In this article, I talk about working environment and how we can gain advantages in self-motivation by making the place we’re doing the work more inviting and effective.

A recent post on Life Hacker demonstrates the point with 25 examples of highly inviting workspaces (at least, inviting to their owners, which is all that matters). The examples are generally for computer-centric work: there are no kitchens or woodshops in the mix. Still, it’s worth seeing even if the technoparadise approach (which is very well represented among the 25) doesn’t appeal to see how other people have attacked the problem and to take in examples like the utterly minimalist dorm room study space and the office on the side of a cliff. Here’s the full post:

http://lifehacker.com/5428746/most-popular-featured-workspaces-of-2009

In gambling, winning streaks are a sucker’s bet, but with willpower, projects, and good habit formation, winning streaks are not only possible: they can be a highly effective tool for making on-and-off success into consistent success.

Why Winning Streaks Help
In matters of willpower, our tendency to see patterns and to get invested in scores and numbers can work in our favor. A winning streak is the kind of system that tends to attract our attention. It’s also a way of harnessing the power of rules.

Let’s say I’m trying to develop a habit of getting to work half an hour early every day. If I’ve been managing to arrive at that time a few times a week, I’ll probably be encouraged, because arriving early on some days is clearly an improvement over arriving early on no days. However, doing something 3 or 4 times out of 5 isn’t a good way to develop a habit: the habit will develop more quickly if I show up at the new time I’ve chosen every single day.

This is where a winning streak comes in: if I have been in at the new time 3 out of the last 3 days, and if I’ve started to keep track, I’m likely to care more about being in at the new time on the 4th day, and then on the 5th. Every time I show up early, my count goes up, and I establish a new record–my “score” gets higher. If I don’t get in early, it ruins my winning streak, and my count is back down to 0.

Small, But Easy to Focus On
If you’re thinking that these kinds of scores are trivial, in some ways you’re right. Yet winning streaks are useful because our brains don’t always pick out the most important information: they like patterns. They also like clear, simple, short-term goals. This is why video games, soap operas, and sports events can be so engrossing to so many people: it’s not because these things are important for themselves as that they offer simple, immediate problems that are either going to be solved or not solved in the short term, along with a structure we recognize and can judge.

A winning streak means we’re not overwhelming ourselves with the requirement to become fluent in Korean or lose 40 pounds or organize the entire house. Instead, we focus on the current day and the current task: learn 10 more Korean flash cards; track all of what I eat for the day, exercise for at least 20 minutes, and stay under my calorie limit; do the next item on the house organization list. If we do the little bit that needs to be done every day, the winning streak is maintained and the days mount up. And if on one particular day things go awry, that’s disappointing, but the new goal is pretty obvious: start over and try to “beat” the old score, the longest previous streak.

My Experience
I’ve been experimenting with winning streaks in my own life lately, and so far the results have been strong, and I’ll be trying them out in other areas.

I’ve have been losing weight and getting more fit for years: I’m down 60 pounds so far, and I’ve become stronger, fitter, and more energetic than I’ve ever been in my life. My eating habits have been good, but typically I’d eat well on average maybe 5 to 10 days in a row, then have one or more days when I got just far enough off track to temporarily stop my weight loss.

Applying the winning streak approach, I started by writing “Day 1” on the pad of paper where I keep track of what I eat, what exercise I do, and what I weigh. My task was to keep my food intake within 1700 calories each day (a level at which I know from experience I lose weight at a healthy rate) and to exercise on every day it was feasible. Each day do these things this counts as a “win.” So far, every single day has been successful. Today is day 24, and not only is this probably a record for me in terms of consecutive “perfect” days for weight loss, but I weigh 7 pounds less than I did on day 1. That breaks out to about 2 pounds a week, the highest weight loss rate that is probably healthy for me. I’ve even been through a number of disruptions during this time–illness, Thanksgiving, a trip out of town, eating out, and so on–but because I was on a winning streak, my attention remained focused on how I could keep on track for each of those days. For Thanksgiving I planned ahead with my family and brought some healthy foods along to the meal myself. On my trip I packed healthy food before I left and chose a restaurant to have lunch in with care. I have no doubt that I would have felt much less motivation to make things work in those particular, difficult situations if I hadn’t been trying to protect my winning streak–and getting motivation during those trickiest times is exactly where willpower needs to shine.

