pressfield, Do the Work

Robert Gottlieb, Paris, Home of Le Burger

Vir Bala Aggarwal, Essentials of Practical Journalism

COURSES:

Shani Raja, Udemy, Editing Mastery: How To Edit Writing To Perfection

Shani Raja, Udemy, Ninja Writing: The Four Levels Of Writing Mastery

James Patterson, Masterclass, James Patterson Teaches Writing

Brandon Sanderson, Youtube/Brigham Young University, Write About Dragons

Holly Lisle, Holly Lisle’s Writing Classes

2018 Year in Review

This last year has contained a huge change - moving back to the States after a decade abroad. It’s been really light on travel and publishing, but incredibly heavy on new techniques and theories which have already had a gigantic impact on this entire project. Here are the highlights:

Habits
-Formalized a flossing habit
-Added Olympic weight lifting to my exercise habit
-Experimented with habit removal by successfully removing drinking beer

Personal Records and New Highs
-Completed a 90 Day No-Beer Challenge
-started and successfully ushered a flossing habit from tiny habits all the way to a habit terminus, a habit that is totally complete
-With easy access to group meetings in the States I had my first social discharge of a habit by joining in on a group meditation.
-Took meditation to a new high by meditating throughout the entirety of a horror series (The Haunting of Hill House) and thoroughly enjoyed it despite hating horror because of the fear involved
-Solved a decades old issue - shin splints - with the help of Kelly Starrett’s mobilizations. Running is something I’ve always wanted to do, yet I’ve always stopped because of some kind of foot pain. No more!
-Passed 4 years of meditating, writing, and recording.
-Passed 3 years of consistent exercise
-Went from 35 lb dumbbell clean and presses to 55 lbs in 11 weeks (missing 3 sessions)

Publishing
-Finally completed my book proposal and query letter and started pitching it to agents.
-Changed my book idea, and started working on a second proposal

Theories and Experiments
-Created a fully 3 dimensional moveable model of a full habit, something I don’t believe has ever been done before.
-Created a grand unified theory of behavioral change and self help
-Mapped the terrain of quitting
-Created a full model of the process of writing

New Techniques
-Created a Deep Work Protocol based on Cal Newport’s work
-Created and tested Structured Randomness, applying it to meal planning
-Created the ultimate guide to writing
-Figured out how to efficiently overcome the problem of limited natural progress, applying it to meditation and working out.
-Learned to gain entry into jhana through anger and anxiety
-Learned how to use noting the self to get to 4th jhana
-Threaded different types of meditations together to reach deeper states
-Experimented with and got to within a hair’s breadth of mastering sleep.

Learning
-Started reading Daniel Ingrams highly expanded second edition of Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha
-Learned about and practiced Mindful Scrolling, a new meditation technique
-Started reading James' Clear’s book, Atomic Habits

Attempts and Failures
-Ended a social media habit that had already gotten to super habit status
-Attempted GMB fitness
-Attempted a 30 day strict paleo challenge

Travel & New Experiences
-Traveled to Valencia
-Visited Italy (Bologna and Florence). Saw the original instruments of the old scientists as they tried to experiment and quantify temperature, gravity, and electricity, which was really exciting giving it’s exactly what I’m trying to do for self development.
-Traveled to Houston and Albuquerque
-Moved back to the States, and successfully moved into central Houston
-Hosted 5 people
-Stuck with a ban on travel, passing up trips to Greenland, Nunavut, Grenada, Barbados, and Portland
-Tried 3 different meditation groups - the Chinese Jade Dragon Temple, the local Zen center, and an insight meditation group
-Went to a writer’s group meeting
-Started pitching top tier outlets like the NYT

The techniques section has some amazing stuff. I have huge plans for the next year simply because I now finally have the methods to accomplish them. I want to:

-Quit drinking
-Remove negative self talk and totally transform my base mental code
-Master eating
-Master pitching
-Get published like a madman

That might seem like a lot, but as one wise 3 year old would say, It’s just 5 things…

Happy New Year!

I Want it All: Changing Two Very Difficult Behaviors at Once

“I want it all, and I want it NOW!”

Those lyrics off Queen’s The Miracle album lit a fire under me as a kid. Back then I believed I could seize the world as long as I just had passion.

The next several decades rudely disabused me of that notion.

What I’ve learned through this project is that the path to getting it all is paved with patience. Now that tally training beer away appears to be a success – and one that occurred pretty effortlessly – I want to do more of it. The problem is I want to master two very large behaviors at once: emotions and food.

THE CHICKEN OR THE EGG

Logically, I know the best behavior to train is negative emotions. I’m an anxious, depressed, pessimist, and attempting to rid myself of negativity 5 years ago was one of the most eye-opening experiments of my life. I found that “static meditation” had little carryover to the rest of my day. So, I attempted to note, then counter, every instance of negative thought that arose, from nervousness and tension, to actual anger and massive depressive episodes. I called it “dynamic meditation”.

In the beginning, the results were phenomenal. Life became saturated with joy. I had a grin continually plastered to my face and felt I was cheating at life. I could actually feel myself changing and becoming a different person.

That lasted two weeks.

The system broke apart for the simplest reason - I simply didn’t have a mechanism in place to continue tracking it all.

Now I do.

So why an additional behavior? All my work on food and exercise just seems like a sunken cost. While Structured Randomness has significantly stepped up my eating game, there have been many leaks around the edges to compensate. Eating on weekends is unstructured, and the lack of rigor on what I snack on or indulge in with friends destroys progress. I’m putting in daily hard work, but there are no significant results. That infuriates me.

Also, I consider eating a core process like meditation or mobilizing. Eating effects mood, energy, sleep, and overall health more than anything else.

So in terms of choosing which to pick, it’s a hard decision. As with many items in what seems like a never-ending laundry list of self-improvement, I feel less that like screaming “I want it all” and more like sobbing “I needed to have done it all”.

The bigger question - is it even possible to attempt it all?

TRUST THE PROCESS

Now the case for overreaching lies in trusting this new method. Tally counting significantly offloads change from solely resting on native effort, will, and motivation. These are the factors that limited me to one change at a time. Also, as this project goes on, I want to start experimenting with methods to compress everything down. However, this is dangerous as these behaviors are also both very difficult to change. They are deeply ingrained and discharged continually throughout the day under many circumstances.

Sandbagging may be a way to have my cake and eat it too.

Lydia’s concept is based on the idea that willpower is a response based on a load. Dumping sand bags from a hot air balloon makes it shoot up because there are two opposing forces at work. If you’re working on two behaviors dropping one when the going gets tough assures the success of the other because the system was already trying to compensate for a heavier load. I would drop eating because, as Lydia argues, negativity affects every area of my life.

THE DETAILS

To do this I would need a double tally counter. I would also need to be vigilant as to how the two changes interact. I can see craving and negativity feeding off each other, potentially starting a comedic landslide of clicks on either side of the counter.

For dynamic meditation, I’m just going to use the same protocols that I used in my old attempt. The protocols for food on the other hand, are a bit trickier. Do I have cheat days? Do I include all alcohol? How do I include the holidays? What if someone invites me out? Will this be a long-term change or a challenge?

I’m betting, oddly enough, that eating will be more difficult, simply because it involves a lot of social pressure, pinpoint discipline, and preplanning (like going to the store and having healthy snacks around or knowing what restaurants have clean items on the menu).

Generally, I’m foreseeing that at some point this is going to get really, really tough. Then it’s going to get really easy as the meditation offloads the stress from eating clean. There is this notion that habits can positively reinforce each other, and I can definitely see that happening here.

PRAGMATIC PASSION

Can I do more to offload willpower? Yes, and this is really key. I can track food with pictures, or start the day with motivation or an affirmation or an implementation intention of the day. I can have my meditation responses all written out, and have a sequence of widgets like my ego-depletion protocol. I can also bypass decisions by planning for each thing that could go wrong.

Luckily at this point, I now have a lot of tools to work with.

“Here’s to the future,” Freddie Mercury croons later in the song, “to the dreams of youth.”

Over the long years with this project I’ve been incredibly cautious about grasping too much, knowing that I could very well end up with nothing. As I approach my 40th birthday (and The Miracle approaches its 30th), I realize that mental freedom and a healthy body are perhaps the greatest gifts I can give myself. And the journey to get them might also reignite the passions of my past.

photocred: Freddie by SoniaDee

The Elements of Change: A Grand Unified Theory of Self-Help

Behavioral scientist B.J. Fogg researches how small changes can transform your life. Admiral William H. McRaven advocates building momentum through completing small tasks at the beginning of the day. For author Charles Duhigg it’s habits and for Dr. Judsen Brewer, self change rests on mindfulness.

Every few years a new productivity technique emerges as the one true method to rule them all. But a better model is one that sees them all as pieces of a greater puzzle. As elements with unique characteristics and applications, they’re like building blocks that can be stacked and strung together.

As a young professor in Russia, Dmitri Mendeleev grew frustrated at his student’s inability to follow his chemistry lectures. But there was a good reason. Though chemists started identifying elements in the mid 1700s, there wasn’t a standardized system detailing qualities and relationships between substances. Delving into the problem in his classic text, Principles of Chemistry, he arranged elements in terms of atomic weight and shared properties. His breakthrough resulted in the Periodic Table of Elements.

Though motivation has a low half life (January 17th is National Ditch Your Resolutions Day) and habits presumably last forever, productivity techniques don’t have a concrete analog to atomic weight; there is, as of yet, no agreed upon willpower unit. But just as Mendeleev’s table was sorted by families so too can behavioral methods be grouped into those that Strengthen, Observe, Replenish, Diminish, Reward, and Automate.

