Willpower needs a metaphor, and it needs a metaphor that has something to do with how people really acquire it, none of this stuff like “iron will” or “inexhaustable drive.” Those not only sound unattainable, but they also don’t even sound very fun. Real willpower is actually pleasant to have, doesn’t require bionic implants, and in many ways is exactly like owning a dog.

Practically anybody can be a successful dog owner if they really want to be: you don’t have to have any special qualifications. This is not to say it’s always easy: it’s just doable. After all, the things you have to do to successfully own a dog are:

1) Actually want to get a dog,
2) Understand how to take care of your dog, and
3) Do a few simple things on a daily basis–like feeding the dog and going for walks

Similarly, the only things you need to do to be motivated to do a particular thing, or to have willpower in a particular area, are

1) Actually want to pursue the goal,
2) Understand how to take care of your motivation, and
3) Do a few simple things on a daily basis–like visualizing where you’re going and and maintaining a feedback loop

Even though self-motivation requires getting several things right at once, and while it does take a continued time commitment, it really doesn’t take heroics. You keep at it every day, even though sometimes you succeed and sometimes you fail (like accidentally leaving the door open so the dog gets out). You keep things in perspective, deal with problems as they come up, and try to learn from your mistakes. Sure, you’ll need to take time out of your day to keep on track. And sure, you’ll probably need to learn some skills, like idea repair, mindfulness, and visualization … just like taking care of a dog means taking a little time out of your day and requires learning how much to feed it, how to keep it from chewing up your favorite shoes, and when to take it to the vet.

Speaking of which, dog ownership also gives us some guidance about what to do if motivation falters–if the dog gets sick. First of all, observe the symptoms: what’s wrong? When did it start? Are there any patterns to it?

Second of all, and dogs are pointing out something very important here, if your dog gets sick, you don’t abandon it (unless you are a heartless fiend): you pay more attention to it. You take it to the vet, give the deadly nightshade plant away to a single, petless neighbor, and offer your dog some extra attention. The same thing applies to your motivation, with the wonderful difference that instead of eventually getting old and slow, your motivation will just get stronger the longer you have it.

If we expand the idea for a minute to say that willpower is like having a pet, and that every different goal is like a different species of animal, we get a better picture of why we don’t try to simultaneously adjust our lives to, for example, a new boxer and a new snake. There’s enough to do when adopting just one species at a time: once the puppy is comfortably settled, there will be plenty of time to go shopping for heat lamps.

Dog in snow photo by digital_image_fan
Dog and snake photo by b.frahm

Let’s say that you decide that every night before you go to bed, you’ll walk around your house and clean up anything that’s out of order: you put any last dishes in the dishwasher, pick up any dirty clothes, shelve any books that are lying around, etc., so that in the morning you can wake up to an ordered house, because you find that makes you happier to start the day. You do it for a few days. You’re very proud of yourself. Then you’ve been doing it for a week. Then you’ve been doing it for a month, all without missing a day. Is that enough for it to be a habit? As usual, there’s a short answer and a long answer. The short answer is “probably not.” The long answer follows.

Science to the rescue: some hard numbers
I’m working from a single study, “How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world” by Phillippa Lally, Cornelia H. M. van Jaarsveld, Henry W. W. Potts, and Jane Wardle in the European Journal of Social Psychology, so we’re definitely talking about actual science here, but it’s just one study, so take this information as tentative for now. With that said, let’s plunge into the long answer.

The long answer is that there seems to be no set length of time it will take a person to develop a habit. Different people will take different lengths of time, and different habits will also take different lengths of time: for instance, it seems that complicated behaviors take longer to become habits than simple ones.

In the study I link to above, the range of time it took people to form habits (specifically, to “reach 95% of their asymptote of automaticity,” and if you don’t have to look up at least one word to understand that, you did better than I did) ranged from 18 days to 254 days, the average being 66 days. As a general rule of thumb, then, two or three months is often going to be enough time for something that you repeat daily to become a habit. According to the study, missing the habit just once in that time didn’t seem to cause trouble, though more than once did.

That long?
On the one hand, that’s depressing: that’s a long time to have to work that hard at something! On the other hand, this is great: in just two to three months, you can turn many behaviors into habits that you just do automatically without worrying much about them. Cleaning, answering letters in a timely fashion, speaking diplomatically, exercising, eating well–any one of these might well be within your grasp before Christmas. We already knew that habits don’t come automatically; this just gives us a better idea of how much work they take.