Want to Try It?
If you want to try using a winning streak yourself, you’ll need to know two things first: what your requirements are (exactly what do you have to do to “win” each day?) and what you need to have or know to be able to meet those requirements. For instance, you can’t plan to study Korean every day if you don’t yet have materials to study.

Most habits will benefit most if you do them every day, but if that’s not practical, you’ll want to establish an exact schedule, for instance “every business day” (which would be suitable for a job-related goal) or “every Monday, Thursday and Saturday except when ill.” Write down all the allowable exceptions at the beginning–it’s too easy to change the rules and wiggle out of things if you change the rules in the middle of the game.

Then just write “Day 1” … and start your winning streak.

Photo by cliff1066

In cleaning up my office recently, I found several notes to take down from older phases in my health and weight loss process. Over the last few years I’ve lost more than 50 pounds (so far), put on a good deal of muscle, and improved my general fitness and energy levels–but it has taken a lot of effort, and it surprised me to realize how many different approaches I had needed over even just the last couple of years.

And when I look the notes over, I realize they were all good tactics. It’s not that I kept trying things and failing, but really the opposite: I would struggle with a set of goals for a while, eventually make them part of my automatic behavior, and then turn my attention to the next step for me, whatever that was at the time. The notes I pulled down today were tucked in places around my desk where I was guaranteed to see them several times a day. They were each at different times a small part of my self-motivation, and when I needed to quickly remind myself exactly what I was working on at the moment, they were always there.

Generation 1
The oldest note I still had up covered six principles that helped me minimize some of my bad eating habits and improve my nutrition and health in general. They’re not so much universal wisdom as the specific things I personally needed to concentrate on. (These were just for eating: exercise was always pretty much a simple matter of “get active, and stay active!”) My note (paraphrased a little) said:

1. Plan food choices instead of choosing while you’re hungry
2. Know how many calories are in something before eating it
3. Eat only from servings*
4. Fruits and vegetables are good choices for snacks and fillers
5. Eat at regular times
6. Write down everything you eat

* For instance, instead of eating from a box of crackers, I would serve myself some crackers on a plate.

Generation 2
As these things became deeply-ingrained habits, I stopped looking at that list, and eventually I created another, this one of things I could do to not eat if I felt hungry (except for fruits and vegetables, which for me personally are always a good idea). They were things like eating a fruit or vegetable, getting involved in something absorbing, drinking tea, etc. They helped solidify my habit of eating only at particular times.

Generation 3
As that grew to be old hat and both good eating and exercise grew to be pretty ingrained habits for me, I added a new goal, task management. Now my reminder note had to do with always knowing what the next thing I wanted to do was, focusing on making good choices every time a choice was presented to me (regardless of the subject), and going out of my way to find enthusiasm for the most important items on my task list.

A Continuing Cycle of New Tactics
What I hope you’ll glean from all this isn’t so much the specifics of my reminders to myself over time as a picture of self-motivation as an ongoing process of acquiring habits. You identify some behaviors you want to change, remind yourself of them every day, and then as they become habits, you set your sights a little higher or make your goal a little larger. For this new vision, you figure out what behaviors you need to change. One goal gives way to the next, and if things go well, you gradually acquire more and more of the habits you really want to have, and lose more and more of the behaviors you don’t want.

Kelly McGonigal recently Tweeted about a British Psychological Society post in which psychologists talk about things they still don’t understand about themselves. It’s really interesting reading, but the particular thing that I connected with was University of Texas psychologist David Buss saying “One nagging thing that I still don’t understand about myself is why I often succumb to well-documented psychological biases, even though I’m acutely aware of these biases … One would think that explicit knowledge of these well-documented psychological biases and years of experience with them would allow a person to cognitively override the biases. But they don’t.”

I know why Buss sometimes fails to act according to things he knows perfectly well, and yet I do the same thing myself, for instance a couple of weeks ago when I had a serious communication breakdown that I later saw wouldn’t have been a problem if I’d  used all of the communication skills I’d been learning for years (see Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High or Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life). Actually, that’s the whole point of this post: just knowing something about how our minds work is not the same thing as using that knowledge.

So what’s the gap between knowing and doing? There are actually four gaps. Lucky for us, none of them is very wide.

1. Noticing opportunities to use the knowledge
The first step is a kind of mindfulness: in order to use, say, a communication skill, I need to be thinking about my communication as I’m doing it so that I can notice, “Hey, here’s a great opportunity to summarize my friend’s concerns!” Mindfulness can be improved with tools like meditation, feedback loops, and decision logging.