STRENGTHEN

A number of recent books and studies have supported the idea of willpower as a resource. This family stretches out that initial resource in some way.

You can use Motivation to psych yourself up, whether through music or vision boards or just “digging deep”. This is usually the very first method people use, and it’s perhaps the least effective. Willpower Workouts are based on studies that suggest that self-control acts like a muscle. Exerting it artificially (like using your non-dominant hand throughout the day) will increase your starting pool of it.

Exemplar Priming recruits resources through either optimistic or inspirational text to influence the ego’s view of itself, resulting in better discipline. Or, you can just borrow those resources. Pretending to be an exemplary fictional character has been shown to increase perseverance with the Batman Effect. Momentum does this in a different way, by increasing confidence and overcoming inertia with a series of wins.

OBSERVE

The Hawthorne Effect, known as the Observer Effect, describes how behaviors positively change solely by being observed.  Creating Systems does this by focusing on the process of a skill rather than the output of one endeavor. Mindfulness, the minute observation of the self, has been shown to have numerous benefits especially in breaking vices. Creating and noting specifics is the realm of Metrics, which allows the mind to grasp and have a record of behaviors that might not otherwise be noticed. 

Implementation Intention is a formal statement of cause and effect that can radically change behavior in habits and even in focus. Meanwhile, Mental Contrasting is an exercise used to analyze what exactly a behavioral change entails. Functionally this troubleshoots by listing out the pros and cons of a change, and what could possibly go wrong while doing it.

REPLENISH

Sometimes you need more fuel to start with, and sometimes you just need to refuel. This family focuses on regenerating willpower and the rewiring involved in long-term learning that’s cultivated by rest.

The most literal version of refueling is eating. Glucose positively influences cognition and energy, and it may play some role in willpower generation. Time Off is not only necessary for replenishing self control, but for learning, focus, and mental and physical health. Microdosing on nature through Forest Bathing can improve happiness and wellbeing, having long thought to have a general restorative effect. 

Emotional cues can also renew willpower resources. Harnessing the power of Kawaii through viewing cute images surprisingly promotes focus and performance, as can Laughter and Anger.

DIMINISH

While the first two families dealt with increasing fuel in some way, the next few deal with bypassing expenditure issues entirely. Tiny Behaviors lower the expenditure of willpower, while Bypassing Decisions takes away the need to use it at all. New procedures can reset willpower and focus through the Novelty Effect, and in a related element, changing up Sequences, can make learning and skill acquisition more efficient.

REWARD

Rather than changing the performance of a behavior, this family incentivizes what you do. The classic Pavlovian treatment is Avoiding Pain and employing concrete Rewards. Some more ephemeral rewards include Socializing and the satisfaction of beating someone (yourself or others) in Competitiveness. 

Completeness is a specific type of reward involving the hunger to get it all. This can take the form of a compulsion to collect or perfectly beat every level in a video game. It can also include the inverse, the fear of missing out on an experience.

AUTOMATE

This family removes all external cues in favor of regularity. Rituals can act not only as an interceding wedge to break apart triggers and responses, but they can also emphasize focus, athletic performance, taste, and rejuvenation through random consistent behavior, often involving objects or implements.

Habits involve repetition, time, association with the self, and automaticity. Combined together, habits work regardless of mood or circumstances, and as such have the longest staying power, balanced on the very opposite end of the chart from Motivation.

BETTER MODELING

This blueprint can not only better illustrate common self-development strategies, but why addictive behaviors are so powerful.

Take for example, “Don’t Break the Chain” apps. Popularized by Jerry Seinfeld, the comic used a calendar to keep track of the days he worked on new material. Every day he discharged the behavior, he would draw a large red X across the day. It got to be satisfying to simply not break that chain, and many people have talked about how it helps them stick to goals.

Broken down, this strategy employs an INTENT (“I will record when I discharge my habit”) to use METRICS (red Xs), where COMPLETENESS (a week where all days have Xs) and REWARDS (the satisfaction of seeing a marked calendar) fosters MOMENTUM (“On day 20, even if I don’t want to do it, I will, because I’ve done it for all the other days”).

Why are vices like smoking so addictive? Aside from the physical addiction:

It’s a TINY HABIT that is a RITUAL (the fire, the movement to another place, implements like the lighter), often involving SOCIALIZING (a community of other smokers), MINDFULNESS (observation of the flow of the world or just the smoke swirling), TIME OFF (often from work), and concrete REWARDS (the hit of nicotine).

Here’s a slideshow of as many behaviors and techniques I can think of just to demonstrate the modeling power of this elemental table:

NEW FORMULATIONS

Rearranging blocks results in new methods of behavioral change tailored to fit unique problems in self-development. Here are a few I’ve discovered and tested:

Structured Randomness
Borrowing from Dr. John Perry’s concept of Structured Procrastination, Structured Randomness was an effort to solve meal planning issues. While meal prepping can bypass decision making throughout the week (preventing Decision Fatigue) it can often be too draining or impractical to make every single meal ahead of time. Here, a once-a-week habit is created of intentionally randomizing the meals made during the week. Harnessing The Novelty Effect, it allows not only for a boost in adherence, but as a side effect creates interest by fostering the exploration of new recipes.

Tally Clicking
How do you remove a habit? While the current, popular advice is to just replace the trigger or response in a habit loop, in many cases this just isn’t practical. Instead, by using a tally counter, we can use curiosity and metrics to monitor the diminishing of the habit. And by using click training, we can wedge an action in between the trigger and response.

An Ego-Depletion Protocol
When you’re absolutely drained of willpower, I’ve found that stitching together a series of theories on renewing discipline comes in handy.

Switch up your schedule, bring your tasks down to minimums, and accomplish a few goals to bring the power of momentum on your side. Eat food to boost energy, do an exemplar priming exercise to build self confidence, and distance yourself from your feelings with mindfulness. Bolster your mood by watching funny videos, going out for a walk, and scrolling Reddit for cute animal pics.

Efficient Routine Creation
Crafting a long term consistent practice is critical for everything from physical or mental health to laying the foundations of any skill.

The most efficient method I’ve found is to supplement B.J. Fogg’s Tiny Habits with psychologist Gabriela Oettingen’s WOOP (Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan) Method. Tiny Habits lowers the daily minimum in order to form habits, WOOP creates a specific intention while planning around future problems, and using a system of metrics prevents interruptions (like large gaps in the discharge of routines) from becoming permanent.

Pushing Routines
An efficient routine will start small, but can often become difficult to level up. And that’s critical to reap long-term benefits.

To level skills up for time, try shortening them, then changing up the workout. Rather than shooting for 1 hour of running you’ll find it easier to try 20 minutes of biking, running, and swimming. The Novelty Effect boosts focus by shifting to a slightly different modulation of attention. This method works for pushing skills, where sequencing, tiny bursts of concentrated effort, and novelty provide effective cross training and plateau-busting power.

CONCLUSION

There’s a lot here, and there’s a lot to tweak. Mendeleev didn’t have all the elements on the table either. But what this table illustrates is an updated model of what the answer to self-change really is. In the past it’s been motivation or a positive attitude. These days it’s habits or grit, but none of this captures the real truth.

The answer is legion. And that’s a good thing.

90 Days of No Beer: Mapping the Terrain of Quitting

“What’s it like being back on the B?” Lydia said as we sipped on stouts and porters at Brash Brewery in Houston. In this case, “B” referred to Beer, and I had just come off 90 days of not drinking any.

For the challenge I carried around a tally counter in order to easily track the number of urges I had to drink beer during a day. The tally counter technique is something I’ve used before to quit smoking, and it offers a number of positive reinforcements for the behavioral change process. In brief, it harnesses mindfulness, self tracking, ritual, click training, and curiosity to drastically increase adherence as opposed to relying on sheer will alone (I will do a more detailed breakdown of the technique in the future).

Whenever I felt an urge, I clicked, and totaled the number with a few notes at the end of each day.

I started this challenge for a number of reasons. First, I wanted to know if the tally clicker technique would work on another vice. Specifically, I wanted to know if it would work on what I’m calling a “half habit” - that is, a habit that’s a partial behavioral change - not drinking beer, versus not drinking at all.

I feel half habits can be important when it comes to moderation. For a long time, the general medical advice for alcohol consumption was 2 units for males per day. In practicality, that’s not easy to do and in fact requires even more razor sharp, specific discipline to make it stick. This is all exacerbated with alcohol, a discipline eroder.

In addition, I wanted to test whether beer had an adverse affect on me. In the past I felt super bloated and sluggish after imbibing it, which I know other people have issues with. And in a larger context, I wanted to help further map out the terrain - is there a pattern to quitting a behavior like there is a pattern to creating a habit? 

All of this is also a great test of the viability of the technique for future changes (including the most personally difficult to remove vice I can think of - negative self talk.)

Unlike other vice removal challenges, this formulation - focusing on tracking urges rather than just not doing the behavior - allowed me to collect a lot of daily data.

90 days later, I had my data. But before analyzing the specifics, my general takeaway was that the technique was almost scarily flawless. At no point was I remotely close to breaking down and having a beer. As with the last time I used the technique, the thought that kept arising was “effortless.”

At one point, I got drunk with an old friend in a bar with excellent selections of beer. A few other times I was lonely and incredibly depressed (with Lydia’s beers in the fridge!), both instances of willpower-breaking circumstances. In each case the level of control and adherence despite my natural inclinations was shocking as I clicked away.

