Widgets and an Expanded Plan of Habit Formation Towards Mastery

Habits are a pain, Mastery of a skill is even more of a pain. But doing this for several habits? That’s a war on multiple fronts.

I’ve had a year’s worth of habit formation under my belt - it’s not even a problem to form one anymore. When I think about pushing this project for the future, I think about a smooth graph of habits working in harmony with one another. What’s this look like?

Imagine an entire plan for a year comprised of superhabit formation, growth cycles smoothly kicking in, ratcheting up, switching of to other skills, a year that’s a symphony of perfectly progressed advancement in all skills. Harmony is achieved by pressing just enough, but not too much to interfere with the continual upkeep of other skills.

What I feel hasn’t been discussed are small protocols that kick in at those breaking points - I’ll call them WIDGETS for now, after the small third party programs on websites or computers that kick in when you need them.

And that’s exactly what I want them to do - a small kick when the system needs it that then go away once their mission is complete.

What are some examples?

-Timothy Ferriss’ DiSSS protocol to push skill mastery
-Protocols for absorption and flow states for progression
-Flow and ritual protocols for regimentation, specifically to avoid worrying and thus leaching willpower when I’m not working
-Having absorptive habits or hobbies to help in not obsessing about pushing skills when not working
-A litany of past successes in order to push past HABIT MANIA - the feeling of needing to do everything at once because everything needed to be in place yesterday
-Other protocols for specifically getting past the emotional aspects of breaking points - like Vipassana to push past depression or that drowning feeling
-Taking weekends off in order to preserve sanity

I think this might be different from a previous idea I had - nested habits . Nested habits are protocols within an already established habit, while widgets would be auxiliary protocols to make sure the whole program (across all habits) is moving as smoothly as possible. So that may or may not include skill mastery pushes.

Timothy Ferris, Rapid Skill Mastery, and My Writing Habit

Timothy Ferriss talks here about how to become world class in any skill within 6-12 months.

It’s a great talk and it touches on a lot of things I’m about - minimalism, and optimizing progress. And it talks about complex skills that are composed of a number of smaller skills. Conglomerate skills that have a tendency to easily frustrate people because there’s not something you can latch onto. Cooking was one such skill for Ferriss, and the reason why he called his book on mastery The 4-Hour Chef.

His methodology is DiSSS.

Deconstruction, Selection, Sequencing, and Stakes

Deconstruct a complicated task, focusing in the first 5 sessions to avoid basic mistakes people make in the task. Select the minimal skill that the majority of the larger skill relies upon (the Pareto Principle), question sequencing with the knowledge that in many cases doing things out of order might be better, and up the stakes to increase behavioral change through motivational factors. He adds that repetition of deconstructed skills when it’s not for real (learning how to sautee with coffee beans on a carpeted floor) is key, as is the belief that it can be done, questioning best practices, and focusing on removal and minimalism.

My question: how do I apply this to writing?

After brainstorming and thinking a lot, here’s my protocol based on my key weaknesses when writing any given article:

Week 1

Research. I have a tendency to get bogged down, so I’m going to practice quickly researching articles. What do restaurants have on their menus? When were places opened. In a lot of cases it may just involve cutting and pasting in a list. I should avoid getting bogged down in research and general internet distractions.

Week 2

The majority of articles are good because of transitions which meld research fragments and personal descriptions to a storyline. On my writing blog I’ve already researched an analyzed a number of transitions. So I’ll just choose transitions that work between the research points - this is also sequenced out of order, per Ferriss’s advice. 

Week 3

Actually writing the middle adding personal descriptions to the research and the transitions.

Week 4

Doing the same for endings. 

Week 5

Editing

The idea with all this is that beginnings are actually not really key. I can take a lot of articles and write them from different high points in the action. But the other things are, in my opinion, key points starting from research and descending.

My plan is to ATTEMPT to do this similar to a newbie mission - 2 articles in one hour, for 2 hours. Depending on how fast I get, I want to expand that to 3 per hour for 3 hours. The key is to do this quickly yet well, working on broken up skills in order to gain familiarity and to be able to execute each part with no hesitation because I’ve done it so many times.