2. Understanding how to apply the knowledge
It’s good for me to know that I should try to summarize a person’s concerns back to them, but I need to know more than that abstract idea: I need to know how I go about it, perhaps having a step-by-step method I can use to apply the information I have, or some test I can use on my intended behavior to see if it would fit the information.

3. Surrendering objections
By definition habits are hard to change, and if you’re trying to act a different way, you’re trying to change a habit. Changing habits usually means giving something up, for example pride, less-than-ideal strategies you’ve been using for years, or defensiveness. In my case, if I want to make sure the person I’m talking to knows they’ve been heard and understood, I have to give up the impulse to do a critique of what they just said and instead be willing to understand first, react second. People are much more comfortable hearing someone else’s ideas when they know for sure that their own ideas have already made it across.

4. Making the effort
Putting a piece of knowledge into play requires conscious effort: there’s usually nothing automatic about it. Effort means a decision to devote at least a little bit of time and attention at the right moments to using the knowledge.

In an article on learning and the brain, I talk about how acting on knowledge helps us learn it better. For this article or any piece of knowledge you gain that might be useful, it can make all the difference to use it as soon as possible, several times, both in order to get used to the specific skill and to fix it in your brain. If we don’t go out of our way to bridge the four gaps between information and action–noticing opportunities, understanding how, surrendering objections, and making the effort–then the knowledge isn’t any more useful in our heads than it is left on the page, unread.

Photo by magnusfranklin

Here is part II of excerpts from my interview with 6th dan black belt Gordon White, where we pick up with him traveling to Korea during college to push his Taekwondo training to the limit. You can read part I here, or read the full interview on this page.

 An all-you-can-train buffet
So, I landed in Seoul, Korea in late summer, 1991. I got set up in the dorm, and I attended practice 4 and sometimes 5 days a week (20 – 30 hours a week) [in addition to academic work].

I woke up every morning in Korea ready to hit the ground running for whatever Taekwondo experience I could get . It was hard. I got homesick, and some cultural things freaked me out (it was not uncommon for the coach to discipline the students with a baseball bat across the back of the legs), but these obstacles were squashed by desire to work and excel at Taekwondo. I guess it’s like being hungry and not feeling like there is enough food in the house–and then you go to an all-you-can-eat buffet, your eyes get big, and you dive in, knowing there is more food here then you are ever going to be able to eat, but you still want to get your money’s worth: that is what my year in Korea was like. There was more Taekwondo there then I could ever consume in a year, but I tried.

When the stakes rise, so do the expectations
I started to feel some pressure to perform, however–it was completely unintentional–but I got loads of letters from the Blue Wave. Everyone was very proud of me being in Korea and training hard, but the expectation was that I was going to come back and mop up the competition at the Nationals. I came home from Korea to attend 1992 nationals, there was a big fundraiser to get me there, and everyone expected me to do well … but I didn’t. I fought OK, but lost my second match of the day. It was very disapointing, and while I knew that no one was disappointed “in me,” many people were still disappointed for me. I headed back to Korea to finish out my final months at Yonsei–interestingly, still very motivated and excited to be there …

Simplifying … and winning
When I got back to Vermont, I was happy to be home but anxious about the upcoming year. I needed to focus on school again, but I still had my heart set on doing well at nationals and attending Team Trials. I had set a goal for myself to attend a world-level event and place. Considering I had only placed at nationals once, this was a pretty big step.

Some changes in how I was living helped: I moved back home, I didn’t re-open my Taekwondo School, and I only worked weekends. The following year, I placed at Nationals, and went to Team Trials and placed second, earning a spot on national B Team, and was picked to represent the US at the World Games in The Hague, Netherlands.

My goal was to make the US Team, but that was not all I was motivated by. I loved Taekwondo, loved how it made me feel, loved the people in it and the relationships I had with them. All these things played into my motivation to continue to train, get better, and simply do my best, had there been no competitive aspect to Taekwondo. Had my only real motivation been competitive, I don’t think I would have been so involved in the Blue Wave Association. I was very close with Master Twing. When he got sick with cancer, he asked that I become president of the Blue Wave Association, not because of my physical ability, but because he knew that I wanted the Blue Wave to be successful, to grow and continue to be a positive influence in people’s lives.

