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

Implementing a Wakeup Habit

As of last week both my small eating habits became superhabits. My plan was to either start a wakeup plan, advance in eating by doing a meal prep on Sunday, or start a walking/being outside habit. 

Lydia and I just got our city bike share card, and had a fantastic day cycling along several beaches, checking out a food festival, and exploring a park. It got us really excited and we sat down and decided we want to become outdoorsy, that we had to do it because of how easy it was. The main problem is that most difficult of freelancer dilemmas: waking up early.

We’ve both been dragging on getting up, and it’s always been on my list in order to cram more things into the day. But, as with eating right, I’ve attempted this habit many, many times and failed. So, as with eating, I’m going to tackle this as an identity based habit.

In my main blog post on how to construct such a megahabit - “Towards an Identity Model of Habits: Part III” - I talk about several methods to hit the problem:

-Social Identity

-Certifications

-Affirmations

-Greasing the Groove

-Counterintuitively Small Habits

-Quantified Self

-Falling in Love

-…and Miscellaneous Advanced Options

I think, when surveying options, the main thing to remember is that for these types of habits, the one thing you don’t want to do is to yet again attempt the habit you’ve tried to introduce before. We seem to think that THIS time it’ll be different, that this time if we really believe and clench harder, things will change, when we’ve seen our methodology fail time and time again. The answer lies in attempting new strategies.

I have always attempted this habit by just setting an alarm early and buckling down inside and just DOING IT. That has never worked. I’ve more recently tried Flux, a program that changes light on my computer and setting progressively early times to just get to bed. Those worked better, but eventually failed. 

The method for identity habits should be the inverse - enacting smaller, less directly connected behaviors and building upon them so that when it comes to do the obvious, direct behavior, it’s almost like an afterthought.

Look, it’s not as though we can’t force ourselves to get up early. If I have to be on a plane, if I have an interview, if I have a job, it’s done. But that’s not what I’m talking about by these deep habits. I don’t want to wake up early, I want to be a Morning Person.

So THIS TIME, I’m going to start with three small habits. The first is recording (from the quantified self option). But I don’t like all the fancy apps and gadgets that attempt to pinpoint REM cycles based on body movements and whatnot. All I want is to keep it simple and record what my wakeup and bed time was for the day before. This is great, because I can build the recording into my food recording superhabit.

The next thing I’ll do is drink a cold glass of water as soon as I wake up. After looking at dozens of websites on how to wake up early, this has been one of the few consistent pieces of advice (I’ll consider this taken from the “counterintuitively small habits” category”).

Thirdly, I’m taking a cue from the “Fall in Love” Category.  One other great piece of consistent advice has been to do something that makes you excited to get up. Krissy Brady from Lifehack writes:

One thing we tend to lose as adults is the feeling of freedom we had as kids. When we had no sense of schedule, deadlines, goals, or pressure, we were always emotionally available and our imaginations made us feel like anything was possible. 

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/10-simple-strategies-wake-early.html

A lot of websites circled around it, but this is my real issue. I use to LOVE getting up in the morning as a child, and somehow, I’ve lost that. I was thinking about what things I’d love to do that give me that same sense I felt as a kid. Going to the beach, definitely, but it’s too long. Other websites talk about having no pressure mornings, but for habits and willpower, nothing beats tackling your hardest task at the very beginning of the day. And then the most ridiculous thing came to mind: making bacon.

As a child bacon was a treat. My mom made it only a few weekends, but those were the days I’d wake up early, I’d go biking, I had long mornings drenched in sun and anything was possible. It somehow encapsulates that precise spot of childlike glee. And because I’m eating primal, it’s not even cheating. Hell, I could use the cals - in Brazil I only got over a long plateau after I started munching on chicharrones. It’s easy, it’s a treat, it’s ritualistic, it’s in my home and doesn’t take too much time, and I can drink a cold glass of water while I’m frying it up. Done.

So my implementation intentions are:

After I record my food, I will record when I went to bed the night before and what time I got out of bed that morning. I will record this on the same spreadsheet I record all my other habits. 

As soon as I get up I will make two slices (let’s not get too crazy here) of bacon. While I’m doing that, I’ll drink a cold glass of water. I will then grab my coffee and do my pantry check.

