“Changing Gears” & Pushing Writing

A colleague of mine always uses this phrase when she has to switch her work emphasis from, say, writing to photo editing -  and she does this ALL the time. Fresh off my travel and habit sandbagging challenge I was hoping to luxuriate in my slow and steady habits, but I need to change gears as well. 

I was hanging out last night with Lydia and she said something to the effect of “wouldn’t be neat if you were completely done with your book proposal by next Monday?”

Yes, Lydia, it would be. And she described it as tapping into the same mania that had me finishing NaNoWriMo in a week this past November.

“I can already see the gleam in your eyes,” she said.

She was right. So, I’m going to try it. It will also be a really good way to look into some concepts I’ve had in my periphery - Cal Newport’s idea of Deep Work, Scott H Young’s ideas on Deliberate Practice, and Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s concept of Flow. 

When I usually do a challenge I drop a lot of things down to minimums. In this case I’m going to drop meditation down to 10 minutes, simply because it really messes with my energy levels, I’m not at a place to really push it (I think I need to do a retreat or get used to sitting and meditating, both of which would require too much right now). Working out, even when doing 3 HIITs a week, is strangely relaxing and lifts me up, and other tasks are already at ludicrously low minimums. 

I also believe this will get me used to doing both parts of writing in concert - writing (scamping) and editing. I want to figure out a process for doing both really well. I’ve written about how for Flow states you need to have some sort of metric, and that’s easy enough for writing (words/time), it’s not so easy to grade editing.

But I guess we’ll see. You learn in the doing!

Strategies to Upkeep Intensity of Habits During Travel

If the gold prize for behaviors is being able to inculcate them extremely fast, then silver surely goes to being able to maintain and maybe even push habits through interruptions like travel.

Next month, Sept 12 - 17th, I’ll be traveling to Aruba for a conference. Normally when this happens I attempt lowered minimums for a few days, abandon all my habits, then pick them up a few days after I get back.

Doing that is really really good. Progress isn’t made, but my habits continue - and that used to be impossible for me. I’ve done this new behavior more times than I can count now.

But I want to push it. When I normally think about sustaining the same levels of habits through travel I think in terms of the minute - I think about if I’ll have the time, or if I’ll have access to wifi, or space to do pushups or whatever. This time I want to experiment by thinking of it in terms of general mechanics.

I see people who do sprints and workout while on vacation - why can’t that be me? Maybe it’s not the details that matter, maybe those are excuses used to cover a lack of willpower?

The next question becomes how can I increase willpower for the duration of that week? In “Sandbagging” I described Lydia’s idea of starting more habits and later losing a few in order to artificially boost the remaining one. In “Skill Pushes and a Looming Problem: Strategies” I describe a “Dragon Ball Z/Kung Fu” Method of pushing skills.

Widening this theory, what if I increased the system load of all my behaviors the week before the trip? Generally speaking I tend to feel the affects of such loads several days to a week later. My theory is that by overloading the system before, I’ll be able to artificially boost willpower in the system by dropping down to my regular habits.

What does that actually look like?

I’d say that 4 or 5 days before traveling I’d up all my minimums. 4 rounds of writing, 45 minutes on the rower for LISS, and additional 20 minutes of LISS on HIIT days, 45 minutes of meditation, extra mobilizations, earlier sleep times.

Then drop down to normals once I get to Aruba.

Here’s hoping it works!

Eternal Recurrence of the Habit Former’s Soul

A few days ago I was bemoaning my lack of social connections in this city. I am, or used to be, a very social person, and I miss having a solid community after a few years of hopping around from place to place. Now that I’m in a city I love, it’s just not happening.

This wasn’t a normal frustration based simply on not having friends. It was about feeling behaviorally undercut - that I couldn’t develop those connections because I had so many other things to work on that should have been taken care of already.

Then I had a weird sense of deja vu, a sensation I’ve been experiencing more and more during the course of this project - I had felt that particular set of emotions before. When I was in Brazil, slowly and painfully developing my recording habit, I bemoaned the fact that working out and trying to get in shape just wasn’t happening.

Since summer has officially begun in Barcelona and the siren call of the outdoors is singing loudly to me, I recently bemoaned why I can’t already just be an outdoor person. I’ve sensed that feeling  - the undercutting - when waking up late, feeling rushed, and knowing that I should have already become a morning person. It’s a weird sense of guilt of not already doing something, like when I feel like I’m not being enough of a traveler here in Europe. I’m working on things, I know, but the guilt wells up when I see people coming for a week and really soaking up the culture in a way I’m not ready to do yet.

