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

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.

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.

A Robust(er?) Model Of Self Improvement - Part II

This model is a sketch. I think there are a lot of variables that still need to be honed. But here’s what I came up with.

Regimentation is a daily practice with specific problems. You have to overome fear, you have to avoid procrastination, etc. You have to have daily recording sessions. You have to manage Willpower.

Habituation is a mid-range practice. You need to avoid danger zones, set up things like TinyHabits. You need to weather disruptions like travel. You need to manage Endurance.

Mastery is a long-range practice. You have to bust through plateaus to continually increase in skill.

Above is a rough graph of what this might look like. One plane is time, another is the SRHI, and another is GRIT. This is a real map of my meditation habit along time and the SRHI. I totally fudged it for Grit because I’ve only taken the Grit Scale three times.

Grit is what I’m using as a stand-in for the path to mastery since it’s defined as Endurance + getting over things like setbacks and plateaus. Habituation doesn’t care about plateaus. You can have a solid superhabit of playing the violin but not ever improve your skill at it. Grit seems to be the best scale for improvement, and it’s ability to predict success is one of the reasons why Duckworth was awarded the MacArthur Genius Grant.

Is it the best scale for this? I’m not sure. How does it play into Endurance? I’m not sure. But this graph seems to me the best model for all three variables - regimentation, habituation, and mastery.

A Robust(er?) Model Of Self Improvement - Part I

I went through my entire blog to dredge up what I’ve learned, and spent quite a bit of time last night listing out terminology, asking questions, making notes, and doodling graphs.

What I came up with is a model for the whole process of self improvement. See, my view is that self help generally doesn’t look at the entire picture. Either they’re looking at just one habit, or they’re looking at grit, or their looking at daily scheduling. But the real story is larger.

We don’t just want to be people who just eat right. We also want to eat right and exert self control in a dozen different habits. We want them regimented throughout the day, and we want to bust through any plateaus in progress. And we want all this to be happening as quickly and efficiently as possible.

What self help tends to ignore is how all these various projects interact with each other. There are so many examples of this - BJ Fogg has a program of habit formation that’s a few weeks long. That’s not enough to really get the whole story, nor is Lally’s experiments where she just draws the graph further to extrapolate that difficult habits may take up to 250 days. Duhigg’s Power of Habit essentially talks about hacking one habit - not eating donuts at work. You have to do the habits and figure out what happens a year out with other progression involved. And still, it’s not enough.

“Just do the work” and other cliches underscore this undercurrent that self improvement is all about simplicity. With the percentage of people who fail at basic habits and self improvement, this overly simplistic view seems to ring false. Self improvement is highly complicated.

The work of Lally, Duckworth, Baumeister and Verplanken and this movement to scientifically quantify all these …for lack of a better world…soft concepts..that’s all fantastic. But I want to crank it up even more. To me it’s still shocking that there is no accepted Willpower scale. 

My goal is create as scientific of a model as I can using the data I can get from myself. I’m going to coin terminology that I think best fits, and keep evolving it. I think creating a technical jargon has immense uses in “soft” arts. It allows our minds to grab hold of concepts. I’m reminded of magic, where (if you really get into it) every twist and turn of the hand has a name - a principle, a theory. And it seems to create a space in your  mind - suddenly you’re not just waving your hands, you’re executing a highly defined protocol. 

I want the same for this.

Beyond Superhabits

The more I ponder the state of my habits the more I now think that superhabits are just the beginning.

Nested Habits
My writing habit is solid, but I’m having problems with specific aspects of it. Today I started pitching, but the fear set in and it took me a lot to overcome it. A few days ago I had the same problem with writing research intensive articles.

When I first start any habit half of the problem is getting over that fear and procrastination that stops me from actually doing the task. It’s why TinyHabits are so great. You do a little, and doing a lot becomes nothing eventually.