Mental Contrasting:

Positive: Waking up early will allow me the feeling of being a child, the feeling of unlimited energy and potential in the day. I’ll be able to take my time in all my tasks, from working out to writing. Afterwards, I’ll be able to get out and explore my city, which also gives me childlike glee. And it’ll give me the space I need to do more.

Stumbling blocks: I will forget what time I went to bed - I’ll have to have a place to note that down, and I’ll have to remember to write down what time I woke up. I’ll also have to remember to get bacon at the store - OH WAIT, it’s on my pantry check (finally some habits are building off others)! If I’m traveling I might not have bacon or a place to cook it on - though if I’m traveling I’m usually waking up early anyways.

Girl waking up by Gabriela Camerotti, vintage alarm clock by H is for Home, glass of water by Gioconda Beekman, bacon by Jazz Guy

Quantified Food Recording

Implementation Intention: Before I go to bed I will make tea and record what I ate for the day on MyNetDiary. So far I like this app better than the widely touted MyFitnessPal, though we’ll see how it goes.

Mental Contrasting: Positives include having a solid metric and gauge on what’s going into my body. As with pantry checking, food has been a thorn in my side for greater progression in this project and I’ve had to scrap it several times. This is a potential manner in which to nail it down and get on to more interesting things and get the body I want that’s capable of those interesting things.
Obstacles include not having my phone charge in order to record my food since it is at the end of the day. Does MyNetDiary have a web correlate? Another is meeting friends late, and coming back and wanting to crash. Travel is always a problem, but oddly enough it’s not the time - usually I get home early. It’s whether or not my phone is charged.

Step ups: Deciding on wether to go the caloric route or the clean route or both and decreasing calories or cleaning up my eating. Also a flash diet for specific difficult to control food items. Another potential is a timed carb cycle or other advanced food control practice.

I like this particular formulation in that it seems to both incorporate multiple buttresses for support and it lays the groundwork to support other behaviors.

For example, it incorporates the ritual of making tea. It’s at night before bed, so it starts a control for when to go to sleep, laying the groundwork for the back end of a bookend and a future early wakeup habit. It also curtails overindulging in late night drinks because I have to go home and do something.

Towards an Identity Model of Habits: Part III

I don’t believe that this identity-centric model in anyway replaces the older model. I still think you can use the basics of habit formation to train in specific behaviors. But the behaviors I’d focus on would be different. Let’s look at some of my initial ideas:

Social Identity

Definitely the most popular idea is to redefine yourself as, say, a vegetarian. James did this – he established with everyone he knew that he didn’t eat meat. And this almost forced him, via social pressures, to keep up the behavior.

Here’s why I’m very hesitant about this approach. It’s so changeable. You change friends, breakup, move, and your social network is wiped out. You see this with high school athletes – they’re expected to go to practice by their peers, teachers, coaches, and parents. But once they go to college, their identity shifts, and it turns out they never really established that habit to begin with. Hello Freshman 15.

I don’t think we need to toss this out completely. I just think it shouldn’t be relied upon in this manner. There is a potential of forming virtual communities and identities that may have, oddly enough, more lasting forms of identity as opposed to changing social circles.

Barcelona, where I’m based now, has quite a few health and fitness communities. What I was most intrigued by were communities about getting together to go out to restaurants that served “healthy” food.  In particular there was a paleo community (I can’t find it now) that was organized around potlucks and restaurants with whole food. What an amazing idea considering the huge difficulty in eating right is the social pressure. You often feel relegated to either being utterly miserable or living a monastic existence prepping everything alone at home.

As an aside I was trying to find out if there were online social sites like Facebook specifically for clean eating and found a Paleo dating site and even a Low Carb Cruise! So I guess you can take identity as far as you like nowadays.

Certifications

There is something very identity-driven about having a formal designation given to you by an institution. Complete your yoga teacher training and you are a certified yoga instructor, whether or not you’d consider yourself a full master or not.

A friend of mine back in China was really into kettlebells and wanted to become a trainer. I just found out that Mark Sisson is offering a Primal Blueprint Expert Certification. I think the only danger is erring on the side of endless certifications instead of real progress, which I believe can occur.