A little help from Kaizan
If you’d like a little help with keeping a habit, Kaizan has a good tip for helping habits not break down: How to Make Sure That Nothing Gets Between You and Your Good Habits.

In the comments to that post, someone cites an often-repeated piece of information that it takes 28 days to form a habit. I’ve heard this more than once, but never heard that it was based on any reliable research. My guess is that it’s meant to be inspirational guesswork, and since people like round figures so much, it caught on. I’ve also heard 21 days cited; don’t believe that one either. In any case, the comment drove me to find research that gives something more like a real answer to the question, which led me to Lally, et al.’s study.

Don’t get too attached to a number
We’ll want to try not to get too wrapped up in a specific number of days, like this article, where they seize on that 66-day average and proclaim it as a universal truth. However much we human beings like a simple, unchanging answer, 66 days is just an average: your mileage is extremely likely to vary.

Why it doesn’t always matter
And it may help to act as though habit formation won’t be happening at all, to simply use feedback loops to keep up good practices and make good choices, and to take habit formation as a wonderful accident. As with any other positive development that results from being motivated, habit formation causes problems if it’s thought of as the end goal: it’s essential to find things to enjoy about the steps along the way in order to keep up anything important long enough for it to matter.

Photo by .scarlet.

It can be truly humiliating. Maybe it’s never happened to you, but it certainly happens to a lot of us: you’ve been grappling with something for years–your weight, organization, starting a novel, getting the house in order, changing how you act with other people–and a day comes when you’re inspired to do something about it. So you do it! You change your eating habits or start running or create a strict rule for dealing with all incoming e-mails. Then a week or two pass, and you find you’re gone off the rails: your eating habits are worse than ever, or a busy day put you behind on your organization and you never caught up, or the trick you were going to use to remember people’s names has been forgotten itself. What happened?

There’s a simple answer to this and a more detailed answer. The simple answer is that we start things in different circumstances than we continue them in. A New Year’s resolution made at a party with friends on a full stomach (for example) turns into a thankless, lonely grind week after week, and it loses a lot of its sparkle that way.

Don’t worry: the detailed answer is much less depressing than the simple answer. But the simple answer reminds us of something essential: inspiration may drive us to start new things, but it’s our own efforts to rise above obstacles that get us through in the end.

Certainly there is such a thing as a badly-chosen goal, or a good idea for a goal that’s not practical at the moment. But for goals that are worthwhile, there are at least seven ways something that started well could run into trouble. Here’s what those seven kinds of problems are, and how to get past them.

1) The novelty wears off
Annoyingly, somewhere in our evolution we acquired a built-in trait that only allows us to enjoy something for a little while unless it changes. A dish that tastes “amazing” on the first bite and “really good” when we have it again in a few days continues to wane in amazingness as long as we keep eating it regularly. This is known as “hedonic adaptation,” and it means that anything that was delightful and new and exciting eventually becomes old hat unless there’s something renewing that excitement. When we first take on new goals, it helps a lot to understand that we need to not only take the steps to reach our goal, but to keep actively renewing our enthusiasm.

2) Our mood changes
Everyone has better and worse days, days when we feel we can do more and days when we’re mainly just trying to keep things from going wrong. What may seem easy to do on a good day can be the last thing we care about on a bad day. Fortunately, we can stop having bad days if we try, but it also helps to use tactics like rule-making and decision logging to keep ourselves happy with our goals.

3) Things get harder; complications arise
Sometimes we’ll start pursuing a goal when things are going well, but then things get harder: there are new demands on our time or finances or attention, for instance. It may become harder to find time to follow our goals. When the going gets tough, the tough organize and prioritize so they won’t lose track of what’s most important. Goals that aren’t nurtured through busy times tend to get lost in the shuffle.

4) We begin to forget
Goals and new habits need to be nourished and maintained by a process of regular feedback. If we don’t regularly remind ourselves of what we were doing and review our progress, our goals become vague, distant, and easy to forget. Once we’re no longer actively thinking about what we want to achieve, we’re sunk: those habits aren’t going to change themselves. Focusing on our priorities consistently can save them from being forgotten.

