An experiment in excuses
For most of my life I’ve been running an experiment between two categories of things in my life: the “excuses are OK” group and “no excuses” group. It’s only recently that I noticed I was running this experiment, though, and so the years and years of results are only now starting to come in handy.

Let me give some examples of choices that have been in each group. By the way, though I talk a lot about eating well in this post, the points about excuses and exceptions apply just as well to forming any other kind of habit.

“Excuses are OK” group

• Eating foods that I’d be better off not eating
• Going to bed at a reasonable hour
• Keeping track of incoming mail

“No Excuses” group

• Parenting
• Vegetarianism (for the 22 years I decided to do that)
• Going to work

So I might do well for a stretch at making good eating choices, then hit a day when I was traveling and didn’t have many options, so I’d say to myself “Oh well, it’s really hard to eat well on a day like today–I’ll just eat whatever.”

But on that same trip I would not say “Oh well, it’s really hard to eat vegetarian on a day like today–I’ll just get a hamburger.”

My results
Knowing what I know these days about self-motivation, it shouldn’t surprise me that the “no excuses” group of activities were much more successful than the “excuses OK” group. For instance, when I started making a rule of eating only at specific times of day, it became much easier to make better eating choices. I went 22 years without knowingly eating any red meat, seafood, or poultry–even that time back in my 20’s when I was out of money and extremely hungry while traveling and someone offered me a hamburger. By contrast, it’s rare that I’ve gone 22 days without overeating (though all the days I have eaten well count for something, as I eventually lost 60 pounds and have been in great shape for quite a while now).

To look at it another way, and in terms of a real experiment, one study on habit formation found that those participants who kept up the behavior they wanted to make into a habit with no more than one exception over the course of months were much more successful at forming durable habits than those who made two or more exceptions.

The secret of excuses and exceptions
The thing about excuses and exceptions is that if we’re trying to build habits, there’s no good reason for excuses short of total catastrophe. Any time we don’t stick with the behavior we’re trying to build up–that is, any time we make exceptions–we lose some of the habitual behavior we’re trying to build. There may be days when eating well is inconvenient, boring, or annoying, but if I use inconvenience, boredom, and annoyance as excuses, then they’ll wreck my attempts to build a habit over time.

That’s not to say that making one excuse is the end of the world, but it is true that taking excuses as a serious problem and not an acceptable norm will help us develop the habits we want to create.

Easier said than done–but possible!
“That’s really nice,” you might say, “but it doesn’t help me for you to just tell me to behave the way I’d like to all the time. Not behaving the way I want to is the problem in the first place!” And that would be a reasonable thing to mention. Fortunately, there is a practical takeaway here: excuses are red flags and should be treated as such. There’s no such thing as a good excuse when trying to build a habit, there are only catastrophic interruptions. If a friend of yours is in the hospital and you end up throwing your good eating habits out the window from stress and limited choices, that’s fine; it’s not the end of the world–but it is a catastrophic interruption, and it means you’re damaging a good habit you’re working on for something more important. But good friends are more important than good food, and that’s a reasonable choice if you really need to focus on your friend.

On the other hand, what if you just interrupt a good habit because you’re in a bad mood or happen to be in a restaurant that serves something you like? Many of us immediately reach for the excuse box.

But if we recognize excuses and exceptions as danger signs, we can stop ourselves and say “My goal here is to build a habit, not to come up with excuses to screw that up.” Using this kind of awareness, making rules, taking responsibility, surrendering excuses, and making use of any useful tactics we can learn (like this list of 24 Ways to Stop Feeling Hungry), we can move ourselves out of the “Excuses OK” group and into the group that’s really kicking experimental butt.

Photo by ariel.chico

Breaking habits isn’t easy: it takes a lot of disruption to make a behavior we’re used to stop coming out automatically. Changing a behavior means coming up with many ways over time to stop ourselves from doing what comes naturally, by habit. For this purpose, the more tactics we have available to disrupt those undesired habits, the better–and one of those tactics, strangely enough, is a bit like procrastination. You could also call it “delayed gratification,” but regardless, the technique is to push things off a little further in time. For instance, if a person is hard at work at a home business and is tempted to stop working for a while to check Facebook, something they’re trying not to do doing working hours, one option is to say “How about I check Facebook a little later?” Chances are the idea of checking Facebook came up during a particularly boring or unappealing moment in work, and if things get more interesting as the work progresses, then not checking Facebook might be easier when the promised time comes than it was when it was first put off.