Affirmations

If social identity has flaws because it relies on other people, then why not move to hammering your identity changes with your own mantras?

I experimented with affirmations several years ago before I got into habits. So my affirmations naturally only lasted a few weeks. But I did feel really good about the whole process at the time.

Nevertheless, I’m very skeptical as to if they actually work. According to a metastudy on the subject they do appear to work for changing health related behaviors. I’m STILL skeptical, and will do an entire post delving into it in the future.

All or Nothing and Pavel’s Greasing the Groove

Many of these large habits are all or nothing. James is a vegetarian all the time, not just on weekdays. So far I’ve been very consistent about keeping my habits and superhabits to the weekdays, and made what I still think is a wise decision to take the weekends off. But it may be that habits I want to be larger (megahabits? ha!), and that have identity characteristics over more changing situations need to be working all the time.

Greasing the groove might work to hurry the process up. Instead of starting once a day, do the behavior multiple times a day all the time. This obviously may or may not be easy to do depending the behavior.

Counterintuitively Small Habits

Every time I went through a large cycle of clean eating, I came away with a few small behaviors that stuck. I drink my coffee black. I ignore bread when it’s set on the table at a restaurant. I do not drink soft drinks.

These are automatic and there’s not emotional waffling about these behaviors. So maybe the best way to deal with changes is to start with a focus on the small rather than the large.

I experimented with this for a few weeks. I brainstormed a list of really small behaviors that have to do with clean eating:

-Regularly going to the grocery store

-Stocking up on clean basics.

-Planning our meals for the day/week

I selected “stocking up on clean basics” and made it even simpler – every morning as soon as I got up I went through a kitchen and pantry checklist for basics so that if things got busy I’d have options for food at home.

I have done this without the full treatment – no recording, no formal implementation intention. I had a big long break in between for travel, but the week and a half that I did this, it seemed to work really well. And the side effect was that I naturally went to the store and ate pretty well.

I just researched identity based habits and, of course, James Clear has an article on it where he also advocates making small wins and breaking down bigger behaviors in order to become “that” kind of person.

Quantified Self

My buddy james started his move to being vegetarian by using a food tracker. The quantified self seems like a great way to prove to yourself that you have indeed changed. Things like the flash diet definitely helped me in my 30 day no bread challenge, and seemed to provide a buttressing effect similar to a social group for staying on track. Looking it over may help with the identity change as well.

Falling in Love

I know, it sounds really odd, but bear with me here. The things you love to do are things that tend to stick. I love reading, I used to love bicycling. I didn’t need to think up a methodology for how to increase habituation or push for mastery – it just happened. They don’t take up self discipline points – they give them back because you feel relaxed and rejuvenated just doing them.

Can you deliberately fall in love? The New York Times ran an interesting article on the subject of deliberate love, but this was about people. For activities I think the key rests in ritual, something that’s been coming up more and more in self-improvement circles (and one I need to do a detailed post on in the future).

I love getting into bed, opening my book and escaping to another world. Reading isn’t just a “megahabit” that sticks with me across time and circumstances, it’s something I love to do, I couldn’t do without, and it, in a large part, helps define me. And I think you find the same kind of talk when you encounter people who are enthusiastic about things.

I think there’s something important in ritualizing – you get excited about the preparatory ephemera and it not only lowers starting thresholds, it inverts them. Can you deliberately do this? I have no idea, but I’m curious to try. I’m also curious if this would be a totally different paradigm outside of identity.

Advanced Options

I think there are other more advanced options. Buddhist thought talks about meditation as wearing away the concept of a self. The conclusion for me is that if the self is an illusion, and you know it, you might be able to don another illusion more easily. Vajrayana and Tantra deal with visualizations, hypnosis mucks around directly with the unconscious, which presumably is the seat of identity, as does NLP to a degree.

These are all way out of my league, but perhaps the smallest distillation, visualizing myself as another person who is, say, a clean eater, may have some benefit. Though, as with affirmations, I’m not clear if this has actually been proved to make a difference.

mask by 派脆客 Lee, certificates byMark, stones by Sue Langford, tea by Dave Fayram, thangka by Richard Weil