5) Just when we start flying, someone shoots us down
There will always be naysayers, whether they’re people who feel threatened by another person’s success or people who genuinely want what they think is best for you but aren’t ready to support your choices. If any of them get to you, figure out what it is they’ve told you that has sunk in and use idea repair to pull it up by the roots. Recruit them to your cause or harden yourself to their criticism: we’re each responsible for our own lives, so while it makes sense to consider good advice, if we’ve considered it and decided to go a different way, we don’t need to consider that same advice again: we’ll need our energy for other things.

6) A new interest takes over
Since things we’re getting used to become less exciting through hedonic adaptation, we human beings are seekers after novelty. This can be fine in a lot of circumstances, but not when it repeatedly derails us on old projects by tantalizing us into taking on new ones. We generally have the resources to undertake only one new thing at a time. After we’ve been in the groove on one goal for a long time, we might consider adding something else, but add something else too early and like it or not, the old goal will very likely go by the wayside. When you’re tempted by a new direction, think carefully about what you’ve invested in the goal you’re already working on and about why it’s important to you in the first place. Of course we have to keep some flexibility, but guard your progress jealously against all but the most important replacement goals.

7) Just announcing it was enough
One interesting psychological study with law students found that students who announced a study goal tended to do worse at achieving that goal than students who kept their goals private. One of the reasons this may be happening is that sometimes, a person can get enough positive feedback for just committing to something that they don’t feel the need to actually follow through–and very often the people who are there to encourage us when we start something aren’t going to be looking over our shoulders to make sure it gets done. Not following through under these circumstances isn’t so much a character flaw as it is a logistical error. Who knew that we would feel so much more satsified and resolved with our current situation just by announcing the intention to change? The enthusiasm for the actual change leaks away, and we may not even realize it’s happening.

If you might be in danger of falling prey to the announcement trap, the safest course is to only announce your goals to people who will be holding you accountable to them. Note that this is hard to do over the Internet; it’s too easy to avoid the subject, or the place where you announced it, or to say vaguely that you’re working on it. Someone who’s going to greet you in person every morning and say “Hey, how’s the novel coming?” is going to be much more help than an online friend who asks the same question, and someone who doesn’t listen to the answer isn’t going to be helpful to you regardless of where they are.

Starting new things and failing at them is so common in human experience that we tend to mark it down as a character flaw, to think that we “just don’t have the willpower.” Fortunately, willpower isn’t so much something you have as something you do. By anticipating the efforts we’ll need to make to move forward with our goals and by proactively handling the kinds of problems we’ve just talked about, we can keep ourselves on track and find ourselves just as committed on day 100 or day 1,000 as we were on day 1.

Photo by greekadman

I’ve mentioned in other posts how important feedback loops are to self-motivation, but I haven’t described in detail what I mean by a feedback loop or why they would be so essential. It’s high time to take care of that.

Whenever we’re talking about self-motivation, our intention is to make progress toward a particular goal and/or in toward aquiring certain habits. For instance, I might have a goal of starting a business that provides me with a living wage, or want to change a habit of being late, or be trying to lose a certain number of pounds while changing my eating and exercise habits so that I keep that weight off. A feedback loop is a system that monitors progress toward a goal or progress in acquiring habits and provides information to improve that process. In it’s simplest form, a feedback loop is made up of information about how a process has been going in the recent past, some thought about what that information says about the process, and ideas from that thought for maintaining or improving the process in future.

Why is this important? Because it’s a very common thing to start working toward a goal and then lose momentum. A feedback loop catches us when we’re losing momentum and helps us redirect so that we build momentum back up. Or in the best cases, we find nothing wrong with what we’ve been doing so far but come up with an idea to make things even better. Maintaining a feedback loop means keeping control of our own progress. Not maintaining a feedback loop usually means failure, unless there’s some powerful and regularly-occurring thing in our lives to remind us how important our goals are and keep us on track with sheer energy. As an example of one of those unusual situations where no feedback loop was required: when I was in college I met a very pretty French exchange student who spoke hardly any English. Within a few weeks, I had learned enough French on my own to hold halting conversations in it, urged on by my desire to spend time with this girl. (By the way, I didn’t get anywhere with the girl, but I still use the French). Another example: a woman who “couldn’t” lose weight for years suddenly lost weight quickly when she needed to donate a kidney to her very ill son but couldn’t because of her obesity. But most things in our lives aren’t as compelling as pretty French girls or seriously ill children, so feedback loops come in handy a lot.

Feedback loops need to occur often enough that we stay on top of our process, usually at least once or twice a week. It’s often best to schedule regular days or times to do the feedback work, so as to avoid the danger of always  pushing back feedback “just until tomorrow.”