I believe that I will be able to pare this methodology with habituation, which is why I’m not including the Stakes aspect to this. I might be wrong, I might need it, but we’ll see. This skill pushing will constitute completion of the instance of habit exercise, i.e. a “check” for having completed my habit of writing for the day.

This might not work. I might have to do each task until it becomes the new ratchet point, and I have NO idea how long that will take. Do I need to do each part longer? Is this the growth phase, and after this 5 week cycle will I have to come up with a new daily minimum? Probably. Do I need to record the writing habit again until the daily minimum becomes a superhabit? Will Ferriss’s skill mastery methodology trump my own habit heavy methodology? I have no idea…but I’ll find out.

Strategies Towards Skill Mastery

photocred: Alexandre Keledjian

I’ve been struggling a lot lately with Skill Mastery.

I have no problem creating a habit. But moving forward with skills is another story. 

It all started when my mom talked to me about why I didn’t try mastering one skill and then just moving on. It stayed with me….why aren’t I doing that? And what should I be doing? Should I be focusing on one thing or should I be expanding to encompass the full complement of what I think of as basic habits?

On one hand, basic habits back each other up. Writing and marketing are great complements, as are eating right and exercising. Some habits just need that - habits with no skill mastery. But on the other hand I can’t shake the sense that I’m not progressing enough. I see a friend who got into weight lifting and is now ripped. Another who is into writing and is now publishing a lot.

My conclusion is that I need more than one habit. The point of this project isn’t to do one thing and then move on. It’s to do many things at once - so how can I strategize to move forward in skills.

I’ve talked about this in a recent post, but I believe it’s about strictly maintaining all habits to daily minimums and dialing up one skill. I envision it as a line of attack…like Go, skill mastery, habit acquisition, and regimentation involves multiple fronts and battles.

Strictness is important - regimentation becomes incredibly hard when Endurance and Willpower are leaking out, even in tasks that are easier or addictive. I enjoy meditating, and I often do more, but when I get to my skill I want to really improve - in this case, writing - I don’t have the energy.

So here’s my overall daily minimals:

Fixed Meditation: One bout of single pointedness

Bodyweights: 2 typewriter pushups or bridges

Dynamic Meditation: 20 minutes

Marketing: 1 action-oriented task

Ratcheting Specifics

On my trip to Dallas I’ve done pretty well, but because my food choices have been poor, it’s once again led to thinking about the specifics of daily minimums when traveling -  as well as ratcheting.

Here was the list in my own head about ratcheting structures for current habits:
Fixed meditation: anchoring and tantric transformation –> vipassana and jhana
Bodyweight exercises: 2 pushups –> 2 typewriter pushups
Writing: 50 words –> 200 words
Dynamic meditation: 20 minutes –> 1 hour

What’s left out is a clear minimal for eating, marketing, and if it’s possible to have a daily minimal for recording. And this is important, because I’ve noticed that not having a clearly distinguished line between failure and completion is an anathema to this project. You never know when you’ve won, and things just start to break down.

For marketing I’ve gone back and forth between doing a time or just one actionable task. I don’t like time requirements - they feel harder to grasp onto. An actionable task could be reading about marketing, doing research, or just doing one thing - lately that’s been folded into my writing editing for tasks needed to launch my new website.

Eating is really hard. I think any line drawn in the sand is better than none. If it’s just one meal a day that’s clean, so be it. That could be minutely increased later to one clean meal and one glass of water instead of a bar drink, then two clean meals, etc, etc.

I have a friend that became vegetarian. What I like about him is that he just owns it. He doesn’t eat meat, period, whether or not he’s traveling or not. Why can’t I work up to that as well?

Recording can be ratcheted. I think a note at the end of the day even if it’s not fully taking the SRHI could be one. Another could be learning to take it from memory, like I’ve discussed before.

How Lack of Proper Weekly Planning Caused Depletion And Messed up Progress in My Week

Like my title? Couldn’t think of one.

So yesterday my project went of course - I ended up getting quite depleted. Willpower reserves 0 after bashing my head into my writing habit. And not really having direction in my marketing habit. This caused me to mess up eating and not record yesterday. Why did this happen?

A number of reasons. One was not properly planning my week. I scheduled a bunch of tasks for Monday which I KNEW I wasn’t going to finish. So I spend the rest of the week trying to catch up, which is not a good feeling, AND it ended up messing up the course of other things I had to do later in the week.

