How to Unlock Transitions in Long-Term Productivity

The simple repetition of solid habits isn’t enough - a lifetime of growth relies on adaptation.

Over the last few weeks my system has glitched. 

When my meditation course finished, I floundered.

I borrowed a rower, but I had to return it as soon as I developed a strong, basic habit. When I pivoted to walking, it got really hot and my habit was inconsistent. And my covid reset attempt fizzled out within a few weeks.

One thing I’ve learned in this project is that there’s always a reason for why things fail that’s more complex than “I just couldn’t do it”. And there were plenty of reasons for failure here.

Enacting all these changes at once was dicey to begin with. A global pandemic, race riots, and a very intense meditation course didn’t help either.

But more importantly, there were deeper, systemic flaws.

PLANNING FOR CHANGE

In the sci-fi show The Expanse, Joe Miller is a cynical, world hardened gumshoe who describes the dangers of walking into rooms. 

“I keep warning you. Doors and corners, kid. That’s where they get you.”

I feel that’s a good metaphor for my recent failures. 

When my rower had to be returned (like I knew that it would) I didn’t have a plan. When my meditation class ended, I didn’t know how to step back into a normal practice. And that’s consistently the biggest problem at the end of any challenge or growth cycle.

Sometimes it works on its own. When I went back to my normal writing after NaNoWriMo, I just naturally wrote more. But such natural growth all-too-often just fizzles out. 

BETTER MENTAL CONTRASTING

One way to navigate these danger zones is a more robust form of mental contrasting. 

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A technique pioneered by psychologist Gabriele Oettingen, mental contrasting uses positive AND practical projections to come up with a plan that often works better in long-term change.

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In mental contrasting you project ahead to any barriers you think you’ll have in your bourgeoning habit and figure out strategies to overcome them in advance. This usually includes alternative activities. If, say, it’s raining and you know you won’t run in bad weather, you’ve got to plan around that.

But another obvious element to include is how exactly you’re going to grow the habit. 

I didn’t formally do this for rowing at all – even though I knew the rower wasn’t going to be here for long. 

Addressing the big picture involves knowing what the next transition will be in order to level up a behavior. If I had planned to switch to another exercise habit and formalized it, I might’ve known that walking in the Texas heat would get to me.

TRANSITIONS

If cross training and pushing a habit are the “corners” in this metaphor, then life transitions are the doors. Visits, travel, the end of a job or the start of a new one - life intrudes, and when it does it disrupts the system. Suddenly cues that were automatic aren’t so strong any more.

One way to transition is to plan a break. They’re critical for rejuvenation, yet I only really take time off when I’m forced into it kicking and screaming.

Another way is to abruptly end a habit and start a new one. In a previous post (“Killing Habits is Just as Important as Forming Them”), I talk about how it’s important to set a transition point, and suggest that 3 months might be a good time to do that even if there’s no other external change.  A formal hand off to the next set of cues to crosstrain a skill-based habit is imperative. 

However, I think that there might be a better method. In THIS post, I theorize an “unzippering” method to create two habits for the willpower price of one. I think I might be able to use this theory to splice in a new habit into the ending of the old one. This would allow for a smooth transition between multiple habits within a lifestyle such as exercise.

If I had tapered off my rowing habit while on-ramping walking, maybe I’d still have a continuous workout lifestyle right now.

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All of this requires quite a bit of planning to orchestrate with any amount of continuity. That’s a skill I’m still working on.

But Detective Miller was right – Plans perish in portals and passages. 

I don’t intend mine to die quite so easily.

TAKEAWAYS

1. When planning a skill-based habit, always include the plan for the next progression

2. When mental contrasting, be on the look out for any personal transitions, whether it’s a trip, a visitor, or the ending of a class or challenge. Prep for what you’ll do right after that point.

3. Plan time off.

4. Try to smoothly transition from one habit to the next in a lifestyle.

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.