What forms do feedback loops take? There are a lot of options:

• Writing in a journal
• Meeting or talking on the phone with a friend (preferably one whom you’re helping  to work toward their own goal)
• Participating in online forums or chat groups
• Attending meetings (Weight Watchers, Alcoholics Anonymous, writers’ groups, etc.)
• Talking out loud to yourself (preferably not in situations where it will make you look like a crazy person)
• Meeting with a professional (a coach, personal trainer, nutritionist, mentor, therapist, etc.)
• Blogging

The best feedback loop options are ones where someone or something will be waiting there for you to provide an update. If you participate in an online discussion group without promising to check in on a regular basis and without having online friends who are regularly checking on your progress, it’s easy to just not post when something goes wrong, as it inevitably will. Always try to find ways to box yourself in to delivering on your feedback. The minute that process becomes optional, a huge danger opens up of it going completely out the window.

Each time you work on feedback, start by making observations about your recent progress (or lack of progress), then move on to reflecting on what could go better, and finally decide whether there’s anything specific you should be doing differently–and if so, exactly what that is. These ideas for improvement, which can seem wonderfully clear and unforgettable when they come out, can easily be lost in the shuffle of a busy life, so I highly recommend writing them down. It can be very helpful to temporarily post them somewhere that you’ll see them regularly to help you keep them in mind.

There are two particular traps I hope you’ll avoid when working with feedback loops. One is beating yourself up: the past is absolutely unchangeable; all we can do is learn from it and find ways to make better choices in the future, which is exactly what you’re doing if you’re using a feedback loop. There is very rarely any need to take yourself to task other than to recognize how you feel about your choices and actions recently.

The second trap is the infamous phrase “I’ll just have to do better.” “Doing better” is not a plan for improvement: it’s a vague wish that gets us nowhere. Yes, we often want to improve how we’re working toward our goals, but if what we’ve been doing so far hasn’t been good enough, that’s an indication that we need to do something not just better, but differently. Perhaps you had planned to get two chapters written in the past week for a book you’re working on, and you actually only got about a quarter of a chapter down. Resolving to “just do better” in the coming week ignores the fact that some very real problems seem to have occurred and will need solutions. Perhaps you haven’t set aside specific times to write and need to do so now. Perhaps you have set aside times to write, but you’ve let yourself be distracted by e-mail and the Internet at those times, in which case you need to focus on ways to prevent distractions. Perhaps you’ve avoided working on your book because you’re worried that it’s gotten off to a very bad start, in which case you need to decide what it is you really want to do next. In all cases, a problem with motivation is not a moral failing or an indication that you’re a weak-willed person: it’s always some kind of specific complication (or more likely, a cluster of complications). Address the complication, and motivation will improve.

That’s a quick view of a large and important subject. I hope you’ll take away not only an understanding of what feedback loops are, but also a willingness to use them in parts of life that are important to you, anywhere that you want to improve or make progress. You’ll need something to keep motivation going, and while it’s ideal if you have something along the lines of a pretty French girl to inspire you, in a pinch, a feedback loop will do.

I’m not particularly interested in playing video or computer games, and you may well not be either, but taking a close look at them can provide us with some surprisingly useful information about how we motivate ourselves. And although in most cases, video games don’t motivate players to do anything particularly constructive, the lessons we take from them can be applied to virtually any kind of goal.

To get an idea of why we would care about video or computer games, think about the times you’ve seen someone who was very involved in one. They may play for hours at a time, postponing food and drink and bathroom breaks, accomplishing difficult tasks despite regular failures and setbacks, disregarding most of the world around them in favor of singleminded attention to a goal. A hard-core gamer might do this every day they can, week after week. Even children with ADD and ADHD seem to be able to focus intently on video games, according to research.

When this kind of attention is directed at video games, it’s a little disturbing. Having fun is great, but being obsessed with a video game is probably not the healthiest way to live. The interesting part comes when we imagine this same amount of focus and perserverance applied to some other task, like practicing the violin, studying algebra, building a house, or examining a patient in a health clinic. In fact, the description of someone who’s absorbed in a video game sounds an awful lot like the description of someone experiencing flow. Are there lessons we can learn from video game playing to understand better how to focus on other, more useful tasks?