Looking at the data specifically, there didn’t appear to be any concrete pattern to the chart data, other than gentle swells up and down and up again in clusters that diminished across time.

There wasn’t any correlation to the popular “icky threes” that always gets bandied about in smoking cessation - namely that day 3, week 3, and month 3 have more clusters of urges.

While this chart informed the diminishing of my urge for beer, I am also interested in how this lines up with a general map for quitting anything.

Looking at my notes, I realized that at some point, urges for other vices arose. I started finding other ways to closely skirt the urge. For quitting smoking it was getting into cigars or hookah, here it was switching to cider. I started catching cravings as they came yet before they fully crystalized. Sometimes I would have this sensation of craving without any content. I just wanted.

The turning point was when I started feeling revulsion towards beer. It wasn’t consistent, but spoke to a greater equanimity towards it. At several points I had people pushing beer on me or asking me to taste it, or watching a tv show where people were drinking, and I just didn’t feel anything. This matches up almost exactly with the notes I took when quitting smoking and my earlier experiment trying to uproot negative self talk.

James Clear’s new book, Atomic Habits came out recently, and in it he describes another layer to the Charles Duhigg/Pavlov behavioral process. Instead of TRIGGER - RESPONSE - REWARD, Clear interjects a MENTAL CRAVING in between TRIGGER and RESPONSE. I think this is a good move.

Usually TRIGGER, CRAVING, and RESPONSES are so mashed together they appear as one. During this challenge more connections and triggers became unearthed, ones I never consciously thought about. In the 3rd month, I went to get ramen, and just got hit by a lot of urges. Apparently I associate ramen with having a beer! But also, it highlighted subtle nuances, like that there’s a difference between a memory of a craving and having the actual craving. Boredom also seriously triggered bouts (also common in smoking and in my anxiety), but it was also funny how so many urges came simply because of the assumption that drinking a beer was just the easy choice.

While much of the technique worked shockingly well, what didn’t work was the recording. Looking back, I made all sorts of mistakes with dates, the number of days I did the challenge (I think I actually went 94 days) and basic arithmetic for weekly totals. In the next experiment, I would probably just default to a spreadsheet where it’s easy to fill in numbers and have the math done for you. I would also see if the process can be sped up by simply exposing myself to the trigger more. Would looking at pictures and videos of beer actually inoculated me through exposure, speeding up the removal of the urge entirely?

Opera singer Jerome Hines once said that “the only proper way to eliminate bad habits is to replace them with good habits” and that seems to be the general consensus of the productivity community today. To follow Duhigg’s advice, you’ve gotta change the cues, routines, or rewards.

After getting home Lydia asked if I was going to continue to abstain. Almost despite myself, I said yes. I didn’t really miss beer as much as I thought I would. And seeing a map of the entire process is just too compelling.

When I think back to unwieldy replacement methods or just old school brute willpower, they always seemed to involve multiple attempts, massive amounts of irritability, and a whole lot of failure.

When removing vices in the future, I know the method I’d want to use.

photocred: “beer” by Mor

Habit Terminus: A (Successful) End to Flossing

Five years ago when I first started my battle for solid habits, I bought into the tacit assumption that self improvement – for whatever you’re going after – lasts forever. And since there was always something more to do and more to add, that appeared self-evident. Yet here I am at the very end of my flossing habit. I’m calling it a habit terminus.

Habit Terminus - the point at which there’s nothing to do but rinse and repeat, and even the rinsing and repeating is automatic.

Here’s the data I collected on the full habit.

Or if we’re being a little fancier - a 3D graph of the entire habit with SRI, habit load, and time (hopefully this displays for you)!

While I’m very happy to finally be at the end of any habit, it begs the question, how exactly do you know it’s the end? How and when can you call it?

My first automatic reaction is to resort to old school, pop science thinking. It’s been about a month. The 21-days-makes-a-habit adage originally came from Maxwell Maltz’s 1960 book, Psycho-Cybernetics (a book I’ve had on my shelf for over a decade and have yet to read), and applied to one behavior - plastic surgery patients getting used to their new faces. I’m very skeptical about these kinds of vague, hand wavy metrics, but I will return to this later in the article.

The second stand out thought is just to take the Self Report Habit Index (SRHI) to assess whether or not the full behavior - “Flossing all teeth” - is automatic.

Taking the SRHI like this was interesting. 

As you can see by the chart, these 5 questions were kind’ve….weird.

• It makes me feel weird if I do not do it

• It would require effort not to do it

• I would find it hard not to do

• This task is typically “me”

• I have been doing it for a long time

For the first 4 questions, distinguishing how I would react to flossing all teeth vs doing the previous iterations of them (20, 10, etc..) was difficult to clearly forecast. So I answered them all with “Undecided”.

The last question - “I have been doing this for a long time” - was just not true, especially in comparison with the duration of the habit itself. Hence the “disagree”.

This doesn’t really tell me much except that the SRHI needs to be modified or replaced with a better diagnostic tool to properly assess the situation.

Which leads to the third method, to focus in on the habit load rather than the habit as a whole. Rather than resorting to time or automaticity of the habit, I could sort out some sort of rudimentary scale for how unnatural or “heavy” the number of teeth flossed was - like what many doctors use for pain (“on a scale of 1-10, how painful is this”). This zoomed in approach avoids differentiating between the automatic nature of flossing 2 teeth vs flossing all of them.

This brings up another question - how many days does it take for a habit load to normalize? And how do you assess this in such a way that is efficient and not burdensome?

I’ve called this problem the Law of Limited Natural Growth - a properly created habit using BJ Fogg’s TinyHabit system, naturally grows a little, then plateaus.

One method is to raise the bar with challenges. I’ve had success with this in writing, (after a really intense NaNoWriMo) and with not eating sugar after a dietary challenge (I believe it was Body for Life). There are severe problems with this method - you’re overexerting yourself in the willpower department, and that’s never a good thing for other habits you’ve got going on. The first few times I did NaNoWriMo, I either ended up dropping habits completely or dropping them down to really low daily minimums.

The second and most successful method I’ve used to date is modulation. By that I mean slightly modifying the habit across time in one session in order to bypass boredom. This has worked particularly well for timed habits, like meditation and cardio. I have a few theories as to why this works, but I do not see it as viable with more straight forwards habits like flossing.

The method I used here was simply to raise the bar slowly. I flossed 6 teeth, then 10, 20, and then all of them. That worked, but I couldn’t tell WHEN I should up the bar.

When I was in high school I was obsessed with long distance running. The cross country coach sent out a progression to get beginners up to speed over the course of a summer, building from 1 mile to 9. Programs like Couch25k or NonetoRun do this as well, but as of yet I’ve never seen why the progression intervals work. I’ve never found if they are based on studies or just general coaching instinct. And sadly, the progression didn’t work for me at all.

Going forward with flossing I plan on changing to regular string rather than the weird flossing plastic handled things I use now, and I’m curious if that affects the habit. I’m also curious how travel affects it. I once theorized that the final test of any habit was doing it under duress like travel. 

But most importantly progress should feel effortless, and I felt I wasn’t doing things efficiently, especially when it came to upping the number of teeth per session. There were definitely points at which my habit could have broken because it felt strained to do 20 teeth versus 10. 

As I was combing through the data I decided to check the intervals in which I naturally progressed from one habit load to the next higher load. Here were the results:

6-12 teeth = 21 days
12 - 20 teeth = 15 days
20 - All teeth = 21 days

There’s that pesky 21 days! Maybe there’s something to pop science after all…

Formalizing a Flossing Habit

Flossing was one of the very first habits I intended to create in this project. I held it off because I thought it would be easy, and because I thought there were more important, foundational habits that needed to be sorted out first. I still think the latter might be true. 

Choosing new habits has gotten difficult - it all needs to be a habit, yesterday! My protocol has generally been to assess what will make the most changes in my life. And as far as I can tell, flossing just affects my mouth (and maybe heart disease? The consensus seems to have changed on this).

Long ago I made an original list of habits I wanted to implement. At this point I'm very close to catching them all - though, other habits have sprung up as being equally, if not more foundational (mobilization and recording come to mind). With that in mind, I've decided to go for it anyway. But there's also another reason.

Fruit flies have long been used by biologists and geneticists for study because of their short lifespans. In the same manner, I'm oping I can use flossing to study skill pushes. I've studied two vectors of my master graph of behavioral development in detail - time (in days) and habit strength (in SRHI). But the third vector, developing and expanding a behavior, is still unclear to me.

Few behaviors offer such a clear pattern of development. While writing or physical fitness have a host of vectors across which skill pushes can be measured, for flossing it's pretty much just the number of teeth flossed. With other skills I've had to attempt to use Duckworth's Grit Scale or come up with another index of difficulty. Here, it's a number.

I'll be guided by Lydia on this. She formed a flossing habit based on my methods really early on, and has been keeping it up for about 4 years. She said it's a breeze, so here goes!

Implementation Intention

Following BJ Fogg's advice in his TedX Talk, I'll floss 2 teeth. I will do this in the morning right after I brush my teeth.

Mental Contrasting
Positive: This will help me nail down a habit that I've intended on doing for decades. It will also help me understand the nature of pushing habits

Stumbling blocks: This habit is tool-specific. One stumbling block will be just making sure I have floss handy. I also find normal floss quite difficult to use, especially with back teeth. This might cause a stumbling block once I move to harder to reach teeth and switch from using the special one-use floss sticks pictured above to normal lengths of string.

photo cred: fruit fly by Martin Cooper

Meal Prepping, The Novelty Effect, and "Structured Randomness"

Despite the lack of recording, I’ve really ramped up my Sunday Meal Prep Habit since moving back to the States.