But when I set that feeling aside and work on nailing the small behaviors I get somewhere. When I run around from one pull to the next I make absolutely no progress.

Suddenly I felt really happy - I’m nailing my eating, which I bemoaned before. I’m nailing working out, which I also bemoaned before. I have no doubt I will get around to mastering the shift to becoming a morning person, and outdoors person, and eventually a social person again. 

But this time around, I will bring all my other habits to socializing - it won’t be staying up late nights, or eating whatever, and having friends with whoever happens to be nearby just because it’s convenient. It will be me becoming the specific type of social person I want to be. 

That’s a place I’ve never been before.

photocred: Stairwell by mark, chess pawn by Ahd Photography

Towards an Identity Model of Habits: Part II

How exactly do you train a new identity?

That’s the big question, and it sometimes feels like an unsolvable riddle.

The Greek philosopher Zeno had a series of paradoxes where he posited the impossibility of motion. In one, the Dichotomy Paradox, he states that in order to travel from point A to point B, one has to go through a midpoint, point C. In order to get to point C, one has to get halfway there, point D. One has to do this an infinite number of times, which is impossible. Therefore travel to point B (and all travel) is impossible. Yet we disprove logic like this every day.

I’ve deluged friends like James with questions, but the details come out vague. Somehow, like travel, they just did it, and the same thing applies to me and the identity habits in my own life. It just happened, and how I hate that response!

One methodology around this vagary comes from Neuro-Linguistic Programming. In it the founders, Richard Bandler and John Grinder, advocate taking exceptional people and breaking down their actions into composite parts in order reproduce their resulting….exceptionalness. Although I am as of yet unconvinced of NLP as a whole system, I like this technique. According to Bandler and Grinder many of their models were using tacit techniques, and it was only by breaking them down could they repeat their results. In Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H. Erickson, M.D. the duo dedicate one entire volume to the famed clinical hypnotist’s verbal patterns and a further volume just for his nonverbal cues.

But it’s not as though identity isn’t already a part of habit formation anyway. The Orbell-Verplanken SRHI has several questions dedicated to identity. My move to an identity theory of certain habits is more because I believe ALL the little bits – including gamification and motivation – are cogs in a robust mechanism of self change.

What I want is to use all those cogs to construct a training protocol to make certain behavior’s identities more than just simple if-then grooves in my mind so that I have behaviors that cover radically changing circumstances. For some behaviors, it’s not really that necessary. For some they definitely are.

Milton Erickson was arguably the most famous and successful clinical hypnotist, but his students weren’t necessarily any better than average. But by putting a microscope to his actions Bandler and Grinder were (allegedly) able to reproduce the results. I don’t know for certain if this reducability worked for them with hypnosis, but I have definitely seen it work for other behaviors.

I hope, in Part III, to put people who have developed Identity Habits under the microscope to reverse engineer some plausible methods for this type of change.

mask by 派脆客 Lee, hypnotic pendulum by Ray Scrimgeour

Recharging Habits

Since finishing NaNoWriMo my writing habit has been lax - automaticity has been difficult to achieve. A part of that has to do with improper transitional planning - I knew exactly what I had to do during my 30 day challenge, and after it ended I was left swinging in the wind. 

Another aspect is a lack of a proper implementation intention. It had been eroded by my recent travels, and for NaNoWriMo it had changed. My unstated implementation was “write A LOT” - which I did. But shifting gears to a normal schedule my if-then protocol was gone. And this is very noticeable when compared to my very new rowing habit, which has a crisp if-then (as soon as I get up, I row), a fact that’s reflected in rapidly soaring SRHI scores.

I switched up my routine yesterday and today, immediately writing after rowing. It just feels more automatic. It appears that the closer I have a task to waking up, the more charged the habit gets. Why? I think it has to proper implementation - the further a long in the day the more willpower stores are depleted. Also more tasks come up later in the day. I need to eat, I need to go to the bathroom, I need to cook. All of those tasks are not precisely pinned down - they change, making the implementation sloppier.

That usually doesn’t matter so much - but after various forms of degradation (travel, a 30 day challenge, getting sick), it starts to make a big difference in automaticity. 

A while back I talked about the potential that all long-term habits may need a “re-charge” once and a while. Scott Young, in his post “Why is it So Hard to Create Permanent Habits?” describes this train of thought.

In the post Young talks about how many habits have to be restarted. We want to think they will be permanent, but they often aren’t - habits for him are a medium-term strategy. They are, in his terminology - “metastable” - they lower thresholds of action in some ways, but not all ways. And because of this, they often have to be restarted depending on the changing action you are doing in the habit. 