Sorry, that’s a dumb question. You’ve probably read the title of this post, so you already know the answer is “yes.” I hope you’ll accept my apology for wasting your time with that kind of rhetorical silliness: I know you’re busy. Let me cut to the chase.

What is it about video games that engages attention and brings out so much focus and determination? It’s a combination of factors, each of which can be applied to self-motivation. Don’t be fooled by the fact that the video game is external to the person playing it, because there is no real carrot or stick. The forces driving a determined gamer all occur within their mind: they are the exact mental triggers that can potentially make any activity compelling.

Challenging, but Not Overwhelming
Video games strive to be hard enough that the player always has to focus attention in order to survive or succeed, but easy enough that eventually almost anyone who keeps trying can become skillful. The initial difficulty makes the later accomplishment much more gratifying, and ensures that the player can’t turn attention away from the game without sacrificing success.

When we want to accomplish something in our own lives, it can be helpful to array the job in front of us so that we have to dive in and work hard. This means creating goals that are difficult to achieve. Instead of having a goal of “cleaning the house,” you can have the goal of “making the kitchen spotless in 45 minutes.” If your kitchen would normally take you an hour and fifteen minutes to clean well, this is a difficult goal. You’d have to focus hard and work at top efficiency, ignoring distractions. When the kitchen is clean, level 1 has been cleared, so to speak. Whether or not you managed to complete the job in 45 minutes barely matters once the kitchen is actually clean. Then on to level 2 …

The Next Thing Needs to Be Done Right Away
In most good electronic games, there’s always another monster lurking, another disaster that needs to be averted, another question to answer. You can’t complete one thing and then relax: you complete one thing and immediately turn your attention to the thing after it, because your only other choice is failure.

In the same way, if you’re working on starting a home business, the most productive way to go about it is to know exactly what you need to achieve–probably in the form of a to do list–and to go about methodically completing one thing after the other. You write the business plan. As soon as that’s done, you immediately start on the financial projections, and then launch directly into the marketing plan, and so forth. The easiest way to keep these tasks going is to not just to keep a task list, but to make sure that the next task to do is already at the top of your list . This takes active management of the list to handle the changing situation. If you have a reliable queue of things to do, you can concentrate on one at a time and work through them without having to hesitate or lose momentum due to not knowing what to do next. If you finish a task and the next one isn’t already identified, make prioritizing your tasks itself the next thing you do.

Always Knowing the Stakes
In life, bad choices often don’t make any immediately noticeable impact. If you decide not to work on your novel today, or to ignore the argument you had with your significant other instead of considering how you could work it out together, everything may seem fine for now–but the long term effects could be a book that doesn’t get finished (or takes much longer than you wanted it to) or a relationship that becomes painful and frustrating.

In video games, by contrast, bad choices usually bring immediate trouble. If you don’t send your peasants out into the fields, your city starves and production grinds to a halt. If you don’t bother to keep an eye out for traps, you could suddenly end up impaled on something. These kinds of results tend to be very motivating: you put out your peasants or do regular scans of the area automatically to avoid trouble and prevail in the game. Creating automatic behavior is the power of a good feedback loop.

We can apply this motivating factor to our lives by reminding ourselves of the real consequences of our actions. If you have the choice of either filing your papers at the end of the work day or letting them pile up, you can focus on how enjoyable it will be coming in the next morning to a clean desk. If we want to avoid buying a bag of potato chips, you can imagine what you’ll look like the next time you put on a bathing suit if you are carrying on a love affair with Pringles. To motivate yourself to do something, think about the pleasing results. To motivate yourself not to do something, think about the unpleasant results.

Engineering Our Own Motivation
Developers of electronic games put enormous effort into designing game play, making a game as appealing and involving as possible. A relatively small amount of planning in our own lives can allow us to accomplish the same thing with our goals.

Photo by Shelms.

In a recent comment to my post Flow: What It Feels Like to Be Perfectly Motivated, Kaizan said, “I think the concept of flow as Csikszentmihalyi describes it is fantastic, but I didn’t really follow him as to how I was meant to apply it to my life.” It’s a good point: psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has researched and depicted flow beautifully, but actually finding flow takes some work. Here, based on what I know about flow so far and on my own flow experiences, is a starter “how to” list for getting into flow.