I have no problem writing a lot of things - but I have problems when focusing on specific aspects of the trade. That’s to be expected. My frustration enters when I mistake mastery in the general task of writing with mastery over a specific aspect, like research writing.

What I should be doing is nesting writing - forming a new research writing habit within the slot of my already formed general writing habit. How would this work? The same as any habit - start small to overcome the starting inertia of the habit, understand that it will get harder before it gets easier, and keep going until it’s as automatic as any other superhabit.

Willpower Cycling
In my general theory, as a habit approaches 84 of the SRHI (max automaticity), it also approaches 0 Endurance, and therefore approaches 0 Willpower. I don’t quite understand the relationship between Endurance and Willpower (and I’ll be keeping this simple by just referencing Willpower), but what I can say is that the Willpower needed to do a habit gets less and less through the process of habituation.

That doesn’t mean it goes away. It’s a very dependent relationship. Willpower is one depleteable resource, but through the process of habit formation you are also building your Willpower reserves. And it fluctuates depending on other drains on that resource.

For example, if I’m trying to bust a plateau of one of my superhabits, it’s going to drain more Willpower than just skating along in superhabit mode. So cycling plateau busting protocols and habit formation protocols is a necessity.

What do I mean by this? It means I’m working against myself if I, say, start doing crossfit to bust past a plateau in my bodyweight exercises AND at the same time start building a brad new flossing habit. I’ve suddenly got two drains on a resource that might only be equipped to handle one.

Mid-Range Programs
I am noticing a deficit in mid-range planning for my planning, and this has to incorporate willpower cycling theory. I’ve got my long-range plan - this general habit project. I’ve got my daily list of individual habits that I do and record daily.

There’s a certain satisfaction and security a weightlifter has when following a training program like Russian volume training or Rippetoe. It means that there’s never a time week-to-week, month-to-month where he suffers doubt as to whether or not there is a greater progression. I don’t have that in many of my habits.

I suffer from a lack of mid-range planning - I frequently feel like I’m drowning, churning my legs in the mud, and though that might not be the case, a part of the security of a  mid-range plan is KNOWING that progress is being made, that there is a hand off from week to week or month to month rather than just toiling away.

What to Do
Lydia suggested to plan out the week and/or the month. This way I can gauge what I should push (plateau busting, etc) and what I should just late skate in order to do good work in other theaters.

What’s the thing I needs the most work? How should I gauge improvement. And most importantly how do I gauge improvement across weeks. These should be like little mini-projects - like 30 day challenges that have discrete beginnings and ends, whose fruits are handed off to the next push.

Nested Habits

I was talking about pitching for work. I want to make it into a habit where I just continuously pitch because publication schedules are so slow, it only works if there are continuous pitches being thrown out. So even if smaller amounts are being answered and even smaller are positive, I’ll have a steady stream of work. Like juggling.

But I’m wondering if I need to treat some of these things as almost separate habits. For example, I have no problem writing 50 words. I have no problem writing a first draft of 50 words a day most of the time. But sometimes I falter. 

The last couple of days I’ve been trying to do a very specific article - a listicle with no narrative that has a lot of research involved. This rips me out of the flow of words constantly - so 50 words isn’t as easy as a 50 word narrative. Pitching is the same way - it requires a lot of research so it’s slow going.

Now I don’t necessarily need to do this everyday, but to work at the habit, I want to be able to cover all types of terrain every day on a cycling basis. 

But these difficult executions may need to be nested. If I need to do listicles, maybe I should do it once or twice a week and do the SRHI for that. Because it feels like I’m starting another habit and the protocols of being calm and compassionate through messups as the will grows seems the same as starting a  new habit from scratch. 

Time of Day and Habits

Again, talking to Lydia, and she’s stopped really recording or thinking about recording her exercise. She’s been doing Crossfit, which she really likes, but because of the change in schedules (sometimes it’s earlier than other days) she doesn’t feel like it’s, what BJ Fogg calls, crispy.