And if it isn’t easier to avoid when the delayed time comes, it can often be put off again. Enough delaying, and it might not happen at all, or else be saved to an appropriate moment–just as with someone who’s trying to stick to a healthier eating pattern putting off a snack until it’s meal time, when the snack is no longer necessary.

This is not a very sophisticated or especially powerful technique, but like the Just Don’t It technique, it can be pulled out at odd moments to interfere with a bad habit a person is trying to break. Even if ultimately the delays don’t prevent the undesired behavior, at least there has been some interruption of the normal state of things, which is an accomplishment and a bit of progress. And at their best, delaying tactics can be one of a set of tools that together can be employed to completely extinguish an undesired habit over time.

Photo by Stuart`Dootson

I’ve been corresponding with someone who has recently become more productive, and this person brought up a very useful question: once you start doing well with something, how do you make sure it continues? Some of the material I’ve dug up in the course of writing for this site offers some answers.

Use feedback loops
First, take a little time to figure out what you’re doing right. The best ways I know of to do this are to talk the situation through with someone sympathetic to your success or to write down your thoughts. What kinds of things do you think about before and during a successful experience? What kinds of thoughts are keeping you on track? Have you made any changes to your schedule, organizing, etc. that might be helping? The more you know about what’s going right now, the more likely you are to be able to keep it going or do it again in the future.

Build a Habit
Second, if you’re not doing it already, you may want to try to get into a habit of doing things at the same time and place each day. By repeating the successful behavior in the same context again and again, you can encourage it to become a habit over time, so that eventually you find yourself getting into the successful behavior automatically.

Troubleshoot
Third, keep a sharp eye out for obstacles. If you start to feel avoidant or negative, that’s not necessarily a problem: we all have our ups and downs. But it can become a problem if the feelings aren’t recognized, understood, and worked through, so it helps to pay special attention to exactly what your thoughts are and use idea repair as needed–the earlier, the better.

Photo by K2D2vaca

Ten weeks ago I posted the article “How I’m Keeping My Inbox Empty,” in which I described a new strategy I was taking to keep on top of all of my e-mail and keep my inbox completely clear. Some of the key points of my approach, which owed much to Dave Allen and his book Getting Things Done, were

• Make a set of special-purpose folders for e-mails that need follow-up, things to read, general information to keep, etc.
• Make tasks out of any e-mails that cause you to need to do tasks and put those tasks in a task management system
• If you can answer or deal with an e-mail within about two minutes, handle it immediately
• Look at everything that comes in as it comes in. Don’t put off any e-mails to consider later. If it’s going to take a while to respond, put the e-mails in your Reply/Act folder.
• Visit your Reply/Act folder often and deal with e-mails there, oldest first.

Of course there’s more to it (see the original post), but those are some highlights.

Ten weeks after I started, do I still have an empty inbox? Actually, yes! And this pertains to both a personal e-mail setup I have and a work-related one: the system has been working in both places equally well.

And have my inboxes been empty the whole time, or have I had to redo the cleanup? Amazingly, the system has worked consistently for me so far: I’ve never had to duplicate my initial effort (which wasn’t even so difficult: I outline how to pretty rapidly establish a clean inbox in the original post) and have had a clean inbox the whole time.

Have there been any unexpected snags? Yes, one: I sometimes get in the habit of watching my inbox like a hawk but neglecting my reply/act folder, which really needs to be addressed often. In online gamer slang (from my book Talk the Talk: The Slang of 65 American Subcultures), I’m “camping the spawn point,” looking for monsters where they appear instead of going after the ones that are already in place. But once I realized I was doing this, I began working harder at going back to that reply/act folder, and I’ve seen better results since. What’s wonderful is that even with that problem, I was being much, much more responsive to e-mails than I had ever been before.

Have you tried out this method of keeping a clean inbox? If so, I’d love to hear how it went for you in comments.

Photo by mek22

In yesterday’s article (Motivated, Wise, Productive) I mentioned a willpower challenge I’m starting, and it deals with bringing together a lot of skills from this site. If I succeed with this experiment, it should provide some useful findings–and if I fall on my butt, that should at least provide a little amusement.

You’ve probably noticed that this site offers a lot of tools for developing and using willpower, like emotional antidotes, flow, idea repair, feedback loops, and so on. But there are at least two major barriers between being familiar with those tools and using them all the time in everyday life: one is that knowing is not the same thing as doing, and the other is that it’s very problematic to try to pursue more than one goal at a time. Sure, I know a lot of great willpower tricks (like 24 Ways to Stop Feeling Hungry), but it still takes time, attention, and resignation to use those tricks.