This idea of metastability conforms to my experience as the reason why I’ve found few habits have had permanent lifespans. Inevitably, the habit breaks down because of a temporary lifestyle change: a vacation, an illness, needing to move or work overtime. These create shocks which are often enough to break the behavior, increase the decision cost, making it no longer automatic when you return to the habit. 

http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2015/03/25/permanent-habits/

His full post is really interesting, and I’d like to analyze it fully in a separate post. I agree that shocks will destabilize habits. But I think proper mid-range planning can compensate allowing you to “shelf” some habits at lower daily minimums (which he mentions) or, in this case, “recharge” them by rotating them in a daily regiment. 

I also think that tempering a habit comes with these periods of unstableness - there’s my quarter mark theory, there’s a dip in the graph before a superhabit is formed - without a metric to determine habit strength or a habit of tracking habits it’s hard to see whether a habit is lost, or if it’s still there and going through a weak patch.

Rowing Habit Thus Far

Rowing achieved a 71 on the SRHI on day 22. This is all the data I have so far. If it continues to be locked in in this manner, rowing will be the fastest habit I’ve ever developed.

This means either:

1) My ability to form a habit is changing

2) The proper execution (excellent implementation intention, TinyHabit formation, and mental contrasting) was so good it sped the habit up

3) This habit piggy backed on my previous bodyweight exercise habit

4) It’s not really a habit yet.

We’ll just have to wait and see. But it may just be a counter to the impression I got from Lally’s experiment on disproving the 21 day myth of habit formation, where it was suggested that physical activities are some of the hardest habits (in terms of time) to form.

The Problem With Recording Mastery vs Habituation

It’s a bit difficult. 

Today I’m recording my bodyweight exercise habit. I’m pushing it from the “shelf” of doing two typewriter pushups a day to the “shelf” of also doing tabatas and pull up type exercises across the week.

So what do I record? My typewriter pushup habit is easy to record - but when I do my tabatas I have less automaticity, because it’s understandably daunting.

I’ve been recording it as a whole - which caused a dip in scores. And it makes me think that each shelf is almost like making a different habit, something I’ve jotted down in the past.

This really kicks home with my writing habit - my new shelf is to just open my project and type a word. Usually I do more, but once I do that it’s a check and a win for the day. This has resulted in me being much more automatic - jumping a rapidly shrinking chasm. My question is - when do I move on?

It’s easy if I’m recording my writing - I’ll know it once I get back to full automaticity on the SRHI scale. And that’s good because there’s a concrete methodology for knowing when to push that habit or another habit. But it is a bit clunky. Streamlining the process will hopefully come with time.

This is, I feel, one of the key aspects of this projects many other habit/self help/mastery gurus don’t cover - the fact that progressing over multiple skills can be problematic, as can switching from habit formation to skill mastery.

I absolutely believe both are key - habits get you in a steady extended practice and mastery depends that practice. Working out the kinks in fusing the two are the real problem.

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.

Writing Habit So Far (From Start to Superhabit), SRHI over Time

This graph isn’t very clear cut at all in terms of backing up my Quarter Mark Theory. But analyzing it further there are two big gaps in progression. 

At around day 53 there is huge downturn - actually a gap in recording that occurred. That was during a week of travel to England and France. 

There is another one starting around day 72. This was during another travel to Germany where my computer completely died.

In both cases I wasn’t prepared - I didn’t go lo-tech and I didn’t have a solid implementation intention.

Before both and after both travels I quickly got back to the 70’s in the SRHI.

Does this blow my hypothesis out of the water? I’ll have to keep looking into it.

It is interesting to note that in the first iteration of my writing habit using 750 words, I got to the 70s on day 50 (though at the time I wasn’t taking the SRHI every day - it was more like once a week, if that). And this most recent iteration of the writing habit really did seem to stretch out a lot longer than I would have thought it would. I’m guessing this had to do with the travels and gaps in recording.

This graph might be particularly useful to try to analyze how gaps might stretch out a habit. AND it could be useful to analyze how long it takes for regular habits to become solid superhabits over 80 on the SRHI.

Old School Habits: Habituation Notes from Highschool

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

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

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

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

A more robust iteration of the checklist.

Here you see more of a strategy of regimentation.

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

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

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

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

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

The Next Habit: Writing

Today 3 of my 4 habits reached “Superhabit” status at 80 and above on the SRHI. They feel pretty effortless, especially after getting used to my new unrecorded habit in the last two weeks of starting new duties at work. Two weeks ago I felt endurance depleted, but now I feel very solid, and it has been reflected in my scores.