So first - properly plan things out. A part of that is to really break a part tasks. I can’t just say - “Throw up a huge post with pics on my website.”

That task isn’t one task - it’s writing the post, it’s editing it, it’s sourcing the pictures, etc. By NOT breaking it up I am encoding failure in the planning part of my week - I’ve guaranteed failure.

Breaking up tasks is also important because it contributes to a flow state. You get the most progress by having small accomplishable tasks that are challenging that you can go through. Each victory contributes to a momentum of success.

Secondly get up earlier.  I have a sleeping problem. Whenever I wake up late, like I’ve been doing since being in Houston, I wake up behind. Everything shifts. I wake up, and people want me to do stuff. I’m always several steps behind. I’m beginning to understand why a lot of authors got up early early in the morning. There’s no way to get into a groove if you’re being rushed.

But it’s not particularly surprising that all this happened. I’m BAD at planning, and this was only the second time during this project I’ve ever really done it. It really should be a habit for me, as should an early morning wakeup schedule.

Unusual Reflective Tendencies in Habits

I have uncovered a pattern in my urges lately. I have been meditating as I lie in bed about to fall asleep. I’ve been doing some sort of exercise in the afternoons (biking or basketball). I’ve even had strong urges to do casual reading on marketing and do some fun writing in the evening. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about regimentation. Specifically about tasks that are absorptive yet fun that will take me away from worrying about my daily habits - yet most of the tasks are almost mirroring my beginning day tasks. It’s almost as though I’m subconsciously bookending the end of the day to reflect the beginning.

One explanation is that I’m grasping. I’m clenching at tasks and using regimentation as an excuse to worry through doing the same tasks again.

But I really didn’t notice this as a pattern at all until late last night. I was wondering how weird it would be (and what the repercussions would be) if I doubled down on habits per day. Then I realized - I kind’ve already do it!

I have no idea what this means. And I might actually try to double down in a day and see how it affects my endurance reserves throughout the week. We’ll see.

Regimentation Strategies and a Rudimentary Scale

Here’s my first rough Scale for Regimentation:

1) When I do a scheduled task I do not think of other tasks
2) When I end a scheduled task I do not continue to think of it afterwards
3) I am able to leave off thinking of work when work is done
4) I don’t work when it’s not time to work
5) There is a strong line between work and non-work for me
6) Work stress doesn’t tend to worry me out during non work times
7) I quickly get into a relaxed state once I finish work

Each question is a 7 point Likert Scale as is the Grit Scale and the SRHI. Do not agree at all = 1, Strongly agree = 7. I just took this and I scored a 17 our of a possible 49 points. Which sounds about right.

Some possible additions?
-I tend to put off tasks (procrastination seems to be a factor in regimentation)
-I tend to ramp up and ramp down depending if it’s work or relaxation (might be too simple to question #7

Some Strategies:

“Sticky” or Absorptive Hobbies 
Not looking at things like Facebook/work email
Spend time outside
Try to steer clear of staring at a computer screen.
Having weekends
Charting out a schedule for free time - I have a  tendency to let everything drop which inevitably leaves me feeling like I didn’t DO anything during my free time. Some amount of lazing is great, but total lazing makes me feel like I didn’t quite relax enough, as odd as that sounds.
Having an intention to not think of work stuff and to relax

The Weekend Power of Habit

I endeavored to take this weekend off. 

I automatically did all my habits on Saturday. And I did several of my habits yesterday (Sunday). There was a point where I was out with a friend and we had planned to go to a place that had only clean meals. We instead went to a Tex Mex place (my kryptonite). 

I automatically ordered a salad. It came completely covered with fried tortilla strips. And I just automatically pushed them to the side and ate everything else.

This is actually working. It’s something that I don’t really believe because the results aren’t immediate. But it’s in moments like that where I begin to understand that my self control is shooting through the roof - that’s definitely no the person I was 1 year ago.

My weekend in general was incredibly relaxing. I am starting to really focus on regimentation and am now really convinced that the art of regimentation is a significant and important part of this project. I think it’s something that most people have problems with - the ability to be completely caught up in something and just, in the next moment, completely forget about it. I think an inability to do this results in massive leaks in self discipline across time.