And yet … every time I miss an opportunity to use my self-motivation skills, it’s disappointing. My primary goal right now is using organization and time management to get more writing work done, and that’s been very useful and important to me. But that means my other goals–like having a more orderly home and improving on my fitness–have had to wait on the sidelines for quite a while, and of course I’m impatient. So I theorized that if I could get into a habit of using my immediate willpower skills every time a willpower issue came up, even if it wasn’t in the course of pursuing my main goal, then I might make a lot of progress on those secondary goals and in fact on any goal I had clearly outlined and understood well without having to take on more than one goal at once per se.

The problem, of course, is forming the habit of using all those skills. Forming habits means repeating a behavior on purpose, and it’s necessary to do that daily for months before the habit typically sets in. So my challenge is this: every time a difficult willpower situation comes up, I’ll try using one of the techniques I know to deal with it. If I succeed, great. If I succeed in a surprising, interesting, or unusually powerful way, I’ll make a note about it in a special journal. If I fail, I’ll make a note about it that same journal and figure out what tool I could have used so that I’ll be prepared last time.

There are pitfalls here: this discipline might take too much focus away from my main goal, which wouldn’t be acceptable. Or it might just be that preparation (meditation, planning, etc.) is so important that in-the-moment techniques won’t get me where I need to go. Regardless, I’m planning to find out. Off I go on my adventure: wish me luck!

You might also be interested in reading:

• Knowing Isn’t Enough: The 4 Steps Between Knowledge and Action
• Choosing a Goal That Will Change Your Life
• How to Multitask, and When Not To

You may be in charge of how often you check your e-mail: it may be that you can stay away from it for days at a time, that you don’t check it on vacation, and that if you’re at a computer doing something else, you never look at it every five minutes just to see whether something new has shown up. Many of us, however, are in a different boat–if not with e-mail, then regularly going to bed later than intended (even if the last wakeful hour of the day was spent just marking time), or with watching the news every night, or with having a cup of tea every afternoon at four (I’m not looking at you, The United Kingdom; I’m just saying).

Whether we think of these kinds of behaviors as compulsions, bad habits, or routine, they have a few things in common: they seem to appear by themselves without our ever choosing them; they are often counter-productive (well, maybe not the tea); and they’re not easy to get rid of.

But these habits aren’t such a mystery, because we acquire habits in the same way whether they help us or hurt us, whether they’re desired or accidental: we repeat a behavior over and over for a reason until we naturally start doing it automatically even when we don’t have a reason.

Constantly checking e-mail is a good example: this kind of habit can easily develop when there’s important information coming through e-mail that you’re eager to see. I know that every time I’ve had a writing success (when I won the Writers of the Future contest, when my book Talk the Talk sold, etc.) or especially was hoping for a writing success (waiting for a response on a short story, waiting to hear back from a publisher about a novel) I’ve tended to check my e-mail over and over on the off chance that some time in the last five minutes, the hoped-for news had come: the book had sold, the contest was won, the agent is excited about working with me. And having a number of kinds of things like that over the years, I did this repeated checking long enough, often enough, and consistently enough that now for me, checking my e-mail is a little bit like eating: if I go too long without doing it, I start feeling antsy.

The exact same process applies to staying up late at night, or playing video games when you arrive home from work or school, or watching the news every evening regardless of whether it’s really making your life better to do so: any period where you have a powerful reason to do the thing over and over can birth a long-term habit that doesn’t need a reason. The same steps even apply to addiction in some ways, although there are also physiological factors when we’re talking about substance abuse.

Some of these (non-substance abuse) habits are neutral or helpful, others not so much. If you want to ditch a habit you never meant to pick up in the first place, the process is simple in a sense, though it takes attention, effort, and thought: you interrupt the repeated behavior long enough to weaken the habit. In order to do this, it’s helpful to find some non-habit-forming or constructive alternative, because it’s difficult not to do something you’re used to, but much easier to do something else–even if you’re not used to the something else. This is why people who are trying to quit cigarettes chew gum and why people who are trying to quit alcohol drink coffee at AA meetings.

As to whether constantly checking e-mail is one of the bad habits or one of the neutral ones–well, I would answer that, but I have to go check my e-mail.