That is to say, there’s not a specific trigger immediately followed by an action.

I have had this for all of my really solid and quickly developed habits. But what I’ve noticed is that when an action achieves superhabit status, that crispiness doesn’t really matter.

If I don’t have time or the will to do something in the morning, like writing or exercising, I do it later. I get that “something’s missing” or “my day’s incomplete” vibe that seems to be the hallmark of a well inculcated habit.

Think about brushing your teeth - it’s not really a big deal if I don’t do it immediately as soon as I wake up, or immediately after eating. But I feel something’s missing, and daily consistency is still achieved.

It might well be that a great protocol to follow is start out by constructing a really “crispy” habit - and once it’s a superhabit, play around with it, or use that freedom to evolve it.

I do want to check out crossfit. If I like it, my bodyweight schedule will be in flux, but that’s a great thing - it gives me more of a workout, and since I’ve already developed a superhabit, what I’m hoping is that it also keeps consistency. I’m hoping that if I have a day where I don’t do an exercise in my room, I’ll have that “wait something’s missing” itch that’s scratched later on by a gym or crossfit workout.

This freedom also will hopefully allow me to bust through plateaus. 

Slacking and Superhabits

The last few weeks I’ve gotten the impression that I’ve been floating through many of my fully formed superhabits.

A lot of this has to do with my bouts of sickness and travel, where I have to slack deliberately in order to sustain the habit.

But now that I’m good, there’s been a slump. Specifically:
Fixed Meditation
I’m doing basic meditations. Relaxation, visualizations - these would have been difficult a while ago, but I need to PUSH. Bring UP bad emotions, then quell them. OR do some advanced stuff, like TUMMO. OR start doing what I don’t like to do, like single pointed meditation. OR do Vipassana for time. 

Bodyweight Exercises
I’ve been on type writer pushups - that’s awesome. But I’ll do 3, and stop. I can do reps like I did today - and it HURT. I should be used to that pain. I need a better cycle - I’ve started doing bulgarian split squats and that’s good. I need to push my bridges. I dropped my dragon flag progression because I don’t have a good stable spot, but that’s no excuse - I gotta solve that problem. And I HAVE to do what I hate, tabatas.

Writing
I’m totally slacking on the actual writing part of my cycle. I need to get back into that mentality of doing a first draft - like I can do no wrong. And then the next day NEEDS to be editing to a polished submittable piece. If I can get that cycle down, a HUGE weight will be lifted, because pitching is easy for me. So maybe I should just focus on that - forget everything else - first draft, then edit. again and again rinse and repeat.

Eating
I’ve been letting things slip here. But I don’t care as much - FINALLY it’s just coalesced into a habit. If I can keep it like that, I’m happy, and I can clean it up later.

Conclusion - this is something I’m going to have to constantly be aware of. Plateaus are a part of this business. Sometimes it may take something special to shake things up. Maybe I should do crossfit. Maybe I should drop everything and do writing/editing for a month. Maybe I should do a month of single pointed meditation. There is definitely a huge benefit to doing something like my No Bread challenge. 

A New Protocol for Work, Pavlov/Click Training Style!

A New Protocol for WorkWork just isn’t progressing well enough, and I think it’s mostly because I don’t have a solid trigger.

Now normally my triggers are sequential ones, using bookending. I have my stable daily event - waking up. I wake up, I take a shower, I meditate, I do my bodyweight training, I write, and….by that time I’m a little mentally tired.

I end up dithering online for a while. Making coffee. Reading emails, whatnot. I need a bit of a break.

Earlier I had thought about incorporating a unique sound, just like Pavlov’s dog, to become a trigger. I rejected a time based alarm because my schedule changes day to day. But what if I did a timer and set a specific sound?

So today I started this. After I finished writing I gave myself 25 minutes

I selected a unique sound - “Waves” - to set my habit to.