Weekends Off?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the off time regarding this project. A lot of sources highly encourage things like taking weekends off to prevent to boost productivity for the week. Other sources also highly recommend increasing the value of time off with things like hobbies - Warren Buffet plays the ukelele, Bush oil paints, etc.

These are, perhaps, two separate issues but they’re only getting more distinct as I mull it over in my head. For weekends off, on one hand, it seems antithetic to my project. A habit is something you do automatically with regularity. Ideally that means every day because the more regular a task is the more (presumably) benefits you’ll reap. Automatic tasks don’t sap will, so why take weekends off?

There are some counters to this. Certain tasks are a pain to do and do take energy no matter if they are habits or not. The act of sitting down to write is automatic, but actually working through editing a text is hard. And presumably that’s because I’m not just executing a habit, I’m also working on a difficult skill, which does sap resources. 

It becomes more and more clear that all of this isn’t just 2 dimensional graph, it’s at least three dimensions with various phases. And rejuvenation may not just be needed for habituation, but it may well be needed for increasing in skill towards mastery.

So perhaps habits not yet in 70′s or 80′s can be dropped on the weekends. After all, the more I do a task, the more it gets to be a superhabit. But once it’s a superhabit, I’m on the skill/mastery track. Perhaps weekend habits can be maintained by doing something fun and easy - a fun bit of writing, a walk for working out, a pinterest safari for marketing, etc.

But another argument for weekends even while forming a habit comes from the SRHI. It’s pretty hard to gauge whether it feels weird NOT doing a habit if you’ve never not done it. A weekend away from habits can, at some point, be a proving ground for that feeling, gauging its strength.

The worry with all this is getting so exhausted that all of it collapses. I’ve been taking more weekends off in year 2, and I’m still wondering if it should be a part of my schedule. Definitely hobbies and regimentation and not worrying after work will help. But I have to wonder if this is another hole in the system I need to plug in.

Right on Schedule: Emotional Breakdowns a Week into New Habits

Yesterday was rough, and today started really rough. Ego depletion, rapid surging of worry and insecurity, a difficulty keeping my emotional state steady. I feel totally overwhelmed. 

Last week I had tons of energy. My sleep was great, my wake ups were great. Lydia noticed I had a restless energy about me, and she stated that it had happened before. Apparently there’s a trend I have that when I start a new habit, I get excited - I want to do more AND I then get into a slump afterwards - a feeling of being up to my eyeballs with work and a sensation of drowning etc.

I just went back into my logs and did find this trend to be true (when I recorded my emotional states). There are several habits where I had fantastic sleep, energy, and emotion in the first week of a new habit, followed by a depression and bad sleep, followed by a stabilization. 

This is really interesting and really REALLY important, practically speaking, and is exactly the reason why I wanted to record all this - to spot trends. In knowing I’m going to go through this I can distance myself from it and understand that it will take a period to stabilize it. It also makes forgiveness and setting really low completion thresholds a la TinyHabits incredibly important.

Why is this the case? My tentative theory is that Endurance reacts slower than Willpower. Willpower, according to the studies, depletes immediately - you do a task designed to deplete willpower (don’t eat that donut!) and then do an unsolveable puzzle and the time it takes you to get upset and storm out of the room on the latter task becomes noticeably less. 

The Endurance load only settles after a time - it has to by definition because it’s willpower across time! But it only settles to affect daily emotions later. 

As to why I feel all energetic in the first week ….well that’s beyond me!

A Few MORE Thoughts on Regimentation

If we were to define Regimentation it seems as though it consists of a few aspects:

1) Focusing on the task at hand to the exclusion of other tasks
2) Not clinging to tasks after their appointed time
3) Rest and Relaxation (which ties into number 2)

To accomplish this I need to, for 1) have a list of tasks that are completely broken up to their most basic composite actions. That helps me start and forget with ease because I don’t have a hesitation when I start a task - it has already been decided beforehand. The progression and movement forward has already been decided upon. I often worry about what comes next, and that frequently happens in my free time.

But the tasks need to be broken up correctly.

For example one task I have is formatting a blog post correctly to my new website. That’s not an accurate assessment and the structure of that to-do list results in immense frustration and (not to mention willpower leaking all over the place) It’s built into the structure because I’ve planned it improperly.