First, not every activity should be done in flow. Flow requires being able to concentrate on one particular task or related group of tasks for a substantial period of time without having to switch gears. This can happen alone or with other people, but if anyone or anything is going to need to pull your attention away from the task–ringing phones, kids needing help with homework, pets needing to be let out–it will tend to disrupt flow. That doesn’t mean a person can’t have a phone, kids, or pets, just that whenever there are potential distractions, getting into flow means making sure as well as you can that distractions are taken care of: the kids have someone else to go to, the dog has already been out, and there are no telephone calls you’ll need to take, for instance.

Flow also requires that you know what you’re doing. It’s a balance between control and challenge: if you’re just barely getting a grip on a new skill, you won’t have the control you need. That doesn’t mean you can’t get into a flow state when learning or practicing, but the ways I know of to do that are either 1) mastering the basics first, or 2) getting into flow about learning, not about the activity itself. For instance, if you’re just starting out with guitar, you could conceivably get into flow in terms of learning chord patterns if you have good learning skills, but you wouldn’t be able to immediately get into flow with actually playing the guitar.

Experiencing flow also means needing to carefully set clear goals that provide a challenge. Even thoroughly washing dishes before a deadline, believe it or not, works as one of these kinds of goals: washing dishes well but quickly is a challenge, and the ticking clock makes your goal clear and also provides another essential element:

Feedback. You need to be able to know how you’re doing as you proceed. This may be as simple as dishes washed, whether or not you’re playing the music as written, or seeing the wall you’re framing fit perfectly into the space allotted for it. This feedback needs to be immediate, something you’re getting in real time. Any activity that can’t provide that in-the-moment feeling of “Wow, this is going great!” probably can’t be done in flow.

That’s it. Surprisingly, the task being doesn’t have to be something you would usually consider fun. You don’t have to be a world-class expert at it, and you don’t necessarily need complete peace and quiet. Flow can be achieved filing papers, making a sales presentation, playing “Fur Elise” on the piano, sketching, vacuuming, teaching, brainstorming, organizing … or anything else that meets the following simple requirements: you are able to focus on it; you have a clear goal; it’s challenging yet within your abilities; you’ve already learned the basics; and you can see how you’re doing as you go.

So not everything can be done in flow–but then, not everything should be: sometimes being more responsive, relaxed, mindful, open, or social is called for instead. But as an element of a healthy lifestyle, flow provides an unmatched opportunity to operate at the our highest level while enjoying every minute.

In future posts, I’ll be following up with some descriptions of my own flow experiences, some information about applying flow to different kinds of activities, and possibly an interview or two about other people’s flow experiences.

Photo by Jim Natale

What would it feel like to be perfectly motivated, even if just for a little while? You would become really involved with what you were doing, even fascinated with it, so that you’d stop noticing distractions. You’d be excited, working hard but not wearing yourself out. You’d know exactly what you were doing and exactly what you were trying to accomplish and exactly how well it was going. Things would just flow.

As you might already know (or have quickly guessed), this state of mind does exist, and it’s not even exceptionally rare. Probably you’ve experienced it yourself at least once or twice–maybe many times. When it works, it feels magical, because you’re working at about the highest level of difficulty you can manage, yet everything feels profoundly easy.

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced “chick SENT me high,” as in “This guru chick sent me high into Himalayas to find myself, but she didn’t bring me there”) has a word for this state, which he’s studied now for decades. He calls it “flow,” because when you’re in this state, you feel like you’re being carried along, as though by a river.

It’s a little misleading for me to talk about flow meaning being perfectly motivated, because while it’s true in a sense, flow only applies to short-term experiences. You can get into flow when writing a chapter of a book or giving a musical performance or playing a game of baseball or even fixing a lawnmower, but you can’t get into a single experience of flow over the course of days or weeks or months. Flow also only applies to things we’re already pretty good at: if you’re just learning something, then you need to teach your brain about each of the pieces before you can put them all together into a complex whole.

So if it doesn’t last long, and if most large, important goals take a commitment of weeks or months or years, what good is flow? Well, that long-term commitment breaks down into individual sessions of doing something: exercising, writing, cooking, talking, studying, practicing–whatever it may be. And in those individual sessions, if we get good at what we’re doing, we can strive for flow. Flow is addictive, I can tell you from experience (mostly with writing and music). It’s also pleasurable. It’s also hellaciously efficient. Even if it only comes along now and then, a little flow can turn a long-term project into a long-term source of satisfaction and thrills.