I hit a glass ceiling in Spain. I’d make 6 lunch meals, which involved trips to 2 or 3 stores/markets. It took an hour to prep and store, and then I had to deal with the glass jars I stored them in. 

Eating healthy, pre-prepped lunches during the week was effortless (this word/feeling is key - I’ll get back to it later), and I attempted to do little bits here and there to increase that habit, because a lot of meals were obviously left unaccounted for. But none of it worked - we were stuck hovering at the same output. 

I’ve started to call this Limited Natural Growth.

Limited Natural Growth - A well-established habit naturally has a growth spurt, then plateaus.

Getting past that plateau requires other techniques.

I’ve since moved back to the States and things are a lot easier. We got a car and don’t have to haul things by hand. One store usually has everything. Salads don’t have to be made, they come in pre-mixed bags. We can shop for an entire week. My “Sunday Meal Prep” has essentially transformed into a “Sunday Shopping” habit.

But we still encountered the onerous task of deciding what we were going to cook.

It seems pretty inconsequential, but decision making itself has its own willpower cost. As in Spain, we found ourselves dithering, and more often than not I would balk, leaving the bulk of the burden on Lydia. I felt we were going to hit another plateau, until Lydia decided to randomize our weeks.

Lydia had a dream - she wanted to cook through entire cookbooks and now, with access to everything, she can do it. So she entered every title of every recipe from her favorite clean eating cookbooks into a spreadsheet and randomized them for dinners.

It’s been two and a half weeks and has felt effortless. With my system of mechanistic change, I’m trying to chase that feeling. To me, a really good progressive program should feel like it doesn’t bog you down, like you aren't dipping into reserves of motivation or willpower. 

This plan has worked so well, I began to wonder what was going on. It turns out it has a name: The Novelty Effect.

The Novelty Effect is best summed up in an excellent article on the subject by Clive Thompson on Medium:

"My behavior is governed by what psychologists call “The Novelty Effect” — the short-term boost in performance that comes from changing the environment around you."

The power of changing things up is not to be taken lightly. It grows you. It’s the reason why 30-day challenges are so great - they get you to do more than your usual routine, and that feels exciting. In doing so you rise to the occasion. 

Of course, you also fall back down.

Thompson continues by stating:

“Temporarily” is the key. A change to our environment can invigorate us by changing the intellectual furniture of our everyday lives. But as soon as we become habituated to the new, the improvement fades."

However, by introducing one day (Sunday, in my case) when I planned to randomize the rest of my week, something amazing occurred. I could potentially ride this temporary wave indefinitely. It’s Structured Randomness.

---

A few years back on a work trip I met a fellow travel journalist who described a project. In it she tried a new workout every week for a year. Based in Colorado, where demand tends to be high for all things fitness-related, she tried everything from acro yoga to trapeze. She got so addicted she kept it up for years. 

The gamification experts often describe player types that can be appealed to in games. The Bartle Taxonomy of Player Types includes Killers, Achievers, Socializers, and Explorers, but it’s the last one that I want to focus on here.

Explorers like new things, to reveal a new world, or discover hidden places. It’s a button of addiction that can be pushed in programming, and so too (I believe) with Structured Randomness. It activates the fun and addictive centers, appealing to my appreciation of cooking and experiencing food.

I’ll continue to monitor it, but I think this is a watershed moment not only for eating healthy, but for all other habits.

Because of the concept of Limited Natural Growth, it’s often very difficult to break free from plateaus. This results in fully formed habits that, unfortunately, don’t progress or do you any good. 

The standby techniques are just pushing the habit in small increments or using intense, brief challenges. Those have never sat well with me because in practice, they're a pain. For both, you're dipping into that well of motivation or willpower, and though it works for one habit, if you're trying to do it for 10, that well dries up fast. The key is effortless change.

But beyond this project, Structured Randomness appears to result in a more broad-spectrum human experience. Lydia once did a project where she read a book in a new genre she’d never read before every month for a year. We’re planning to see if we can eat at a restaurant that serves food from every country in the world here in Houston (though, since we’re going alphabetical, it may not be “Random” but it’s at least “Structured Variety”). And at one point we attempted to try one new restaurant or activity a week, to break free of the rut of habits and the intense, often repetitive practice that is commonly considered a precursor to mastery. Broadening horizons just exposes us to more, and that, I feel, is a good thing.

I don’t know how this technique could apply to things like meditation, or writing, but it bears a lot of future thought.

photo cred: coin flip by frankieleon, shopping carts by Kevin Lau, novelty store by Jim Barter, Bartle's Taxonomy by Ramiromagalhaes 

2017 (ish) Year in Review

I’ve been a little behind with this post. This has been the most turbulent year I’ve ever had, with immense amounts of travel, and a lot of setbacks. Nevertheless, the tests and experiments have yielded pure gold, techniques I can see myself using for the rest of my life. I'm including a few months of 2018 here (up until now) so i'm cheating a bit - but here are the highlights:

Habits
-Created a once-a-week habit and mapped it out using the SRHI
-Pushed meditation by successfully cross training it, adding gratitude, tantra, and metta training
-Created a social media habit

Personal Records
-Passed 4 years of daily recording
-Passed 1,000 days of daily writing
-Got back to my habits in record time (1 day off) after travel
-Improved the functional skill of my mental state through meditation

Publishing
-Wrote an article in Tricycle Magazine on behavioral change and meditation. This was subsequently shared by JSTOR, and listed as Tricycle's top list of articles in 2017
-Wrote quality Quora answers that garnered hundreds of views
-Connected with one of my favorite travel writers, one of my favorite meditation instructors, and got an offer to submit to Quartz
-Moved my website over to a new site

Theories and Experiments
-Experimented with Personal Kanban and used Trello to improve my workflow
-Had a breakthrough with the editing process of writing
-Experimented and succeeded with a new method of removing a negative habit using a tally clicker
-Conducted a sleep experiment using my own sleep scale
-Found a willpower scale
-Conducted another travel sandbagging experiment
-Progressively analyzed, read, and experimented with countering moments of ego-depletion and procrastination, and then came up with a protocol that seems to have cured me of these issues even with regards to difficult tasks.
-Used Cal Newport's concept of "deep work" to come up with a deep work protocol that works like a dream.

Learning
-Read: Cal Newport's Deep Work and So Good They Can't Ignore You
-The Weekend Effect by Katrina Onstad
-Peak Performance by Stulberg and Magness
-Personal Kanban by Barry and Benson
-Tools of Titans by Timothy Ferriss
-Lots of guides on the Getting Things Done method
-A lot of details regarding cross training meditation, specifically Dr. Jeffery Martin's Finder's Course
-Culadasa's The Mind Illuminated 
-Started a Udemy course on the writing process
-Completed a Gotham Writer's course on querying agents for book publication and wrote and revised my own query letter

Attempts and Failures
-Phased out a Pantry Check and Food Recording Habit
-Attempted and failed to complete a 14-day mobility overhaul
-Attempted and failed to complete a Whole Life Challenge
-Attempted a 30 minute research and blogging session at the end of my writing to push the habit
-Attempted a skill push with planning meals
-Paused my social media habit

Travel
-Road trip through Southern France (Toulouse, Narbonnes, Nimes, Albi)
-Road trip through the Costa Brava
-Visited the Catalan town of Vic
-Visited Valencia
-Camped through the entirety of Iceland
-Visited Italy (Bologna and Florence)
-Attended my 20 year high school reunion
-Hosted 6 friends
-Attended a conference in Chicago
-Traveled through Hawaii (Honolulu, Kailua Kona, Hilo, Kawaii)
-Visited South Carolina
-Visited the States (Albuquerque and Houston) two or three times

I really thought I didn't do much this year, but looking back it really amazes me that I was able to do this much while traveling an incredible amount and being sick a record number of times (I think I got sick 4 or 5 times). Lydia and I also decided to move back to the States during this time, and went through the process of selling our stuff and moving everything (a bigger post on that later). 

Seeing what I've done despite massive interruptions makes me feel secure in the process I've developed - there is no way I could've stayed the course before. I'm also really eager to see what a year of stability would result in. Here's to 2018!

A Deep Work Protocol: Methods to Practically Kill In-The-Moment Procrastination

I have a lot of problems with writing.

I’m certainly not the first writer with such issues; writing is a nexus of all my insecurities, and it results in horrendous issues with focus, lack of planning, procrastination, and perfectionism. 

These are what I think of as interstitial issues. Up until now I’ve been attacking the bones and body of self help - things like habits and how to form them and how to conserve willpower drains.

But in putting a system of productivity together in real life, it’s the small things that get overlooked. What you actually do or don’t do in the minutes and seconds before and during work can seriously destroy output.

I’ve been scrabbling around all this for a long time. I’ve attempted and failed to use planners since middle school, and I always look with awe at Lydia, who is maniacally good at this (She has a specific type of planner that’s color coded, plans in advance for her deadlines, and everything seems to work like clockwork). And that’s understandable - she has to be on the ball with her work. For lost freelancers ambling around in the void it’s a totally different story.

I’ve just read Cal Newport’s book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, and I feel that he offers immensely detailed and practical advice in this arena. It's fast becoming one of my favorite self help books. He talks about:

-The power of rituals
-Confronting the distracting nature of the internet
-Keeping metrics
-Creating a daily plan

This last point especially stands out as Newport suggests such an extreme form of it. He advocates to start the work day with a to-the-minute schedule of what you will do and to revise it as soon as possible as circumstances change. 