I think it’s time to attempt a new habit. I thought about a simple habit like flossing, or going back to dynamic meditation. In the book Do the Work Steven Pressfield talks about fear and procrastination pointing to what you should do next. For me, that’s writing - I tend to avoid it like the plague.

My first attempt with this habit was with 750words.com over a year ago! According to my records, it was my longest running recorded habit at 175 days - though I had severe problems with consistency. I officially scrapped it at the end of Feb 2014.

In this new iteration I need to combine all the things I’ve learned so far. I need a solid implementation intention - an if-then of a trigger and the action. This will merge with the idea of “bookending” - doing something as a chain when I get up in the morning. And I need to include BJ Fogg’s notion of a TinyHabit. It also has to be scaleable - I should be able to naturally evolve and add to it.

My bodyweight training is, to date, the most efficient habit I’ve formed - a quick, steady rise to habituation with no real “danger zones." 

So, with all that in mind, my habit will be to write potentially publishable material every day. 750 words isn’t "tiny” so I’ll be writing 200 words a day. And these bits of writing cannot be diaries or meandering thoughts - they have to be something I could actually form into full pieces.

I currently wake up and meditate, then do bodyweight exercises, then record, then start work. I will put writing 200 words right after I record my habits and before starting my real work. This means I will have to off-set the recording of this habit for the next day.

I also need this to be scaleable. So I will first start with 200 words. Once I get good at that, I will extend it slowly by word count, then until I can proof a full basic article of 800 words and have one article ready to publish per day.

In my original 750 words project I would end each session by brainstorming what I would write for the next day. This is also a great practice.

This is going to be really difficult. It’s hard to do this psychologically because I fear it. Also I’m moving to a different country in one week. However, I want habits and habit formation to work irrespective of location changes, so I’d like to start now. I’m also curious if 200 words is tiny ENOUGH. The idea is that it has to be utterly easy - almost ludicrously so. We’ll see how it goes.

I’m nervous, scared, and a little excited - let’s see how this works out!

Graph Day! Graphs of 3 Habits

You might have noticed that I didn’t blog yesterday - my internet was out so I had to do it all offline. But as I went to log it in I went ahead and logged all my travel data into my spreadsheet. Since I had all the numbers, and since my bodyweight exercise is, at least according to the numbers, a habit, I thought I’d do another series of graphs. I omitted eating since I didn’t start recording it from the beginning.

I don’t have time to analyze them today but will do so soon.

X is number of days, y is the SRHI from 12-84.

Record Keeping

Fixed Meditation

Bodyweight Exercises

When and Where

So this is my first “Record Keeping” habit post. 

I decided I would do my record keeping in the morning right after waking up. Although from a memory perspective it would be best to do this at the end of the day or right after doing the task, I find that for the habituation portion “bookending” at the beginning of the day is best. As the day progresses more and more chances for deviation get introduced.

My starting SRHI = 14 for this habit.

I’ve pegged the habit at 40 days - just a rough estimate, but one I will ascertain by taking the SRHI - for this one I’m going to attempt to take it every day as part of my record keeping - I do not know if this will affect the scale, or if it will simply give me more plot points of data.

Since Last Time....750 Words Status Update

 

In my post, A New Plan For Habit Formation Part 3 - A New Hope, I outlined, well, a new plan. I scrapped the old way of doing things and focused specifically on one habit until I reached my estimate for it becoming easier - the halfway point. 

My halfway point for 750 words was 25 days (50 for full automaticity). 

Turns out, in this case, I was spot on. About day 30, I felt a flow to the habituation, supported by two things: A daily progressional flowchart using the ideas in the Self-Discipline in 10 Days book, and the notion of “bookending” - having a daily set of things you do in the morning after getting up and at night before going to bed.

In this case, I used the solid event of getting up and made myself do 750 words right after. By doing this I attached it to a daily event, something I wasn’t doing before. Before I would tell myself to do the task whenever, as long as it got done - and that often resulted in not doing it.

On day 50 I achieved an SRHI Score (a self reported score measuring habitation - I’ll do another post going into this in more detail) of 73 (out of 84) and for me that felt like that habituation was achieved.  

Today is day 71 of 750 words. Despite going on a trip to northern Argentina with long travel days and a few days in the jungle, I’ve been on a 48 day streak, and it feels incredibly solid. This is a huge win, especially looking back at my track record and feeling like I was all over the place.