Photo by CarbonNYC

Here’s a quick and easy exercise: look at your task list (or if you don’t have your task list, just start jotting down or typing out a list of things you’d like to get done) until you find an item that will take five minutes or less to do–especially if it’s one that you really don’t at all feel like doing. You don’t have to do it now, so it’s completely safe to pick a really unpleasant one if you can find it.

Now ask yourself: how many times have I thought about/spent time avoiding/reshuffled or scheduled this particular item? If the answer is that you jotted it down on your task list very recently when you were in the middle of something else, or that you just thought of it, either 1) you’re doing amazingly and don’t need any further information on this subject or 2) you have other less-than-five-minute items you’ve actually been avoiding and need to pick one of those instead.

Now ask yourself, just for fun or any insight it may provide, has organizing/keeping track of/thinking about/avoiding the item taken more time and attention so far than actually completing the task would? Even if the answer is “no” in this case, might it be “yes” in other cases? It certainly is sometimes in my life.

An example: my shower hasn’t been draining well lately, something I noticed a couple of weeks ago. I usually shower when I’m gearing up to go somewhere and don’t have a lot of spare time, so whenever I noticed the shower problem, I kept thinking (for the first week) “I have to remember to put that on my task list.” To my credit, as soon as I remembered it anywhere near my task list I did write it down, and I didn’t even fall for the trap of writing down “clear shower clog,” which is vague and doesn’t have a specific action attached to it, but instead wrote down “Check to see if I have any drain opener.”

Then the task sat for another week.

This morning I was reviewing my task list and doing my best to adhere faithfully to David Allen‘s very good advice about not handling things over and over: anything that would take a few minutes or less, I did it immediately rather than shuffling it around. When I got to the “check for drain opener” item, I went and checked to see if I had any drain opener. Nope. I could have then written down the next item “Search the Web for clearing shower drain ideas,” but since that too would only take a few minutes, I did it. A few minutes later I was upstairs in my bathroom, prying the drain cover up with a flat head screwdriver and then extracting gobs of my (and I suspect, the previous resident’s) hair. As a public service, I did not take a picture of that to illustrate this post. I got rid of the hair, washed off the screwdriver, and was back at my computer in hardly the time it would have taken to make a cup of tea. Then I checked the drain opening item off.

This was not always the way I would have handled things. Often in the past I would have thought “No no: organize now, do later.” The change in thinking for me was in considering these tiny tasks part of the the organizing.

Keep in mind that even if the task is very trivial, if it’s got some of your attention, it’s a win to get it done right away. That’s because there’s a point at which a task, however unimportant, takes more of your time and attention not to do than to do.

There’s a more advanced and effective step beyond what I did, which would have been to provide a little extra time to get ready each morning so that I’d have leisure to deal with the shower drain immediately when it came up. Allowing a little extra time here and there allows us to pick off a lot of things as they come up, and makes it easier to keep up with things like quick answers to e-mails, doing a few stray dishes that are sitting in the sink, or making a brief telephone call–all of which offers a more productive and less distracted life. It’s like clearing a clog to let water flow freely. And fortunately, it only takes a few minutes.

Some related articles:

• Useful Book: Getting Things Done
• The Eight Things You Can Do With a Piece of Paper
• 4 Ways to Make Sure You Get a Task Done
• How I’m Keeping My E-mail Inbox Empty
• Relieving Stress by Understanding Your Inputs
• Effective Organization and Filing Are … Fun??
• Why Tasks Lists Fail

Photo by  ap.

It’s not true what they say: you can teach an old dog new tricks. Up until just a few years back, the scientific consensus was that adult brains more or less stop changing, but the newest research presents a strong case that our brains continue to form new connections and pathways throughout our lives. This idea that the brain changes its own structure over time, called “neural plasticity,” has a lot to do with forming and breaking habits, because a habit is a set of neural connections that makes it more or less automatic to do one thing instead of another.

How Habits Form and Are Broken
The way we break existing habits is to interrupt them–to use different conditions, distractions, or thinking to get ourselves to do something other than what we’re used to. The way we form habits is to do a certain thing consistently day after day, a few dozen to a few hundred times. Breaking a habit means weakening the neural pathways our brains have created to make that behavior easier and preferred, while building a new habit means forging new neural pathways that helps our brains highly efficient in the things we do repeatedly, so we’ll have more brain function available for the unusual and the unexpected.

As an embarrassing example, there was a period where I would jokingly use the word “groovy” to describe things. I used this particular joke so much that at a certain point, I found myself saying “groovy” without meaning to. Someone would say “Hey Luc, it turns out that car repair I had to get cost hardly anything!” and I’d reply “Wow, groovy!” Needless to say, I had to go out of my way to dismantle that particular habit, and it took some effort.

