The Chaos Monkey and Productive Habits
Beautiful Habits
The vast majority of productivity gurus rely on habits. Just form the right habits, do the right thing enough times, and you will cross some magical horizon. After the 1000th repetition or the 30th day, you will cross into a hallowed land, the Land that Time Forgets, and you won’t have to work at it anymore.
No, no work for you, you will do the right things automatically. You’ll topple over the walls of your cubicle like in Office Space, damn it feels good to be a gangsta, kick your heels up on your desk, peer over your shades with a hint of a smile, and coast on your innate brilliance effortlessly manifesting through your hard-won habits.
And how are we going to build these beautiful habits? Well.
Set aside the same time every day. Habits depend on stimulus and response. You need to train your brain to respond to a new pleasurable reward. If you can build on top of an already-existing habit, even better.
Cold Reality
Sadly, the research doesn’t back this story up. Do the same thing at the same time every day? Dude, if I could do that, I wouldn’t need habits. That would be a habit far more powerful than any other habit.
When I try to make my schedule the same every day, I just die of boredom. It’s absolutely stifling. Sure, at first the new routine is exciting. And then it’s not.
Further, most habits don’t actually work on the pleasure principle. When you sit down with junk food, you might not be addicted to the junk food. You might be addicted to that feeling of being out of control, ohmygod I just can’t help yielding to this temptation - how luxurious!
Yes, Big Mac as Christian Grey. You’re welcome for that image.
As often as not, we’re actually rewarded by the anticipation. It’s the getting, not the having.
Gardening Emergent Systems
The difficulty of setting a strict schedule and the trickiness of designing good rewards hint at why these seemingly-simple shortcuts don’t work: we humans are not nearly simple enough. You’d have to be far more simple to just plug in a helpful habit, complete with a reward loop, and expect it to work.
Habits are patterns of our lives, the product of a system formed of our circumstances, goals, history, personalities, relationships.
All right, I hear you saying, very clever. All I want to know is, how do I make it work?
If you change the pattern of your life, you can observe new habits forming in response. Habits don’t arise out of order and routine. Habits help establish order and routine. Habits form when our lives are in chaos.
To use a physics analogy, if you impose more stability in your life, you’ve reduced the energy in the overall system. More chaos means more energy means you need a habit to suck up all that energy.
That’s why you’re three times more likely to successfully form a habit if you’re moving cities. Your life is in chaos. The old life is partially gone, the new one forming. Old patterns fall away, and there’s more fluidity and energy, an opportunity for new patterns to emerge.
You can’t build a habit, but you might be able to grow it.
We can rest assured that there will be no shortage of “disturbances” to propagate. They can come from the outside (life events), from inside (mid-life crises), and can possibly even be created on purpose, like Josh Waitzkin’s “self-created earthquakes” that high performers call upon for creative inspiration.
If you really want to change things, seek instability, not stability, in your life. With time, you’ll be so precise and skilled at exploiting or even creating mini-pockets of chaos and change, you won’t require a cross-country move.
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
People have always been interested in forming better habits, becoming better people, becoming more powerful people more able to achieve their goals.
Just as importantly, though, there’s a trend toward atomization. Significant products used to be built in large teams, and (for instance) the software productivity methodology was the Waterfall Method. Then important products were built in small teams, and the software producitivyt method was Agile/Scrum.
Now the teams are becoming smaller, more people are freelancing. I’m certainly not saying teams are passé, but the individual matters more than ever in the cutting edge of getting stuff done.
Any time you figure out how to improve your productivity just a little bit better, you’re unleasing the power of compound returns on yourself. If you get 2% better every year, you save an entire week of work.
Individual productivity systems aren’t just for the self-obsessed or the power-hungry. More and more, empowering the individual is the fastest way to make the world better.