From competitor to teacher
[Lately] I have been busy getting the Taekwondo fall schedule up and running, attempting to solidify a new working relationship with an equipment supplier, getting the details straight for the Black Belt Conference taking place in November, and trying to secure a location for Winter Camp 2010. So “why” I do it is something I often ask myself and I am not sure I have a good answer for.

Transition from competitor to teaching was a natural process for me. As I said, I always imagined myself teaching, and teaching was something I did for a long time. Grandmaster Lee and Master Twing worked with me and expected me to help spread the information, and I think from the start it was very rewarding to teach, and I also felt responsible, Taekwondo was something (I felt) had given me so much, and this was my duty to give back.

In 1998 I fought at the Massachusetts State Championships. I had 3 fights to win the division. It was a lot of fun, I fought well, and when it was all over, I told Calvin (my wife) that I was pretty sure that I was done competing. I knew what it took to get to a high level of competition, and also what it took to stay there. It has to be your priority, your job to train and compete, and something inside me said that I’d had enough. It was around the same time, however, that I was getting very excited at the prospect of teaching and having my own school. I felt ready to teach: I felt like I had a lot of experience and depth and could be a good instructor. Having Master Twing’s overwhelming vote of confidence simply reinforced what I was feeling. Teaching, running a school and building the Blue Wave was the next place for me to place my passion for Taekwondo.

It’s interesting: you often hear that teaching is such a selfless job, you have to put the students first, but honestly it’s not entirely selfless. Teaching has made me understand Taekwondo far better then if I had just remained a practitioner. I think this is what is part of the motivation for me. I still get something from it, so there is still a selfish element. The satisfaction comes in seeing the school grow, watching the student progress and the competitor’s performance improve. There is a certain amount of pride in knowing that you have something to do with it. You share in the success and failure of every individual in the gym. The ups are wonderful, and downs equally disappointing.

Find more videos like this on The Blue Wave Taekwondo Association

Master White demonstrating a kicking technique to students in 2007

What keeps the fires burning
I often wonder if I should give up some Taekwondo–have more time to relax, more time with my family, etc. Right now, this is what I am doing, and as long as I get up in the morning and more often then not am looking forward to the Taekwondo tasks ahead, I will probably keep doing it.

So the point is that yes, teaching is about the students, building the Blue Wave is about the members, and coaching is about the athletes, but it is impossible to give these things 110% without it fueling you back, keeping you excited about what you are doing and giving you knowledge and experience that adds to the person you are. I don’t know, some day I might have the same type of revelation that I had in 1998, and it will be time for what is next, but right now, I have to finish this email: Junior ATP [Athlete Training Program] starts up tonight, and I’m excited to work with my students.

Photos and video courtesy of Gordon White.

Gordon White holds a 6th dan black belt in Taekwondo Chung Do Kwan, a rank that takes upward of 20 years of hard practice and constant study to attain. He has sparred and won medals both nationally and–as a member of the U.S. national team–internationally, teaches Taekwondo on his own time four or more days a week, and serves as President of the Blue Wave Taekwondo Association, a New England group with hundreds of members.

It’s through Blue Wave that I know Master White: I’m in training to test for my 1st dan black belt in March of 2010. Having long been struck by Master White’s passion for Taekwondo as well as by his drive to teach, I asked to interview him for The Willpower Engine. When he agreed, I received some unexpected and enlightening answers to my questions.

Following is part I of excerpts from the interview in Master White’s own words (except for the headings I’ve added), with part II available here. To read the full interview, unedited, click here.

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It started with bullies
I started  Taekwondo May 13th, 1983. I was in the eighth grade. The 6th and 7th grades were tough on me: I was picked on and beat up a lot, and now was nervous about being a freshman in high school the following year. My older sister had a boyfriend who practiced Taekwondo, and he invited me to visit his school.

So my parents brought me over on Friday night. We talked to the instructor, who had me fill out a form. There was a list of about 20 different “benefits” of Taekwondo training. Self confidence, physical fitness, self defense, competition, etc. I checked off all but 1 or 2….(I think weight control was one that I left off). I signed up that night, and was hooked. For the next 2-1/2 years, my parents drove me to Winooski 3 to 5 times a week. While I had other interests (drumming, skiing, BMX biking …) which I continued to be involved in through High School, they quickly became a second priority to Taekwondo.