A better to-do list involves what I really had to do. I had to find a movie clip for the overview of the post. I had to figure out how to stabilize the video, how to select and move clips, how to do a good transition. I’ll then have to figure out why the original video didn’t work in the post preview. Proper planning and breaking up tasks results in a mental feeling of winning. Something I don’t have now even if I’ve worked for hours on something.

That’s the beginning of a task and its execution - for the ending I need to, as I said in a previous post, have a set time - I can’t just keep working and working - that causes a blurring between “work time” and “off time” - and that usually results in me banging my head on the table feeling I’ve failed at life. This also results cheat meals and exhaustion throughout the week, destroying other habits.

The next part of regimentation involves forgetting. How do you forget? Dynamic meditation can be used to stay in the present moment after my habit sequence is completed. My tendancy is to replay and worry and go on tangents about work in my head throughout the rest of the day. This is difficult but might be an unusual case where my habits can actually back each other up, especially if I increase the number of times I do the dynamic meditation habit.

A second strategy is to find some hobbies, which I have severe problems coming up with on the spot because I almost always want to fully master them and put them through the habit formation process. The hobbies have to be casual - HERE’s a site for finding a hobby, and it’s something I’m going to have to think more about.

Another aspect of regimentation is to delve into viewing it as a capacity, like Endurance, Willpower, or Grit.

I’m sure a simple Likert scale could be constructed with questions regarding the ability to stop thinking about tasks outside their appointed times, absorption of other tasks during their structured time, the strictness of work time versus free time, having hobbies, absorption and relaxation index of hobbies, etc.

Why is this important? Because it solidifies it as a skill that can be learned, like habituation or grit - and it formalizes it as such.

Regimentation Part 3: The Fog of Fear & the Repulsion of Planners

In a previous post I took a pic of old habit notes I had from high school and discussed my habits in middle school. I was really bad at them. But that’s ok, I’m getting pretty good now.

Another thing I was really really bad at despite trying constantly was planning. Planning ANYTHING. I had so many planners, but it was really difficult for me to keep to a schedule - it was almost like as soon as I wrote it down something would emerge from me, a perfect procrastinator who would see it as a challenge, preventing me from finishing a task when it was scheduled.

And I still have this difficulty. There’s an almost nebulous revulsion that arises when someone tries to pin me down to something for, say, next wednesday at 4 pm. I start immediately squirming and grasping for ways to at least have an exit should I not want to go to a date when the time comes up.

Yesterday I spent a lot of time trying to nail down tasks for the next 6 weeks. I believe that one aspect of this project that I’m lacking in is week to week, month to month progressions. I should know what I want to accomplish for a month, and how, week to week, the sub projects contribute to that overall goal. And how that goal progresses to the future. Which is essentially the realm of planners.

When I did this a great fog arose in my mind - like some subconscious part of myself was trying to erase the focus for the task of planning. It was agony, which was pretty hilarious. I take this as a positive sign a la Stephen Pressfield - when he talks about that quality as being a compass pointing north - it tells you exactly what you need to work on.

So I need to work on this, and I have to believe that if implement it correctly, I can improve my regimentation ability. Should this be a separate habit? I can see it as a Sunday task, sitting down to plan out what I need to do for the week and course correcting. It would certainly give me the opportunity to experiment to see how only doing a task once a week affects the habituation process. It’s something I’ll have to think about.

Regimentation Part 2: Pesky Tasks and R&R

So what should I do?

For one, I need to stop planning in a goal-oriented manner. That means not planning with goals in mind, but for quality time. Like the post I linked from James Clear on Zanshin, everything is aiming. So how do I aim? Start with a small amount of time - in short, it’s recognizing that fighting through difficult pesky and small tasks IS the battle, not some sort of failure before the real struggle.

That can definitely help mitigate that frustration if I know my frustration is solid progress forward. But an equally important ability is to leave work at the door and relax. I think that capacity is something I ignore because A) I always feel like I’m behind and B) I don’t really have many hobbies or relaxing activities. Almost everything I do slides into a desire to want to master it. I bought a calligraphy book and pen a few weeks ago, and I want to master it fully. I started biking, which I used to do purely for fun in high school to get out of the house, and I start thinking about it in terms of steady state cardio. Games get me frustrated a lot of the time. And watching TV shows on my computer often is me just staring at the computer screen like with work AND often has me reaching for something else to do.