He admits that this sound excessive, and I agreed until it dawned on me that this is an implementation intention. And everything else sort’ve clicked.

He continues to address common objections: What if something changes? What if the task time you’ve allotted takes more time? What’s the point when you know what you have to do already?

For Newport, the excessively nitpickckiness in taking time to immediately revise the schedule is well worth it because it activates adherence. I wasn’t convinced until I remembered that the best writing stints I’ve had was during the last NaNoWriMo, where I logged every break and metric of word count with Pomodoros to streamline the process and see if there were any patterns. But looking back, it also kept me on track.

The second revelation was that this is purely mechanical.

What I mean by that is that I know that all these little protocols work on long term habits. Do Tiny Habits and you’ll get to habituation faster.  Do implementation intention and mental contrasting and it’s more assured. Make a habit of recording your habits and you’ll pick them up again after a break. 

If you do X, then Y will happen, no “digging deep” required.

I just never thought of daily work distraction and procrastination as solvable by that means, but for the last week the protocol I created based on Newports ideas has trumped even my horrendously distractible mind.

My Deep Work Protocol:

1. I spent a few minutes writing down exactly how I intend my work day to  go on a piece of paper. This is to-the-minute, including breaks. If it changes I take the time to immediately revise it.

2. I put my phone on airplane mode.

3. I use Self Control to block Reddit and Facebook, as these are my go-to mindless automaton methods of wasting time and procrastinating.

4. I get on Spotify and play the “Deep Focus” radio station, which I find blandly ambient enough to block sounds without distracting me.

5. I set my Pomodoro at the appointed time. I do 13 minutes for really hard tasks, 20 minutes for easier ones.

While none of these steps is particularly mind blowing (except the plan-as-implementation-intention) there is a lot of behavioral science at work:

-Steps 1 - 4 are a ritual. 

-Pomodoros are like Tiny Habits. If I’m doing something painful, I don’t want long exposure to pain to prevent me from doing the task. In my NaNoWriMo wins I found that smaller bursts actually had me doing more across time. This may change as my focus builds.

-The plan is an implementation intention.

-The whole process already troubleshoots - I can’t be reached by phone, I can’t get to my number 1 and 2 procrastination outlets. It acts like the practical steps after a mental contrasting plan.

-The music soothes and relaxes me, while ridding me of external auditory distractions.

I have tested this out for the last week, and the boost in productivity has been startling. While habits got me to do my work, it was only after a lot of procrastination. These failures to start often ended up messing up my other habits further along in the chain. My focus was constantly being pulled by either random messages or sparkly new videos on the internet.  These are all gone. 

While before I felt like a train violently going off the rails, I now feel the only option I have is to chug straight ahead. And that’s a fantastic place to be.

Photo cred: Old No. 70 by Michael B.

Grinding Without Progress: The Science Behind Efficient Multi-Habit Growth

Intro

For most of last year I’ve had a nagging sense that I’m not progressing in individual skills as fast as I should. I can now easily establish multi-year habits, but what’s the point if I’m not really leveling them up?

This is infuriating. In the past I’ve demonstrated quick advancement. With bodyweight training I was able to do a full back bridge (something I haven’t done since elementary school) and typewriter pushups within several months. I started NaNoWriMo unable to complete 50,000 words in 30 days to completing it in 5 days. These were things I thought I would never be able to do. Furthermore, I don’t think I’m a special case. We as humans have an extraordinary capacity for improvement when the right training methodology is in place.

However, when I put all of these individual habits together I find myself simply grinding away, paying for the privilege of hovering at exactly the same skill level across the board.

Why is This Happening?

In my old conception a habit reacts very much like a spaceship. If willpower is fuel, a new behavior uses that fuel until it reaches automaticity. At that point, very little fuel/willpower is needed because the ship as reached inertia and continues its flight path at the same velocity. When I push the habit (in time, skill level, or difficulty) I’m accelerating, and I have to draw upon fuel until I reach the next progression. After a time that too becomes automatic.

That model works fine with individual habits. But in combining several it doesn’t. If I do my rowing, writing, mobilization, meditation, and social media in one day – all of which I’ve already leveled up past a Tiny Habit – I’m exhausted.

I believe there are two issues here:

1) The Question of Automaticity with Skill Pushes
When I move from a Tiny Habit to a medium habit, how long does it take for that push to become automatic and drain less willpower? This is sort of a grey area that no one really talks about. If I’ve got a solid habit of flossing one tooth, does pushing it to 10 teeth make it like implementing another habit? Should I then take the SHRI for this new habit before moving on? 

This is definitely something that’s clear in writing. When I start to do more complex writing, the daily willpower load is higher, which t in turn degrades the automaticity of the behavior - it takes me longer to start and sometimes I put it off. This is the very definition of writer’s block.

2) Energy vs Willpower
Are these two different issues? Is the sheer amount of work draining on an energy level? If I automatically run 5 miles a day, it may not take willpower to do regularly, but I’m still going to be tired, and that’s going to affect the rest of my day. Is it just the sheer amount of work that’s causing a drain on the system?

(As an aside, the Harvard Business Review did an excellent article on energy management in the workplace. It treats energy as a resource similar to willpower and offers suggestions to manipulate it.)

Rolling Progressions

Happily there might just be a way out. Several articles on learning challenge the normal stance that mastering a skill is a simple matter of amassing hours (like the 10,000 hours rule popularized by Malcolm Gladwell). In this article for Salon, Peter Brown and Henry Roedigger III excerpt their book, Making It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. 

In the article the authors discuss varied and spaced practice. Cross training through varied practice develops deeper learning. And spaced practice, in the case of a study of surgeons learning a specific procedure, showed that they learned more efficiently across time through spreading out lessons with a week of space rather than doing the lessons in one day. 

In a test given a month after their last session, those whose lessons had been spaced a week apart outperformed their colleagues in all areas—elapsed time to complete a surgery, number of hand movements, and success at reattaching the severed, pulsating aortas of live rats. The difference in performance between the two groups was impressive. The residents who had taken all four sessions in a single day not only scored lower on all measures, but 16 percent of them damaged the rats’ vessels beyond repair and were unable to complete their surgeries. 

This study in particular underscored that it wasn't just improvement in cognitive tasks, but mechanical skills as well.  

This is not as surprising as it seems. Mark’s Daily Apple recommends a focus on eating to lose weight with periodic (once a week) HIITS like sprints. My once a week meal prep results in better eating for the entirety of the week. And in an hour I can schedule an entire week’s worth of tweets. There is a lot of room for saving space and cutting work volume on any given day in order to preserve willpower, efficiency, and allow for greater cross training throughout the week. A rolling system of practice, where each habit is extended on one day of the week, might be just what I need.

What Would This Look Like?

Monday - Prepping ALL meals for the week
Tuesday - 1 hour of social media, scheduling out all tweets for the week
Wednesday - Extended practice in writing
Thursday - A HIIT
Friday - An hour of meditation

I can already see how this would improve things dramatically. For meal preps, the power of an extended prep time to do lunches and dinners for the week would mean making real gains. A solid HIIT one day of the week would allow me to go all out without having other habits suffer from lack of energy. Really working on writing would give me the time to move on from my already mastered ability to bust out a rough draft. I could work on global edits and get more efficient at writing one piece from start to finish. I’ve been thinking about longer meditation sits – now I could do them.

Notice I do not include mobilization in this. I believe some behaviors, like mobilization, are ones that need daily practice in order to reap full benefits. In this case I think there are just too many muscle groupings to be hit in one day. But that’s not so bad since, according to Dr. Kelly Starrett, a good daily habit would only consist of 15 minutes a day, which is only a little more than my Tiny Habit of 10 minutes.

Two Options

One method of implementation is to just nix all my habits but the one I’m extending. Essentially I’d have one habit slot that’s split depending on the day of the week. The other option is to keep Tiny Habits going throughout the week and rotate the pushed habit. I feel that there are still benefits to be reaped from, say, low level cardio, and light writing. However, that doesn’t necessarily apply to social media or meditation.

One solution is to cross train on off days with the latter method. If it’s the case that Vipassana should be spaced at once a week for greater efficiency and progress, then why not do other practices that take less time in that same meditation slot on other days of the week? If doing slow cardio has benefits, then why not do it while walking outside - something that is not only a natural mood lifter, but helps immensely with sleep? For social media why not do other tasks, like reading articles, adding followers, commenting, or generally researching tactics on other days?

Measuring

I don’t like blindly trusting research. And with habit research I was able to test the techniques on myself with days as my base metric - if I stuck with it then it was working. With this, it’s a bit trickier because I’m just experimenting on myself. I can’t exactly map out how much better my meditation is compared to practicing every day, and the same generally applies to writing because standards and progressions aren’t solid. 

But perhaps the best argument for just doing trying it comes from an old self help maxim that goes something like:

“If what you’re doing now isn’t working then why are you repeating it?”

The general feeling of not progressing may well be the best reason to change to a different system. For behaviors like meditation, I know that increasing time is part of the solution. For writing, I’m not even exerting enough time to get the base tasks to progress, and that definitely seems to be the case with meal prep. There’s just not enough energy left in my tank at the end of most days to push everything.

Furthermore, in cases like this paralysis by analysis has always been my problem. The way seems simple - try it now, and see how I feel in a month. 