I had a similar problem at a certain point with the expression “jinkies!”, but I don’t want to talk about it.

Getting Used to Things
So we’re constantly training our brains in and out of different behaviors. When we start adding salt to our meals or eat a lot of prepackaged or restaurant foods (both of which tend to be very high in sodium), we may be training ourselves into needing salt for things to taste “good” to us. When we decide not to do the dishes right after dinner for once after being used to doing it, we’re taking the first step in getting rid of that dish-doing behavior. The effects even extend to sex: as Norman Doidge argues in The Brain That Changes Itself, anything novel that’s connected to a pleasurable experience tends to become directly associated with pleasure on its own. This isn’t so surprising, though, to anyone who’s taken Psychology 101 and heard of Pavlov’s dogs, who began salivating whenever they heard the bell Pavlov sounded at feeding time. In a sense, the dogs had developed a bell fetish.

Good Parenting for Brains
The thing we can take away from all this is that our day-to-day decisions count in what kind of people we become. I’ve heard people advocate that someone who’s trying to develop healthy eating habits every once in a while take a healthy eating vacation and eat whatever they like, and while it’s possible that this has benefits (though I’m not sure it does), what we know about habit formation tells us that this will do some real damage to the good eating habits that are beginning to form. In a sense we’re telling our brains “Wait! Maybe we don’t want that habit after all. Let’s dwindle that pathway down a little.”

Like kids, our brains seem to respond best to very consistent behavior on our part, to the point where eventually we don’t have to put any real effort into something we’ve done consistently for long enough.

Photo by Roger Smith

In my recent article The Eight Things You Can Do With a Piece of Paper, I talk about some principles for taking the stress and difficulty out of organizing the piles of paper that can sometimes grow unwanted around our homes and workspaces. But that article didn’t really address the question of why someone would want to put the time and effort into organizing papers in the first place. For instance, if a person has been used to living in the midst of stacks of paper for years, why shouldn’t that person just continue doing so?

Well, certainly not everyone needs to organize papers, and even people who can benefit from it might do better to avoid it if by doing so they can get some more pressing things done. For instance, if it’s between organizing papers and working on broken ideas to address a serious problem with anxiety, I say let the papers pile up.

Still, here are some benefits of organizing papers for those of us not in that kind of position:

• It helps you capture tasks, responsibilities, ideas, and resources that otherwise might be hidden or forgotten
• You will probably find you can get rid of a lot of papers you don’t need, freeing up space and simplifying your environment
• Organized papers look better and are more motivating for most people than piles, drawers, or boxes of papers
• Things you didn’t know you had or forgot about can often surface during the organization process, not uncommonly including money
• The wonderful feeling of “THERE that thing is!”
• When you actually need some of the material you’ve organized, it will be easy to find it
• You can make much better use of information you have on paper when it’s collected by subject and easy to find
• Even a small amount of organizing work can help create a sense of satisfaction, order, and empowerment

Keep in mind that just organizing papers once in a major effort isn’t success: success is building a habit of keeping papers organized as they come in so that they are immediately available when they’re needed. Conveniently, this habit can be built up by regularly–ideally, every day–grabbing a few papers and taking care of them. You don’t have to make a massive initial effort to get things organized; it can just become a regular part of your day.

Photo by jasra

Update, 3/18/2010: My coaching schedule is now full for the time being, and I’ll be sure to announce when I have openings again. If you’d like to join a waiting list, just send me a note letting me know.

During this month and for a limited time going forward I’ll be providing free, one-on-one goals and habits coaching through e-mail. I don’t know about you, but I often find it easier to work through issues by talking with someone who is interested and has specialized knowledge they can bring to bear. Through coaching, I’m able to assist in identifying obstacles, determining tactics to overcome those obstacles, and providing resources to help inform the process.

Coaching services are entirely free: the benefit to me is in expanding my understanding of how individual people face issues with goals and habits in their own lives. To participate, it’s necessary to be willing for our discussions to be drawn on and quoted in my further writing on these issues, with the understanding that participants will be kept completely anonymous at all times.

A full explanation of the service is available under the Free Coaching tab at the top of this page. There are no strings attached, and I’m not offering any fee-based services at this time. If you have questions, please get in touch through the contact form.

Please feel free to repost this or information from the Free Coaching page anywhere you think it might be of interest. As a matter of fact, I’d consider it a favor.

Photo by Philo Nordlund