After 25 minutes (the pic shows it counting down) my timer went off and I immediately started opening all the pages I need open for work. Now it’s “crisp” - I’m tying it to this particular unique sound at my choosing.

I think this will work, but we’ll see. My minimum is still set at 20 minutes of work. I finish, record and write on this blog, then finish up with the rest of work. But what if I set each time I start on work to the same ring tone? The trigger is still there, but now it’s going off twice, maybe multiple times a day.

My hope and hypothesis is that I will be able to really vanquish this habit in record time because of this. Why? Because I’m practicing the habit multiple times a day, it becomes triggered more often, and automaticity gets practiced more. Frequency shoots through the roof. Length of time is already maxed out, so the only thing that would need more points is identity questions.

We shall see!

A Habit Singularity

I was talking the other day with Lydia and she seem to think that I might be approaching a time of explosive regimentation in my habit project.

The way she described it was like the technological singularity, where the rate of technological progress explodes and accelerates beyond comprehension. 

At first I didn’t understand, but going over my progress and where I’m heading it starts to get interesting. 

I am starting to veer off of traditional habits into slotted habits where individual activity can be exchanged for cross training. For example, my pushup habit has now evolved into a pushup progression one day, a HIIT another day, and core exercise day.

Meditation has evolved into doing different types of meditations, writing has become writing, pitching, blogging, editing, and doing writing exercises depending on the day. I talked about this HERE when I discussing introducing cycling to all my habits.

What other habits are left? A recording finance habit, learning a musical instrument, flossing, and a general learning habit. Almost everything else can be enfolded into this cycling, slotting, regimentation thing. 

Do finances need to be recorded every day, or could they be folded in a general all-around slot? That slot can also handle learning about social media, photography, etc. Meditation can be expanded to Tummo training, bodyweight training to martial arts, breakdancing and parkour. The time of an idealized complete habit structure might not be too far off, and with cycling all habits are multiplied.

That’s a very strange idea to think of. It reminds me a lot of some descriptions the Kwisatz Haderach in Frank Herbert’s Dune. That’s particularly funny to me because Dune is the book that really influenced me and got me into all this self improvement stuff in the first place.

Restructuring Habits

Although my super habits are down cold, my two non-habits - eating and work are pretty much in shambles. I’m not worried about either though - once I get into the zone in eating it gets consistent fast. And with work it’s understandable - I haven’t worked the last week for the holidays and that absence is affecting my SRHI score.

More worthy of discussion is the plateau I find myself in superhabits.

Writing is about to change. I want to alternate between writing and editing, and I’ve started doing this to good affect. I’m also considering adding another day of pitching and one day of blogging on the weekends.

I need to memorize the SRHI to continue on with record keeping, but it’s not that serious of an issue.

Lastly, I’ve plateaued in bodyweight exercises. I’ve started doing the one arm pushup progression against the wall, but it’s not that difficult and I’m not sure if I’m doing it correctly. Other exercises are stalling - my dragon lifts are pretty much the same right now and my bridges aren’t necessarily improving. 

I realize with this that though it feels like I’m flailing, it really hasn’t been that long. It just sort’ve feels like a long time because it’s the holidays and I’ve been traveling and relaxing because of it - the holiday effect. But I would like to throw more stuff into the mix - maybe start lower body exercises or whatnot. 

I’d like to start implementing my fixed meditation plan as I outlined in my book. It basically consists of practicing multiple arenas of meditation classifications. I’ve started doing a it a little bit but I want to make it cyclical - changing it up every day. 

This cycling idea started with bodyweight training and has seemed to just leak over to all my superhabits. I’m curious how it works. I’m wondering if it’s a good way to bust past a plateau. But I also think it’s completely like cheating. Up until the superhabit formed I’m normally doing one task - usually in Tiny Habit form. But once the “slot” coalesces not only does the actual amount of one task grow, but I can get several tasks for the price of one.