Photo cred: grinding by Andrew Sutherland, graph by Stannered, Wikimedia Commons

Towards an Ego Depletion Protocol: How to Bypass Bouts of Procrastination, Tiredness, and Wanting to Put Your Head Through a Wall

ENTANGLED HABITS
I write as soon as I wake up. I do this because it's the most psychologically entangled habit I have. It can be extremely frustrating, there are too many variables, and there isn't a well established progression. Lately I've also had to deal with a lot of proposal writing, involving multiple rewrites and knowledge that I have to learn from scratch. This results in greater bouts of anxiety, depression, procrastination, and an inability to focus.

It's exactly what Dr. Roy Baumeister calls "ego depletion" - to Baumeister, willpower is a limited resource of discipline that we drain throughout a day. So if you drain it when doing one task, you're going to have diminishing returns when working on the next. In his experiments, Baumeister accomplished this with difficult puzzles, and the resulting willpower drain would result in participants doing poorly on the next challenge  - when they weren't yelling at the examiner or just walking out in a huff.

Despite the recent reproducibility problem surrounding ego-depletion, I have found it to be quite true in my own metrics (that deserves an in depth post at another time).  For me, ego-depletion results not only in not accomplishing the task at hand, but failing to discharge the rest of my routine, even if the other tasks are easier. It's a catch 22 - tackle the hardest task at the beginning of the day when I'm fresh, or jumble my schedule up and get too exhausted to do my hardest, most important task.

AVOIDING EGO-DEPLETION
I tend to avoid this problem by using methods to conserve willpower until I reach a hook point of automaticity. BJ Fogg's TinyHabits or other formulations of ludicrously small habits help immensely.  Another bit of Fogg wisdom comes from one of his old tweets, where he says to "Stop obsessing about willpower and discipline. For long-term behavior change, focus on planning and design." Combined with the idea of avoiding decision making to prevent fatigue, I also use it in habits like my weekly meal prep, where I pre make all my lunches to avoid even having to make a decision based on food.

Training multiple habits towards mastery should be like training elite athletes using periodization: nudging skills, then backing off in a carefully controlled symphony of progression. But because real life is chaotic, ego-depletion is inevitable. Over the last few months I've been trying to figure out direct methods around this. 

A DEPLETION PROTOCOL
Luckily there have been a number of unusual studies that test this. Among the variables that delay ego depletion or improve willpower are:

• External rewards, like money

• Belief in unlimited willpower

• Positive mood

• Exemplar priming - in this case, reading a passage that depicts a person overcoming adversity

• Self Awareness

• Glucose

I want to be clear. Ego-depletion as a theory has faced some harsh criticism, as have these methods around it. But this blog is about a first person science.  As such, testing these variables in my own life is the final arbiter in my book. So I constructed my own rudimentary protocol:

My Ego Depletion Protocol

1. Stop, drop and eat! (Glucose)

2. Write down observations of what I'm feeling and what's happening (Self Awareness)

3. Write down reasons why I could be depleted (Self Awareness)

4. Watch a Youtube clip of a comedy or stand up comic (Mood)

5. Drop all habits to a smaller daily minimum

6. Reverse my routine

7. Get out into the sun (Mood)

8. Read a list of my accomplishments (Exemplar Priming)

9. Read a list of affirmations (Exemplar Priming)

10. Meditate (Mood or Self Awareness)

Numbers 5 is more of a continuation of Fogg's theories. If willpower over time hits a wall, then lowering a daily threshold gets us over that wall in order to reach the hook point of automaticity. For days where practice is difficult, automaticity isn't enough to get us over the wall, so lowering the daily minimum still works. Number 6 relies on momentum. While writing is mired in procrastination, working out and meditating is easy for me. When I get the majority of my tasks done in a day I gain some sort of velocity that helps me over the procrastination wall. 

SELF EXPERIMENTATION
I have practiced this protocol on and off for last month and a half. It has worked remarkably well. On one day I was pretty close to tears in frustration and ready to give up on everything. Going through the protocol allowed me to get through all my tasks at my normal load, even though I gave myself permission to drop down to lowered minimums.

The biggest problem is formally acknowledging that I'm in this state. Normally it's just something I'm in - I find myself endlessly looking at Reddit or justifying watching a bit more of a favorite TV show. However, the more I practice the protocol, the easier it is to "catch" myself. Another difficult issue is retraining myself to view this system as a mechanistic model, rather than a personality flaw. When I'm in the moment it is incredibly easy to start self flagellating myself as being weak.

Moving forward I would like to actually test individual ego-depletion counters. I haven't had much luck finding a willpower scale (I'm still digging though the science papers!), but after a lot of search I found the State Ego Depletion Scale that was used to test these protocols. While I could not find the original paper, I did manage to find an online version of it in an appendix of a dissertation from the Netherlands! 

This is an incredibly unwieldy scale at 25 questions, but it's a start. With it I hope to find what the most efficient actions are by taking the test before and after going through specific protocols.

photo cred: Svein Halvor Halvorsen

Formalizing a Social Media Habit

All of my work projects have basically been crying out for me to use social media. I've had magazines reach out to me, only to back off once they knew my social media game wasn't that robust. Book publishing is like that as well, and it's understandable. I've been putting off using social media professionally simply because to me, for some reason, it feels like showing off rather than being recognized because of the quality of your work. 

Despite my reservations and my lack of knowledge, I don't think that this is any different than any other behavior. First thing's first - start a habit.

Implementation Intention

I've already started today - When I'm done with my writing sets, which now include blogging/research, I'll do a small habit - 10 minutes - of either research on how to use social media or actually start sharing stuff.

Mental Contrasting
Positive: This will help me get my message out to the world. It will also help me better accomplish my goals of publishing. But perhaps most importantly, it will allow me to connect with other people who are doing similar things to me. What I want is to be a part of a community of like-minded experimenters and eventually help a lot of people. 

Stumbling blocks: There are a lot. I've always felt like I'm trying to be a part of the cool kid's table, professionally speaking. I feel like the world is conspiring professionally to keep me out of that crowd. I feel powerless, like it doesn't matter how good I am, I'll never get the recognition and respect I want. Social media appears to me like a waste of time with limited ROI. I could theoretically waste all my time on my phone, and I see that scattered potential in some of the people I know around me. I'm afraid that I'll get addicted to it and fall into a sink hole of time where my actual content gets worse and worse. In addition I feel that my inability to grow my online social presence will continue to keep me back in my work.

Creating a Self Administered Sleep Scale

INTRODUCTION
These last few weeks have been a symphony of horror when it comes to sleep. I thought I had this nailed down, but in getting back from Spain from the States my sleep quality and quantity has been all over the place. This negatively affects almost every other habit I have, and it's a problem I've had for a very long time.

There are many variables I'd like to test out. The biggest problem I've encountered is finding a good metric that I can test variables against. A quick search resulted in this great overview. It outlines several scales, including:

• The Medical Outcomes Study (MOS) Sleep Scale

• The Insomnia Severity (IS) Index

• Pittsburgh Sleep Diary (PghSD)

• Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) Instrument

What I want is a simple self-administered scale (just like the SRHI for habit formation) that I can use as a base to deliberately test out behaviors to see what will affect my sleep. There is so much advice out there, but almost none of this is systematically tested. I've also had several friends who have gone in for sleep studies only to get vague advice in return, usually related to sleep apnea. 

EVALUATION OF SCALES
I found that the Pittsburgh Sleep Diary (PghSD) and the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) Instrument both include too much detail and contain behavioral questions that I want to test out personally (how much alcohol did you consume, etc). I found the Insomnia Severity (IS) Index more feeling-based and difficult to assess with any accuracy over stretches of time. I found the Medical Outcomes Study Sleep (MOS) Scale good if applied to a week rather than the 4 weeks time periods questions were based on. The best thing I found was one section of the PSQUI on Habitual Sleep Efficiency (HSE). HSE is a simple weekly percentage:

# hours slept/# hours in bed X 100

I find this very elegant, but it does not assess quality of sleep. 

QUALITY OF SLEEP
Several questions spread out across multiple scales addressed sleep quality, so I decided to just collect them all irrespective of scale. Some had to do with daytime dysfunction (naps, sleepiness, alertness, enthusiasm), sleep disturbances (how many times did you wake up), and sometimes data collected from sleeping partners. 

Many of these questions dealt with quality of sleep during a month. Personally, I believe that remembering a month of sleep is not only inefficient, but highly inaccurate - I have problems remembering what happen a few days ago. That being said, I believe that assessing variables based on on one week would speed things along. Under the Likert-type scale, answers are based on sliding strengths of opinion. The SRHI is a great example of this with it's 7 point answer system, though many of the sleep scales have a 5 option system.

COLLECTING QUESTIONS FOR SLEEP QUALITY
Here are some questions I collected. I include this to show examples of not only the types of scales but how to potentially create self administered scales in the future, as I find them highly useful in productivity and personal development.

• From the MOS Sleep Scale:

(All of the time/most of the time/a good bit of the time/some of the time/a little of the time/none of the time = 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
How often during the last 4 weeks ...