Self defense is what motivated me to walk in the door of a Taekwondo school, but what kept me there were number of things. I was good at it, but I also felt like belonged there. I was surrounded by 5 men in their twenties who were black belts, and in my eyes were like having 5 Bruce Lee’s to practice with. I wanted their physical skills, strength, and confidence, and my instructor made me feel like I was capable of achieving it. I was made to feel that I had tremendous potential, and that by practicing Taekwondo and dedicating myself to it, I would be successful in anything I wanted to pursue. While my motivations and goals changed–instructing, competing, etc.–I guess once I started Taekwondo, NOT doing it was never an option.

Parents’ and instructors’ expectations
Part of my motivation was driven by my desire to to live up to someone else’s expectations. My parents, instructor, and coaches all played a very important role in me staying motivated and dedicated to continue with Taekwondo. Those that come before you have the experience to know what is possible–so they set high expectations for you, higher then perhaps you can imagine on your own. It’s fantastic, because it helps you do more than you would most likely accomplish otherwise. However, with it comes pressure. I see parents all the time who don’t think they are putting pressure on their kids, coaches who have a “low pressure” philosophy, but as long as there are caring instructors there will be pressure on the students.

From the time I started Taekwondo and got my yellow belt [an early beginning rank], I intended to be a Taekwondo instructor. I was fortunate to find the Blue Wave and Master Twing–but if I had not, I don’t think it would have stopped me. I think I would have continued to search until I found an instructor that I could connect well with.

The pressure to perform vs. enjoying a thing for its own sake
Luc, in reading Keyna’s favorite movie list, I was reminded of one of my all time favorite movies Searching for Bobby Fisher. The main character, Josh Waitzkin, (this is based on a true story) has supportive parents and coaches, [who all] see his potential (he’s considered a gifted chess player) and are driven to support and push him, thus creating tremendous pressure for him. The conflict he feels between wanting to just enjoy chess and excel to the point that he thinks his coaches/parents want is very well portrayed in the film.

By the time I was in college, my desire to do well in Taekwondo was driven almost entirely by my own motivation. I think the trick with motivation is that if it’s a chore, it’s not really motivation: real motivation has to come from within. External influences can help, but I think this can turn into a feeling of responsibilty, or a fear of disapproval. No one was telling me to get up early to run–or give up social events on Friday night because I was traveling to a training session or tournament. I did these things on my own, because I wanted to. It never felt like a sacrifice for me.

College as a goal–and as an obstacle
College got in the way of Taekwondo … My first two years of college were done out of responsibility–not motivation. All I wanted to do was Taekwondo: studying was not high on my list, but my feeling of responsibilty to my parents to “get a four year degree” had me putting in minimum effort to get by. It was a bumpy road – 6 years for a four year degree including some time off and a year abroad, but in the end, Taekwondo is what provided the real motivation for me to finish school. I FINALLY claimed a major, “small business management,” which allowed me to link what I was learning, to what I eventually saw myself doing, owning a Taekwondo School.

Another obstacle for me was the lack of training partners and travel distances. When I started Taekwondo in 1983, I was able to train 4 or 5 days a week. But in 1986, I began training with Master Twing in Randolph, Vermont, a 100-mile round trip. I was only getting down 1 or 2 times a week–when Grandmaster Lee arrived in late 1987 and came back again in 1988, I would often spend weekends at Master Twing’s house, training with Grandmaster Lee in the basement.

A montage of board breaks and sparring by Gordon White from 1987-1990

The missing ingredient
By 1990, I had failed to place at Nationals after 3 attempts, 1987, 1988, 1990. I missed 1989 due to knee surgery–another obstacle, I suppose. I felt like I should be on the podium, but something was missing–the people that were placing had something I didn’t, and it wasn’t physical skill: it was confidence. While I spent all of my training time sparring with people that were not as good as I was, the best players were from big cities, training with teams of national level competitors. This was the difference. The only time I had experienced this was in 1987: Grandmaster Lee took myself and one other black belt to Korea for 6 weeks. We traveled around the country, training at different schools and getting our butts kicked on a regular basis. The dramatic increase in skill and confidence I gained just in these 6 weeks was something I needed much more of.

I headed to the International Education office at UVM and asked what my options were for a year abroad in Korea. I was given information for attending Yonsei University, and started making plans for it. In order to go, I needed to get my grades up at UVM (I did); I needed to close my Taekwondo School (one of my students, Tim Warren, wanted to open a school in Milton, which gave me a place to send my students); I needed to continue to train as hard as I could–I still had nationals to attend and if I hoped to keep up in Korea, I wanted a good foundation–and lastly, I needed to earn as much money as I could, because I would not be working for the year there. I waited tables at the Peking Duck, picking up extra shifts.