So what are the components of flow, and how do you get into it? A full discussion of that takes much more space than we have here, so I’ll summarize what flow is and follow up with more posts on the subject in the future. If you’d like to learn about flow in detail, read Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.

Interestingly, flow has several things in common with good self-motivation techniques in general:

• Clear goals
• A strong focus on what you’re doing (in the case of flow, so much focus that everything else is blocked out)
• Feedback as you go (in the case of flow, this needs to be immediate feedback, like a comedian gets in front of an audience or a musician gets from hearing the sounds coming out of the instrument)
• The task being challenging, but within your abilities

In addition to those prerequisites, Csikszentmihalyi describes some important signs that one is in flow:

• Your consciousness of yourself fades, and your awareness is pretty much entirely on just what you’re doing
• Your sense of time distorts: an entire afternoon may feel like half an hour
• You’re enjoying what you do, so that it doesn’t feel effortful
• You feel powerfully in control of what you’re doing.

Flow can happen on its own when the conditions are right, but with an understanding of the process, practice, and some determination, we can get better at making flow happen on purpose. Flow isn’t the main component of long-term motivation, or even a strictly necessary one, but as components of motivation go, a hellaciously efficient and deeply enjoyable state is a welcome addition to the mix.

In a follow-up article, I talk about how to get into a state of flow.

Photo by Haags Uitburo.

A recent article on the Psychology Today site by psychologist Kelly McGonigal, “The Self-Control Costs of Moral Flexibility,” talks about research that seems to show that it’s easier to make good choices when we make a rule of them. For instance, it’s easier to choose to do the dishes after dinner if you’ve made a pact with yourself to always do the dishes after dinner.

In the article, McGonigal says “What’s the best strategy, then, for making moral decisions or sticking to a behavior change? Take a principled stance that sets automatic restrictions on your behavior. Weighing the risks and benefits in each situation may seem like the more logical approach, but it’s more effective for most people to commit broadly and then not reflect on each opportunity.”

So creating rules to follow can be powerful, but there are pitfalls: using rules too much or without thinking it through carefully can cause them to fail or even backfire.

First, keep in mind that we have a limited amount of focus, attention, and effort to spare, and that learning to follow rules (even if they’re terrific rules that we’re coming up with on our own) requires all of these resources. If we try to add on a bunch of rules at once–or even two at once–we may be dooming ourselves to failure. As with new goals, it’s often most effective to get used to new rules one at a time.

Second, watch out for unintended consequences. If you make a rule to eat only at specific times throughout the day, are you piling on extra food at the end of each of those meal or snacktimes because of a fear of going hungry? If you decide to study every weeknight at 7:00, does that mean you’ll pass up a golden opportunity to study at another time because you “don’t have to?” Of course, one way to deal with these problems is to try the rules out, then evaluate how they’re working once or twice a week to see if you might be “gaming” them. Don’t try to reevaluate the rule when it’s time to follow it: by doing that you’d be second-guessing yourself at every step and giving up the whole “no struggle” advantage of rules.

Finally, only make rules for things you want to be doing pretty much all the time. Don’t make a rule that you will sit down for ten minutes at the beginning of every workday to review what you accomplished the day before if you know that at least a couple of times a week, there will be more urgent, important things to attend to as soon as you walk in the door. But this kind of rule problem, too, can be fixed with a little bit of reflection once or twice a week to see how you’re doing.

The idea of making rules about your own behavior may be offputting; if so, it may be more productive to think about taking, as McGonigal puts it, a “principled stance.” Regardless, use this technique to make use of your good thinking now to make good choices in advance and free yourself from some unnecessary indecision.

Photo by Monoglot.

1. Not having a clear goal in mind
Not knowing exactly what you want, or knowing that but not keeping it in mind, makes it very hard to remember what you need to do or why. If you don’t have a clear, short explanation of your goal that you could give anyone who asked at a moment’s notice, talk with a friend or write down your ideas until you can summarize your goals without even having to think about it. Then make sure to tell yourself about your goals regularly.

2. Trying to pursue more than one goal at a time
While it’s not absolutely impossible to pursue more than one goal at a time, doing so dilutes attention, focus, and mental resources. We only have so much time, attention, and effort we can put into changing our lives: trying to do more than one thing at a time is inviting trouble. What’s the single most important goal you have in front of you? Once you’re well on your way with that single, most important goal, it might be possible to get started on a second one.