...did you feel that your sleep was not quiet (moving restlessly, feeling tense, speaking, etc, while sleeping)? 
...did you feel that you got enough sleep to feel rested upon waking in the morning
...did you feel drowsy or sleepy during the day
...did you awaken during your sleep time and have trouble falling asleep again
...did you have trouble staying awake during the day
...did you take naps during the day
....did you get the amount of sleep you needed

• From the IS Index:
  (0 = none, mild = 1, 2=moderate, 3 = severe, 4 = very severe)

-difficulty staying asleep
-how satisfied/dissatisfied are you with your current sleep pattern?
-how noticeable to others
-how worried/distressed are you about your current sleep problem
-to what extend do you think your sleep problems interfere with your daily functioning - fatigue, mood, ability to function at work daily chores, concentration, memory, mood

• From the PghSD:
  (specific numbers/written descriptions)
  -how many naps?
  -how many times did you wake up during the night?
  -different types of waking up?
  -sleep quality - very bad, very good - whole scale between
  -mood on final awakening
  -alertness on final awakening
   

• rom the PSQI:
  How many times do you...
  -wake up in the middle of the night or early morning
  -have to get up to use the bathroom
  -overall sleep quality
  -trouble staying awake while doing things during the day
  -enthusiasm to get things done 

NARROWING DOWN SLEEP ASSESSMENT QUESTIONS
I went through these and narrowed them down and modified them. There were several problems with this. First, I had to include multiple elements to the scale. The SRHI doesn't just include length of time with respect to habit formation. It includes length of time, automaticity, identity, etc.

Secondly,  the all had to be scored similarly. Some were on a 5 points scale, others were specific numbers (how many times did you get up during the night?). If there were differences, different types of questions would have greater or lesser weight. This seems really obvious, but I didn't think of it at first, and I think it's just something to remember in the future when creating metrics.

Thirdly, I had to figure out what time frame the questionnaire would be based on. Most of the exams I pilfered questions from were for a month. I don't think this is very accurate - I certainly don't remember my sleep patterns after a few days. So I'm going with a daily assessment with a weekly average in order to test out variables for a week. 

A MODIFIED SLEEP QUALITY INDEX

1. [Sleep quality at night] How severe was the restlessness of your sleep?
   0=Very Severe, 1=Severe, 2=Moderate, 3=Mild, 4=None

2. [Morning] How well rested do you feel in the morning?
   0=Exhausted, 1=Not Rested, 2=Moderately Rested, 3=Rested, 4=Energized

3. [Rested, next day] How often do you feel drowsy or sleepy during the day?
   0=Incredibly drowsy, 1=Quite Drowsy, 2=Somewhat Drowsy, 3=A little drowsy, 4=Not at all

4. [Sleep quality] How often do you awaken during your sleep and have trouble falling asleep again?
   0=Every Day, 1=Several Days, 2=A Few Times, 3=Once This Week, 4=Never

5. [aps] How often do you take naps during the day this week?
   0=Every Day, 1=Several Days, 2=A few days, 3=Once a Week, 4=Never

6. [General] How often this week did you get the amount of sleep you need?
   0=Never, 1=Once, 2=A Few Times, 3=Almost Every Day, 4=Every Day

7. [Functioning] To what extend do you think your sleep problems currently interfere with your daily functioning?
   0=Every Single Day, 1=Almost Every Day, 2=A Few Times a Week, 3=Once, 4=Never

CONCLUSION + FIRST TEST
Right now, I see my sleep scale to be comprised of both the Habitual Sleep Efficiency (HSE) and the above modified sleep quality index. My intention is to take both every day to be averaged for the week. I'll be doing a controlled test this week, just to see how it works and the ins and outs of taking it. I'll check to see if some elements need to be modified.

Yesterday just happened to be a day that I had a particularly bad night's sleep. Since I already have a habit of sleep recording, it was pretty easy to figure out my HSE.

HSE = Total Hours Slept  (6) / Total Hours in Bed (11) X 100 = 54.5%

Sounds about right.

My, for lack of a better label, "Sukumaran Sleep Quality Index" was a little more difficult. Here were my results:
1. 0
2. 0
3. 0
4. I got up once
5. I took one nap
6. 0
7. 0

Numbers 1-3 were simple. Questions 6 and 7 could be modified to read "Did you get the amount of sleep you needed today?" and "To what extent did your sleep interfere with your functioning today?" respectively. Questions 4 and 5 were weird because though getting up once might be considered a medium response on the Likert scale, repeatedly having to get up over a week might result in a worse score. For question number 5, for a daily question my answer would most likely be binary - either I took a nap or I didn't. Added up for the week would result in a number that means something. So it's really difficult to take the scale accurately for a day.

It might just be best to keep all of this information, plus side notes - like the number of times I feel drowsy during the day (yesterday's total count was 32, tracked with my handy hand tally counter) - in a specified document, or appended to my daily log.

Towards A Master Writing Program

The last few weeks I’ve been under a lot of strain in terms of writing. It’s given me some additional clarity.

NaNoWriMo has honed my ability to bust out a first draft in record time. But that’s not enough. I see writing mastery as a linear game.

Level 1 - Draft Writing
Level 2 - Rewrite 1 - order, transitions
Level 3 - Research
Level 4 - Rewrite 2 - Word choice, how things are said, scamping
Level 5 - Proofing.

Various websites, including THIS one, divide the process into revision, editing, and proofreading, but I’ve seen it described in other ways as well.

This relates to an article I know how to do. This would change depending on the essay’s purpose. For example, writing a story is different than writing a pitch. A story may not need research per se, but may need more depth in regards to character development or world building. So this order might be altered in different scenarios, but generally the conception seems useful so far.

This NaNoWriMo I was under a huge time constraint and writing a draft was particularly painful. I found that in doing 20 (rather than standard 25) minute Pomodoros, I was able to consistently output 1,000 words per session for 3 sessions, after which I needed a break. I feel pretty damn good about that.

I found that in a more recent article, the pain period arose with the rewrite rather than the draft. And the same exact emotional problems arose: the need to do it all at once and the need for it to be perfect. In my mind at the time Levels 2 through 4 were jammed together. James Patterson’s Master Class sneak peak got me past that.

I also found that the pain of editing was very high. I noticed a pattern, that for every 20 minute Pomodoro editing session I paused at 12 or 13 minutes. That pause would break my concentration, and the remaining 7 minutes would be incredibly draining. It really reminded me of what I’d read about Flow states - that keeping in them requires constant positive and progressive stimulation. I appeared to go into mini flow states while working, but jump out of it at  around 13 minute mark.

At this point I didn’t seriously think anything of it. But I decided to experiment to see if anything changed if I instead did 13 minute Pomodoros. The results were quite staggering.

I was able to easily do 6 or 7 sets. I was able to more readily bypass the pain and work forward. I could go longer at a higher level of concentration, even if I didn’t pause after the alarm in order to take a break. It really reminds me of my breakthrough with waking up early - it’s not the alarm that wakes me up since I usually wake up close to an hour before it. It’s the act of setting the alarm and recording my sets that makes a mark on my mind.

I was also eager to squeeze in a Pomodoro even when I didn’t have much time, because, hell, it’s only 13 minutes, right? That is an incredible difference from constantly putting off the work. My failure to start issues evaporated.

It makes me feel, perhaps prematurely, that I’ve nailed the next level of writing. In the last few weeks it caused me to take more assignments than I thought I’d be able to do (what with jet lag and travel), and complete them successfully on a deadline.

There are a few other questions and points going forward.

I’m curious how this affects other levels. Research is the next lull I experience in my writing, and it’s something that I believe requires a strict cut off point, which is slightly different than simply recording 13 minute Pomodoros.

Other techniques, like scamping and a thesaurus at the ready with sentence wording and rubber duck decoding for proofing should be a default. For more complex articles, I’m also having problems with keeping transitions and open loops all in my head, and am testing out an idea that involves a distilled symbolic logic notation - like a programming language - to concisely summarize prose. That way I can easily see the global progression of an article complete with themes and specific transitions. It has still has a lot of kinks, but I hope it will really come in handy for the revision level.

Metrics really help with all this - knowing I can do 3,000 words in a rough draft per hour is relieving in its predictability. I don’t really have that with the other levels involved in completing a piece - yet. It’s something I should perhaps measure. I’m beginning to think I should keep a writing master log so I can better assess this.

This master plan also does not address skill pushes for other types of writing. I believe this is where classes come into play, replacing the role challenges play in other habits (or NaNoWriMo did for me with the draft level). Luckily there are plenty of resources -  I am taking a Gotham class on querying next month, and I’ve already bought the full James Patterson course for Lydia that I’d like to go through as well. The same goes for the specific Holly Lisle courses.

The point of all of this is that often enough knowing where you’re going takes so much of the stress out of endeavors. I often feel totally lost with writing, and have a sneaking suspicion that there really should be a more efficient way to progress in the skill - when I’m not drowning in panic. I think this is the beginning of such an efficient progression.

12 Methods to Combat Procrastination in Habits

I’ve just wok up and completed all tasks except writing. And I just can’t do it. All the procrastination mechanisms in my head kick into high gear. I’m checking email, Facebook, and Reddit incessantly.

This is understandable - writing for me is tied up with all sorts of emotions and fears, and it’s a task with many vague parts. This all reminds me of an article (now a book!) philosophy professor John Perry wrote long ago on procrastination. Procrastinators, to him, are rarely lazy. Rather, they have problems actually doing the task at the top of their list. His initial technique from the original article (I’m still reading his book) is incredibly unsatisfying: fool yourself into thinking that the top of the list is on the bottom. This allegedly works because procrastinators also have high self delusion skills. He then advocates a Lazy Susan approach - rotating tasks to satisfy that need for distraction.

This strategy doesn’t work for me. The task at hand is like touching a hot plate – it’s filled with an initial fear of pain and nothing is going to delude me out of knowing that the primary task is sitting there like a lump of hot lead.