Click here to read part II of the interview, following Master White to Korea, back to the U.S., and to the heights of competition.

Photos and video courtesy of Gordon White.

Nancy Fulda is a writer, editor, entrepreneur, Web developer, and mom who created AnthologyBuilder, a service that lets people edit their own anthologies of short fiction by professional writers. Creating this service from scratch took a lot of doing, and is a useful illustration of tackling a big task with no immediate payoffs along the way. I interviewed Nancy about that process and about some of the unexpected insights into her own motivation that came out of it. The rest of this post, except for headings, is in her own words.

The idea: a site where people could create their own anthologies
AnthologyBuilder is a custom anthology web site. Let’s say your nephew is fascinated by genetics and asks you for stories about geneticists. You’re not likely to find anything like that at the bookstore, but you can come to AnthologyBuilder.com and choose stories for inclusion in a mail-order book.  You can pick your own title and cover art, too. The finished anthology costs $14.95 and looks just like any other book.

I started AnthologyBuilder because I was tired of buying magazines and books where only a few of the stories interested me.  “What I want,” I said to my friends, “Is a do-it-yourself anthology web site that let’s me pick whatever stories I want.”  The response was so overwhelmingly positive that I decided to build it.

I had a pretty good idea what the initial effort would be.  I was a bit surprised, later, to discover how much work goes into maintaining and improving a project like this on a daily basis.

The first major obstacle
The hardest part was finding a programmer.  I have some background in computing, so I had a pretty good grasp on what the site would need to do, and I was surprised and dismayed to discover that there weren’t any programmers willing to take on the job for rates we could afford.

“It’s not that hard,” I kept griping to my husband.  “I don’t know why no one wants to do this.  I could almost program it myself.”

And in the end, that’s what I did.  It required teaching myself PHP, figuring out how to encode PDF documents, learning to purchase and administer web hosting, and brushing up on internet commerce, but after three months of work, the first prototype of the web site was ready to go.

How she stayed motivated
I think what helped most was keeping the Big Picture in mind.  At the beginning, the web site wasn’t much to look at, but I tried to see it for what it could be instead of for what it was.

I made mistakes, of course; everyone does the first time they try something new.  But I tried not to let those mistakes discourage me.  I’d tell myself, “It’s ok, I can fix this.  It will all work out in the end.”  And so far, it has.

Starting a business from home, with kids
The home environment [was] an ideal work locale for me; I have the mornings to myself while the older kids are in day care.  Afternoons get a bit crazy sometimes, but I often manage to sneak in an hour or two of work during the afternoon.

I tend to focus on one task at a time.  There’s a weird sort of rhythm that I get into when programming.  Some days, I can code up several web pages in far less time than it takes me to write a page of text.

My most productive work times — and this is going to sound odd at first — happened on the days when I spent the most time with the kids.  Happy kids make for better work sessions, you see.  Crabby children interrupt me more often, and I can’t concentrate well because I’m too busy feeling guilty.  I learned pretty quickly to put the kids’ needs first even if there were five urgent emails in my in-box.  I get more work done that way.

Dealing with distractions
One of the biggest hindrances at first was the number of internet communities I belonged to.  I enjoy hanging out with my online friends, and I’d spend up to two hours catching up on blogs and discussion forums before actually settling into the work day.

After a while it became apparent that I was going to need to change something.  It took some effort, but I finally convinced myself that I didn’t have to stay up-to-date on every thread of every discussion forum.  In real life, I miss conversations all the time, so why should I feel the need to be a part of every single thing that happens online?

I also learned that I prefer to take care of the ‘little’ tasks of the day before settling into the ‘big’ one.  By ‘little’ tasks I mean things like answering emails, paying the bills, and so forth; individual items that take less than five or ten minutes to accomplish.

I used to be so enamoured of the current project that I’d push all that little stuff aside and dive right into the ‘real work’.  The problem with that was that all those unfinished tasks weighed on my mind.  It was like a mountain of work hanging over me, this big dreadful pile of Things That Needed Done, and it sapped my energy like a vampire.