This capacity of regimentation seems to me to be equally important as endurance and grit. It’s a handoff - if you have bad regimentation then you’ll leak willpower. Leaking willpower drains endurance - it’s harder to stick things out long-term if you can’t establish success in day-to-day tasks.

Regimentation Part 1

In a previous post I talked about how regimentation, habituation, and mastery are the three different parts of the self improvement process. I’ve talked almost exclusively about the last two - Habituation is the thrust of the whole project what with constant SRHI scores and Mastery is something I talk about a lot when it comes to overcoming skill plateaus.

But I’ve largely ignored describing regimentation - though initially I talked about it a little bit (HERE, HERE, and HERE).

I have severe problems with the mental framework of regimentation, and this severely undermines the structural integrity of this project. What do I mean?

I have an inability to move from one task to the next during the day without carrying the worries of one to the next. I have problems delineating the line between work and relaxation. Lydia has repeatedly suggested I take up a hobby, but I’m largely incapable of doing something purely for the fun of it and not subsume it for some sort of larger project of mastery.

I also have great difficulty in properly planning out a week with tasks that need to be done. I often make the mistake of planning things out in terms of objectives that need to be completed, and biting off way more than I can chew. This results in immense frustration and tension.

For example, yesterday I took some time to plan out the next three weeks in regards to launching a new website. Today’s task was to format one draft of a post. Unfortunately various small bits of that work caused me great difficulty. Italics doesn’t show up properly. The post videos and photos don’t show up properly. I have to edit down the video using software I am not familiar with.

Because I’ve planned it like this the task becomes difficult to win. I’ve programmed goal-oriented thinking with process oriented thinking, which means failures at small points make me frustrated because I feel like I’m failing, and because of that ending time for work extends out for the entire day. And I end up collapsing, “failing”, giving up, but with immense mental self flagellation, which drains all my willpower, preventing me from having a “springiness” of self. It makes other tasks later in the week harder to start.

I just saw a meme about DragonBall Z:

It’s a funny Reddit meme about a fictional martial artist, but basically it illustrates training. Each part is incredibly important - not just the training, but the recovery time and “feeding the machine.” Arnold Schwarzenegger also advocates this in his autobiography. He trains hard, but he warns against grasping too hard. Worrying about tasks causes you to work against yourself - when he works he plays and has fun as well, which contributed in his successes.

Habit Exhaustion, Stalling, and Growth Cycles

My habits, from an automaticity SRHI standpoint, are AMAZING. 

But from a regimentation and mastery standpoint, they’re shaky.

I’m having more difficulties moving from quality practice from one task to the next during a day. The reason is emotional - I feel like I’m not progressing towards Mastery in any given habit. So despite the length of time and the strength of my habits, it’s not paying off enough for me.

The best example is eating - I initially got a great ROI - I lost weight, etc. Now, despite having it solid, I’m hovering around the same weight, while my buddy, who’s been counting calories, has lost tons of weight. I have to remind myself it’s not about the result, it’s about getting good at the process, yet it still bothers me.

Lydia suggests that I should pick one or two specific habits to enter a growth cycle - the problem is that I feel that ALL of them need to be grown - it’s similar to picking a new habit. I feel I need 20 of them. And I feel it’s important to define that emotional state because it’s the cause of a lot of failure - the need to do everything at once, preventing any improvement on anything despite tremendous energy expenditure (emotionally or work-wise). I’ve always referenced it as “life ADD” - but we’ll call it something else. A compulsive urge to multitask and overcommit. I wish I had a good term from engineering for this, because more and more I”m seeing this whole system in terms of locomotion - aeronautics or something, with thrust, drag, acceleration, etc.

And there’s a cloudiness involved with this. I can’t see past the urge to overcommit, but when talking about it I realized that a few things are ok. Eating is ok - I need to clean it up, but it won’t need much additional willpower. It just needs to redirected, as does my fixed meditation. The two things that might actually make the most changes are bodyweight exercises, because it tends to affect mood, and dynamic meditation, which also effects mood. That’s what Lydia says anyways.  I have to think about it more.