3. Not being committed
Being committed to a goal means accepting it, taking complete responsibility for it yourself, and being willing to submit to the changes it will require in your life. (See Why Self-Reliance Requires Surrender.) If you’re not fully committed to your goal, feelings of resentment or rebelliousness, or a tendency to blame forces outside yourself for being in the situation you’re in, will block you from moving forward.

4. Failing to plan out specific steps
Knowing your goal is important, but in order to make real progress toward it, you’ll need to know exactly what you expect yourself to do. At any moment, you’ll need to know what the step you’re working on is and what the next step will be when you’re done with that.

5. Not setting aside time
You won’t make much progress toward your goal if you don’t set aside time to work on it. If you just try to fit it in when you have spare time, you’ll find your goal often gets lost in the shuffle.

6. Not keeping up a feedback loop
Having a feedback loop means stopping regularly (at least once or twice a week) to look carefully at what you’ve been doing to reach your goal and noticing what you need to work on, pay more attention to, improve, handle differently, or keep up. Some techniques for doing this include journaling, meeting with a group, blogging, participating in an online forum, or talking with a friend who’s helping you keep on track.

7. Not paying attention to your thoughts
Building willpower or reaching a goal means changing habits, and changing habits means paying more attention to when decisions are arising and what factors are influencing our decisions. Bad choices are very often choices that we rushed past or didn’t think carefully through at the time. Understanding what’s going on in our own minds when making choices doesn’t always get us to make better choices, but it’s a necessary step to getting better and better at making those choices. For one way to become more aware of your choices and thinking, read How To Improve Willpower Through Writing Things Down: Decision Logging.

8. Not enjoying the steps
It’s easy to think of the steps we need to take to reach a goal as being painful or difficult, but finding the pleasure in those steps simplifies everything. See Using enjoyment as a tool to reach goals.

9 Not preparing
If we wait until we’re actually faced with choices, we may not be prepared to tackle them well. Some choices even pass by before we realize they were coming, unless we prepare by looking ahead. An example is lateness: being on-time means planning intelligently for when to leave for an appointment and getting everything ready beforehand so that it’s possible to leave at that time. Even for choices we recognize as they come up, we may not be mentally or emotionally prepared to tackle them. Paying attention to broken ideas, meditating, and organizing are some of the techniques we can use to prepare ourselves to do better.

10. Taking setbacks too hard
Changing habits is hard, and doing a difficult thing day after day often means some short-term setbacks or failures. Failure doesn’t need to be a pattern: it can be taken as a learning experience. Consider that if a person is trying to quit smoking, their chances of succeeding are much higher if they have tried and failed to quit smoking before than if they had never tried. Even failure is a step forward. It’s not trying at all that we have to watch out for.

Here’s a funny problem with motivation: in order to understand ourselves well enough to manage our emotions and ideas, we need to be mindful, which is to say, to live in the present, to pay attention to what is really going on inside and around us right now. But we also need to visualize where we’re going, to gain inspiration and energy from seeing what we could become and to anticipate both obstacles and rewards. And despite present and future, we also need to look back at what we have done regularly, to understand how things we’ve tried in the past have worked out so that we can repeat or change them, depending. We can’t do all of these things at the same time. Which is really more important?

Of course, that’s a trick question. Mindfulness is essential to changing ourselves, and visualization is an important step in motivating ourselves, and reflecting on the past to change the present (that is, creating a feedback loop) is an essential part of getting and keeping on track. The trick is to know when to do what. If anyone tells you to always live in the moment, ask them whether or not they look both ways when they cross the street.

The past (reflection or feedback) is important when we’re already working steadily toward a goal and are not conflicted in what we want to do. Reflection helps us correct our course and repeat successes.

The present (mindfulness) is where we need to put our minds when we are feeling conflicted or unhappy or distracted, or just want to be able to focus better. Mindfulness practices (especially mindfulness meditation) help us become serene and attentive.

The future (visualization) is where we need to place our thoughts when we’re not sure what we want to accomplish, or else when we want to build up enthusiasm for moving forward. If we’re feeling bad and unready to face the future, that’s a good sign that we need to concentrate on the present for a while instead, but if we’re calm and want to make decisions or get ourselves moving, visualizing the results of good choices now can be a tremendous help.

It will certainly be worth going into more depth on each of these subjects–feedback loops, mindfulness, and visualization–but even without that kind of detail, we’re ahead of the game just by knowing where in time to put our attention so as to best help our own motivation.

Photo by azharc