The thing is, that huge dreadful mountain tasks seldom took more than an hour to complete.  I learned that if I cleared that stuff off my plate first, I’d face the rest of the day with only a single (albeit large) task looming over me.

How things changed once the business was launched
AnthologyBuilder seems to run in one of two modes: “Coasting” and “Renovation”.

In “Coasting” mode I spend 5-10 hours per week on housekeeping tasks: reading submissions, processing orders, responding to customer emails, and so forth.  AB goes into Coast mode whenever life gets frantic.  It’s a comfortable, familiar pattern that requires little emotional or intellectual investment.

“Renovation” mode comes along every two or three months and tends to last for about a month.  This is where I implement new features, run promotions, rework the site design, and otherwise try to push the site to its next level of potential.  Renovation mode requires 15-30 hours per week and sucks up a lot of brainspace.

When I’m in Renovation mode, I’m bursting with excitement and new ideas.  I’ll find myself jotting notes down during breakfast or planning a new feature while playing with the kids.  This saps energy and attention away from the family, which is why I try not to let Renovation mode continue for too many weeks in a row.

I envision my various projects (AB, family, work-for-hire, and so forth) as a connected system, kind of like push-buttons that pop up when one of the other buttons is pressed down.  Whenever one project is the center of attention, all the others are Coasting.  I try to swap it around and make sure every project gets its fair share of attention over time.

Sometimes I wondered whether AnthologyBuilder was unfairly sapping resources the family needed elsewhere.  Every time I discussed it with my husband, though, we both felt strongly that we should stick with it.  So we made adjustments and kept plugging along.

I would have abandoned the project without a second thought if I’d felt that AB was causing too much stress or that the family structure was cracking under the strain.  I firmly believe that knowing when to let go of a good idea is just as important as knowing when to snatch one up and run with it.

Advice for entrepreneurs
I’m often asked what advice I’d give to young entrepreneurs.  Two thoughts spring immediately to mind:

(1) Just because an idea doesn’t pan out doesn’t mean it was a mistake to try it. You gain skills along the way that will help make subsequent projects successful.

Perhaps more importantly, trying and failing brings a peace of mind that failing to try never can.  Okay, so it didn’t work out, but at least you know that.  You won’t spend the rest of your life wondering what might have happened if you’d tried.

(2) Don’t risk anything you’re not willing to lose.  This includes, but is not limited to, money.

Family picture courtesy of Nancy Fulda.

In my last post, “How to Get a  Lot of Different Things Done Without Going Crazy,” I mentioned molecular neurobiologist John Medina’s point that our brains are structured so that we can only focus on one thing at a time. In Medina’s book Brain Rules, he asserts, “the brain cannot multitask.” It’s a really important point, but he is making it in a confusing way, because Medina goes on to say he’s only referring to “the brain’s ability to pay attention.” As you know if you’ve ever driven the wrong way because your mind was on something else, doing a thing doesn’t always mean paying attention to it. Medina is telling us that we can’t multifocus. Multitasking is not only possible, it’s a terrific way to get dull things done without getting bored, if used in the right way.

But since we can’t focus on more than one thing at a time, that means that if we’re multitasking, we can have at most one thing tying up our attention at a time: past that first thing, anything else we do can’t be something requires attention: it has to be something we’ve done over and over the same way.

I like folding laundry, because I always use laundry folding time to watch a movie with my son. We dump all of the clean laundry in the middle of the living room, sit around the pile, and gradually transform the pile into neat stacks of folded clothing. We take our time, talk about the movie a little when we feel like it, and when we’re done we hardly feel like we’ve done any work. It’s my son’s favorite chore, and I count it more as leisure than work.

But it’s easier for me than for my son, because I’ve been folding clothes for decades, while my son has only been doing it for a few years. Several times every folding session, I’ll notice he’s stopped folding, his attention fully on the movie. Usually this happens with a trickier item of clothing or with a particularly gripping part of the movie. Not being as used to folding as me, he can’t do it entirely on automatic, so his brain needs some of his attention for the folding, and his attention is already taken up by the movie. Since he can’t pay attention to two things at once, the clothes folding just stops, and since he was doing it automatically, he may not even notice: he may just sit there holding the shirt, transfixed.

“Fold,” I remind him, and he takes the few seconds necessary to focus on the clothing and start folding it, at which point his brain can go back to the movie.