TinyHabits, Plateaus and Ratcheting

At some point BJ Fogg talks about how a habit, when properly planted, will grow on its own. He then follows up by talking about how many pushups he does now (I think this is in his TED talk).

I don’t think think this is accurate - and I think a lot of habit researchers make leaps simply because they don’t have enough data. At 321 days of recording my own bodyweight habit, I’ve stalled. 

I started with a basic two pushup habit like BJ Fogg, then it grew - I was doing a pushup progression getting into typewriter pushups, as well as burpees, bridge progressions, etc. Which was great.

But recently I gone back down to two pushups after traveling and introducing other habits. I’m back down to the basic two pushups.  This makes sense considering other sources who talk about plateaus as inevitable. A plateau requires a push to get past.

I understand what Fogg is saying - we do have an artificially created growth cycle when we pass the danger period through making deliberately small habits - it’s as though we’re chomping on the bit but we’ve been forcing ourselves to take it slow. Graphically, the TinyHabit shifts a lot of things over.

But AFTER that initial growth cycle, we need to deliberately push ourselves. Because it ain’t gonna grow on its own.

The problem comes when we introduce multiple habits - also something most habit researchers don’t have data on over long periods. Other habits that are entering a danger zone or a growth cycle will inevitably leach willpower from habits that are floundering. There’s just not enough ambient willpower to sustain growth in all fields.

At the same time the danger is dropping down to the initial TinyHabit for maintenance purposes. You want to drop down to conserve willpower but you still want to keep the habit.

I’ve done this with my pushup habit.  But the thing is, my maintenance level shouldn’t be 2 regular pushups now. It SHOULD be two TYPEWRITER pushups. Going back down to the initial TinyHabit reverses progress rather than maintaining it.

So I think a new protocol for Willpower cycling would be to ratchet TinyHabits for maintenance. At periodic points in a habit’s lifecycle a line must be drawn to determine what a TinyHabit is in each category of habit for the express purposes of keeping up the habit without reversing progress. Maintenance levels for habits have to be progressive across time.

What’s exciting (well, to me at least) is that a TinyHabit has a different graph and lifecycle than a regular habit - and this can and should be mapped out to prevent problems later down the road.

Zanshin: Learning the Art of Attention and Focus From a Legendary Samurai Archer | James Clear →

A great article on Zanshin by James Clear. I think it’s an excellent illustration of the state of relaxed focus AND process oriented thinking.

Focus on the process, and the results become a side effect. 

“It is not the target that matters. It is not the finish line that matters. It is the way we approach the goal that matters. Everything is aiming. Zanshin.”

A Practical Discussion on How to Reach Harmonic Consonance with Multiple Habits

Right now I have several superhabits. My eating is about to achieve superhabit status, I’ve dropped my work habit, and my dynamic meditation is already at the habit stage.

So why am I having days where my willpower/endurance is utterly drained?

There are probably several reasons that involve sleep and eating - I’ll brainstorm other variables later. But one main reason is that I’m pushing a lot of my habits and trying to break out of plateaus in superhabits. Here’s a rundown:

Bodyweight exercises - I’m trying to push the number of reps and I’m including other exercises like squats and reintroducing tabatas.

Fixed meditation - I’m switching from basic meditation to first bringing up negative emotion and then quelling it

Eating - I’m at the verge of a superhabit here. I theorized that right before gaining superhabit status there’s another danger zone. And danger zones are where endurance takes a hit.

Writing - I’m trying to write things that are really difficult for me, specifically research-based writing.

Dynamic meditation - I’m extending my sessions from 20 minutes to an hour. This has largely happened naturally, but I might have pushed it a little too fast.

Those are at least 4 drains of my willpower/endurance. Of COURSE I’m barely getting through the day. But how do I solve this?

Ideally what I imagine in graphic form is a series of constantly shifting willpower/endurance drains, where some habits are reined back and one is put into overdrive.

(apologies for the bad sketch)

So in the top left is stage 1 where the second habit will require more willpower for one reason or another. And in the top right in stage 2 willpower requirements are shifted to the first habit. The bottom two are the same habits with regards to work or improvement. Ideally willpower gets you past a hump and when willpower normalizes, you can use that excess on busting past plateaus or whatnot in other habits - BUT output remains the same as when you were expending more willpower.