Observing myself, I’ve come to some conclusions. I get tense. It’s an almost unconscious avoidance. It definitely has to do with the magnitude of the task, and it accumulates with tasks further on down the line that I’m not even working on at the moment, making what's directly in front of me feel like an unliftable weight.

With that in mind here are some strategies I’ve come up with:

1) A smooth NLP-like transition that robs you of agency. The ideal is the oft-repeated intro line to most of the yoga classes I took back in 2005.

“As you bring your attention to your breath it will naturally lengthen and smooth out.”

NLP is a weird field, but one aspect I like about it is that it can function like an irrigation ditch for the pond of the mind. If I ask you to notice the tingling sensation at the back of your neck, it really doesn’t matter if there is such a sensation there or not; you’ve probably already brought your attention to your neck.

2) Relaxation. The rising sensation of panic followed immediately by tension and avoidance encompasses the emotional range of failing to start a task. In the face of relaxation tension cannot exist. So, perhaps a relaxation routine can help the starting of practice. This could be something as simple as starting my music playlist.

3) Pomodoros. I used this to great affect this NaNoWriMo, spurring myself to action in spurts. I used a smaller 20 minute increments rather than the standard 25 minutes.

It’s exactly like a TinyHabit, but for an one instance of a practice session.

4) Drop Sets. Drop sets in bodybuilding is a technique of continuing an exercise at a lower weight after muscle failure at a higher weight. I think that if I can’t immediately start a session, there’s nothing going to happen except more dithering. I recently worked through dithering this week by just dropping 30 minute sets to 20 minute. I managed to actually do more work than I usually do despite an immense upwelling of procrastination at the beginning of the session.

5) The 3 second or 5 second rule, which I’ve talked about before. This works hand-in-hand with the previous point and the next one.

6) Jumping into the process with a timer. This has naturally been the best method for other tasks like meditation. If I don’t just start my timer, I just start dithering, but if I start it I’m pulled along almost despite myself. The 3 or 5 second rule helps out with this as well, preventing paralysis by analysis. This works hand-in-hand with:

7) Proper micro formation of a habit. Implementation intention shouldn't just be

when [I take a shower] then [I meditate]  

Rather, it is more efficient (and prevents procrastination) if it’s:

when [I put on my clothes after stepping out of the shower] then [I start my meditation clock and sit down]

6) Ritual. I’ve theorized before that a ritual can help ease the beginning of an action, like overcoming inertia in physics. Athletes seem to use it to great affect, and it functions as a kinesthetic form of anchoring.

7) Smaller transitions in advancement. Jumping from 5 minutes on a rower to 1 hour just doesn’t work. 5 minutes acts because it’s a small change - it’s easier to just do it. Jumping from that to an hour makes it so that there’s a huge wall in your mind. But at the same time you’ve developed a habit of doing that action. And there’s the real problem. On one hand you have to do the task because your habit is solid. On the other hand you cannot accomplish the daily minimum. You’re stuck, and because you’re stuck you can’t skip the task and go on to the next task.

8) Avoiding lags. The one thing I notice is that once I’m working, if there’s a lag, the same painful procrastinatory host of sensations comes up. It’s talked a lot in the discussion of flow states, the conditions of which are incredibly informative when it comes to forming a practice session.

9) Shuffling tasks. The Lazy Susan approach could potentially work to prevent lags. A long time ago when I started shuffling reading multiple books in a session I found I actually read more. I never just have one writing/work task to do - I have a bunch, so it might work to have a list to shuffle through if I ever hit a lag.

10) Artificial Starts.Holly Lisle advocates just writing a nonsense throwaway sentence to get started, which could be incorporated into a ritual.

11) An incredibly clear protocol. In writing I’m now very good at spitting out first drafts. In editing, I get bogged down, and this creates lag, which then creates procrastination and no forward momentum. I’ve discussed about a possible protocol for rewrites courtesy of James Patterson’s Master Class.

12) Block distractors like facebook, reddit, or gmail. I’m hesitant to use such surface level fixes because I don’t believe that they actually address the deeper problems. But it could be something to try.

photocred: tapping pencil by Rennett Stowe, stencil by Kat…, weights by jerryonlife, stop watch by Big Swede Guy, pawn by Rey-Ann Panaligan, 

2016 Year in Review

This has been my best year yet. I’ve experimented with a lot of theory, worked on expanding my habit base, completed a number of challenges successfully, all while traveling quite a bit and adjusting to life in Spain. I’d say the spheres I made huge strides in this past year include Habits, Challenges & Personal Records, and Theory.

Habits
-Demolished my badly formed eating habit and reformed it as a family of small behaviors
-Did the same to my “early wakeup” habit
-Made a superhabit of rowing
-Superhabit of food recording
-Superhabit of pantry checks
-Made a habit of Meal Prep Sunday, my first weekly habit
-Made a superhabit of mobilization
-Superhabit of drinking a morning glass of water
-Superhabit of recording eating
-Superhabit of recording eating
-Started a habit of setting a wakeup alarm, which may of just unlocked becoming a morning person
-Significantly progressed in meditation
-Successfully began implementing multiple habits at once

Challenges & Personal Records
-Completed multiple 8 week HIIT progressions of rowing - like it was nothing
-Completed a 30 day no alcohol challenge
-Completed multiple full courses online - the first courses I’ve completed in over a decade. This stretched my writing habit in all sorts of incredibly uncomfortable new ways
-Completed a 5 day National Novel Writing Month - 50,000 words in 5 days
-Reached over a thousand days in both daily recording and meditation
-Completed and submitted a formal book proposal for this project
-Worked on intensity of habits while traveling, including continuing a HIIT progression while on a conference in Aruba and meditating on camel back on a trip to the Sahara Desert. 

Theory
-Expanded on my theory of Delayed Onset Willpower Drain
-Formed an Identity Model of Habits, which seems to work better for pesky families of habits
-Experimented with Sandbagging in travel
-Reincorporated Challenges as a part of skill pushes rather than as a start to entering into a new habit
-Really delved into how to deal with skill pushes, the final major vector in my model of long term behavioral change
-Discovered mobilization, which I would include as an incredibly foundational behavior base along with meditation.
-Delved into Syncing with significant others, an aspect of vital importance most behavior change people don’t talk about
-Successfully worked on theories behind getting rid of habits

MOST IMPORTANT I have been successful with affecting others. Lydia is a year into a flossing habit. And my mother, is a full 30 days into a recording habit. She has completed this utterly effortlessly, despite, according to her, having so many troubles over the years of choosing to create a habit and sticking to it. I am most excited for her in the coming year. 

For so many, the New Year is a chance to change, but change in the old model is to flex some part of you inside and, statistically, to be found wanting in failure. This new model is about effortless change, where the structure of the implementation and progression bears the onus of success of failure. When my mom talks about how easy it was to get to 30 days, that is everything, and the greatest accomplishment of all for me in 2016.

What I Learned Completing NaNoWriMo in 5 Days - Part II

3) Uncertainty in my editing process prevents me from writing.

NaNoWriMo offers a virtual gift basket of goodies when you’re a confirmed winner. This year’s included a special Master Class session by James Patterson on editing a novel. 

What stuck out was his matter-of-factness on the number of rewrites needed.

“I like to do many drafts…but I do these drafts very quickly - I do not, I don’t get constipated, I don’t get worried, I just keep going, let’s do it again, let’s do it again, let’s do it again…”

Although I’m getting better at outputting a draft, I still get stuck on editing it. Why? For one, it’s a lot harder to quantify. I can quantify rough draft output, and because I have stats I can begin to troubleshoot. How do you judge the quality of an edit? Can you consistently know how much time it will take? Or score it based on its sliding strength quality?

Because I cannot answer these questions clearly, the pressure to do a quality rewrite builds. Patterson doesn’t seem to care - there’s no pressure because he knows that he’ll do a bunch of them. And this prevents him from getting stuck. 

So taking from him, what if I matter-of-factly always had to do 3 rewrites? In my mind, just thinking about that already lessens the pressure I feel, and I think it might function very much like a lowered daily minimum does for starting any habit. Going to the gym for an hour might be a pain, but how does doing two pushups feel?

Conclusions:

First, by quantifying my output it not only makes writing drafts manageable, but predictable. In a larger system of other habits, knowing exactly when I’ll get an article done is priceless. Right now, I can’t predict that unless I’m forced into it on a deadline, and I think that might be one of the bars of a true professional writer. This plays into all sorts of things like long term planning and the regimentation of my day.

Word count also helps me gauge my overall skill at writing rather than placing emphasis on one particular article - it shifts me into a process rather than goal driven orientation.

Secondly, the Pomodoro Technique and just starting the timer completely changes the moment where the habit “fold” is created, especially how it should be efficiently created with implementation intention. Rather than “wake up, then start writing” it’s more “get up, then set up blank page and start timer”. It’s an interesting form of a failure to start, because here properly formed habit has nothing to do with the habit itself, it has to do with the starting of the session regardless of content. And this fits into a meta model I have on self change, namely that once we properly get a system of change going, it works regardless of starting state. Self change then becomes more about the system rather than the person. More on that in another post.

Lastly, mastery over writing, something I’ve struggled with, comes in three major parts. Writing a draft, research, and editing. I’m nailing the draft writing, but research still bogs me down, as does editing. But I believe that Patterson’s approach may definitely be the key to helping me with the latter. It may also be a technique for dealing with other habits where clearly quantifying progress is not as possible.

photocred: rewrite by Alonso Mayo, microscope by Kiran Foster, folded paper by Deb Etheredge