I can understand if you don’t think of watching a movie and folding clothes as multitasking (though since I write a lot of fiction and analyze movies for plot, character, pacing, and emotional impact as I watch, watching movies for me is fun work instead of just fun), but even using our attention for fun can make boring work enjoyable.

So multitasking is simple, but multitasking attempts are doomed to fail unless the extra tasks being done are near-automatic ones. In terms of prioritizing tasks if we want to get a lot done, this suggests that it’s helpful to save the really mindless ones for a time when we’re doing something else with our mind: planning, talking on a headset phone (they’re not expensive, and they’re a good way to get housework done painlessly for some people), or even relaxing with a movie. But since even automatic tasks require a little bit of attention from time to time, we generally can’t focus intensely on one thing while automatically doing another: for example, we can’t multitask and still expect to get into flow.

I’m not suggesting we need to fill every moment of our lives with as much productivity as possible, but when we have a lot of things in front of us to do, it can help to know that some of the dullest tasks can be done while our brains are elsewhere. While there are other good ways to accomplish boring tasks, there’s a certain satisfaction in getting two things done at once: it makes us feel organized and confident, and that feeling itself is a great motivator.

Replicated guy cleaning photo by waveking1
Photo of unicyclist Tom James by Elsie esq.

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.

You should understand that I like coffee–a lot. I may not be one of those people who can tell Sumatra from Ethiopian at a sniff or who grinds it fresh every morning, but I really enjoy the stuff. I used to drink it black–no milk or cream or sugar or whipped cream or cinnamon or Sweet’n’Low. I have long enjoyed the smell, taste, and experience of a cup of coffee–and I haven’t had a drop of the stuff in over a year. For that matter, I’ve also had no caffeinated soda or tea and very close to zero chocolate in a year. It has been a bit of an adjustment.

I’d probably better mention that I don’t think coffee, caffeine, or chocolate are evil: my particular physiology just has a very hard time with caffeine. If I drink coffee, I have to have a specific amount at a specific time every day without fail, or I get headaches. Caffeine also drives up my blood pressure noticeably, makes me itch in cold months, and causes me excruciating pain at any time of year if I’ve been drinking it and then really, really exert myself. For you it might be healthy, but for me even tiny traces of caffeine are very bad. I shouldn’t even drink decaf, because decaffeinated coffee and tea aren’t free of caffeine; they just have less. I may have coffee or chocolate at some point in the future (for instance, if I absolutely have to make a long drive and I’m very tired), but if I do, there will be a price to pay.

So as much as coffee and chocolate appeal to me (especially together), I’m a much happier person not having them–though as you can guess, it hasn’t been easy. How have I kept on the straight and narrow and not even slipped once?

I do have a special advantage in resisting coffee, and that’s that once I finally discovered that it was caffeine that was causing all these problems for me, it was pretty easy to tell when I was experiencing the consequences. The headaches have a special, slightly queasy, all-day quality that is hard to mistake for anything else–even though they don’t come until the second day after a caffeine lapse. So whenever I’ve been tempted to have a cup of coffee, especially when I’m trying to get something important done and feel overtired, dwelling on that consequence and all the others reminds me how important it is to stick with my plan. Perkiness and energy now, sure, but later I get an all-day headache.

What’s interesting is that while this connection is clearer and more specific than most consequences, it’s really not that different from the bad consequences of our other day-to-day bad choices. Spending money we can’t afford now results in not being able to pay for important things later, or getting hounded for months or years by bill collectors. Bingeing on doughnuts for a week makes us carry around a couple of extra pounds day in and day out until we work those calories back off. Giving up on the dishes for a day or two can mean a kitchen that doesn’t get cleaned up until the next time someone stops by.

The encouraging thing is that we can make use of those awful consequences to help our willpower now. Usually when we think of buying something we want or eating doughuts or relaxing instead of doing household chores, the thing in the front of our minds is the short-term pleasure, which makes that bad choice feel good. If we move our attention to the negative consequences instead, then our associations with the bad choice begin to be the pain, discomfort, embarrassment, or tedium we’re buying ourselves in the future. A good motivational approach for almost any situation: when you’re thinking about a good choice, think about the good things it will bring you; when you’re thinking about a bad choice, think about how it will hurt you.

This change of attention isn’t difficult or tiring, it’s just not what we’re used to doing, and this one little habit of focus on the main consequences of a choice can help us do things that might seem next to impossible–like giving up a favorite thing and not even missing it that much. It’s a power well worth having.

Photo by The_Smiths