I’m ideally not just writing, I’m using the slot of writing to write, pitch, blog, and edit. I’ll see how it goes, but if it goes well things are about to get really interesting, and either way I’m going to welcome the changes.

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.

Future Personal Finance Habit Ideas

I recently came across a Khan Academy link:

https://www.bettermoneyhabits.com/index.html
Khan is apparently joining up with Bank of America to promote better finance habits. Khan Academy is one of many online resources I want to explore to record, keep track, and optimize my finances. It’s something I know many people have problems with, but I feel it’s something that people just put off, convincing themselves it’ll get taken care of “one day.”

This is like so many habits that fall through the cracks. But with this, it’s about money, and in saving correctly it behooves you to start early.

The personal subreddit is another resource, one that comes up on my main Reddit feed. And there are a series of threads on people panicking about what to do with debt over their head, or even more moderate threads on saving - but in either case immediacy seems to be the main thrust of the advice.

I haven’t researched it yet, but I’ve heard several pieces of advice on Reddit that involve just recording everything. And that’s probably where I would start.

It’s hilarious that in this day and age of the internet there are so many resources freely available, yet people seemed to be utterly incapable of making use of them. There’s just too much out there, and consistency and focus becomes more and more of a problem. We have the knowledge but thoroughly grasping it all has escaped us. Which makes this project all the more vital.

Forming Record Keeping as a Habit

Lydia wants to start record keeping in order to cement her habits. She’s been trying to keep up with a habit by skipping over the recording, and she’s admitted that it doesn’t really work well for her.

When I started this project for real (the third time), I decided that I was going to begin only with record keeping. In my mind, forming a habit of recording habits is the trunk and roots of a tree of skills. And though it seems tedious to JUST do that, it’s the process that, when properly cemented, is where all other branches of the tree arise.

But Lydia’s hesitancy is understandable. I don’t want to advise people to sit there for 2 months doing nothing but recording nothing…just recording the process of recording. It makes sense theoretically - record keeping is something that takes very little time but is often overlooked - like most quality habits. Flossing, doing crunches, etc take very little time, but over time are dropped. Even the researchers have problems getting their test subjects to take the SRHI regularly.

As we were talking I further backed up forming the record keeping habit slowly. There is a maddening tendency while doing it - you have so much willpower right NOW, but you feel like you’re doing nothing. The problem is that willpower really doesn’t matter. Going to the gym once and having a fantastic focused workout doesn’t matter at all if it’s not extended for a long time. Endurance is the key to lasting change.

The other argument is that once it’s developed it’s yours presumably for life. So yeah you might take 2 months to develop it, but isn’t that worth it if you’re going to resting other habits on top of it? Isn’t it worth it if it’s cemented forever?

Despite all this, it still doesn’t sit well with me, especially when it comes to giving advice. “First, go record recording for 2 months” just doesn’t fly off the tongue. I can hear people just ignoring this first step anyway - god knows I would if I heard that a few years ago. Is there any way to compress two habits - one of recording and another habit - so that it at least feels like you’re doing something in the beginning?

I’m all for adding two habits at once if they’re both tiny - the endurance threshold lowers so it’s easier to keep it up to make them both habits. Lydia suggested automating the recording process. A lot of what takes time is adding up all the scores - what if it was all automated?

That level of programming knowledge, though basic, just happens to be far more advanced than what I can accomplish.  Lydia is working on a simple spreadsheet that will tally scores.

But what if you could go further? Say a click-able list of questions that tallies your score and automatically records it onto a spreadsheet with all your habits with a date stamp. And the date keeps rolling - so if you don’t do the questionnaire it continues to mark it as an absence - oddly enough a big problem I’ve had is counting and making sure my missed days are accounted for. I often get quite confused trying to straighten out my numerical mess ups.

If you could have a streamlined system like this I believe the habit would be successfully “tiny-fied” - and adding it together with something like doing two pushups a day would be feasible. And furthermore, it would be palatable as an overall program for general self improvement.