So right now I want to improve writing. I want to form a nested habit of research-oriented writing. But really it’s not a full habit - writing isn’t a big deal, it’s getting over the automaticity of starting research-oriented writing. If I were to record this, I wouldn’t do the full SRHI - I’d probably just include automaticity questions, and I’d think of implementing a Greasing the Groove strategy to get it done faster.

While I’m leaking willpower/endurance for this, I should dial back all other habits to maintenance mode. So bodyweight exercises are just at pushups and bridges. Meditation, I’m just doing basic meditation, for dynamic meditation I’d do 20 minutes.

Once I’ve successfully overcome the fear of research-oriented writing and I can do the task fluidly, I can bring it back as one slot in a greater writing habit and cycle it along with pitching, writing improvement, narrative first drafts, etc.

I think I once called this process “crutching” because it reminds me of leaning on something in order to maintain forward motion.

I think this process is very interesting because it’s this intersection of regimentation, habituation, and mastery of a skill that things all get really dicey. Either you lose a habit, or your skating along, or everything collapses.

Habit Harmonics

Harmonics is the word I’m using for how two habits interact with each other. I don’t know if it’s truly correct, but it’s what I’m using now.

Imagine two strings in a graph. The two strings represent a habit. Each string plays off one another.

Since willpower is one depleteable reserve, if two habits are draining more than their normal share (when being in a danger zone or through busting through a plateau) they will work against each other in habit dissonance.

To prevent that from happening when training multiple habits, a larger view has to be taken that takes into account the willpower/endurance drains of ALL habits. As more habits get trained (like in this project) this dance becomes more and more delicate.

It’s similar to that moment during the danger zone where the habit seems like it’s going to fall a part. The delicate part is managing any drainage through things like making a TinyHabit.

But when it all works together, habits start backing each other up in habit consonance.

So imagine a scenario - you’re in shape, you enjoy being outdoors. Your friend calls you up, and they want you to come out to play beach volleyball. You say yes and everyone is in swimsuits playing on the beach.

If you are in shape, you are more likely to go along with this. You are athletic so there’s no embarrassment. You have friends that are also athletic, you have no shame in just being in trunks. All of this is less likely to occur if you aren’t in shape. All of your habits - your social circle, your workout habits, your eating, going outdoors - all of this is pushing you to greater amounts of physicality. All your habits back each other up.

Another example of habit consonance is the idea of a habit singularity, where there is an explosive growth in habit formation. All basic habits are taken care of - there’s no question you’re going to workout - but how you do it changes. Habits act as slots that can be mixed and matched smoothly. This is perhaps the apex of habit consonance.

The problem is how to get there if multiple points in a given habit draw more willpower/endurance, and we’re trying to train multiple habits.

A Robust(er?) Model of Self Improvement - Part III

Assuming that these three variables are correct, the next question for me is how to express this as an equation.

I asked Lydia’s father, Bill Schrandt, who is a mathematics teacher, about how one can express a line through 3 dimensional space.

The ensuing discussion got into vectors, eigenvalues and eigenvectors, and projectiles and rocket motion. What I got out of it was that it’s much easier to deal with expressing planes, and much much more difficult to express a line - much less a curved path in 3 dimensions. This is something I’ll have to look into in more detail.

But another way to go about this is to figure out how all these values and variables work together outside of a graph.

And he agreed with me in that this all sounds very similar to basic physics - friction coefficients are needed depending on how much willpower a task takes. TinyHabits allow you to cross over danger zones because there’s less of an Endurance load on repeated habits. Willpower reacts differently across time…it sounds very much like a kinematics problem in physics.

So here are some of my basic relationship thoughts with regards to coming up with a habit equation:
-Endurance is Willpower across Time just as velocity is distance across time

-SRHI has a reciprocal relationship to Endurance. As the SRHI for a task approaches perfection (84) Endurance needed decreases and approaches 0

-We can reverse engineer an Endurance scale. If the SRHI is 12 (minimum) then the Endurance load is at a maximum of 72. If the SRHI is at a maximum of 84, then Endurance is at a minimum of 0. 0-72 scale for Endurance.