Habits 2

Yesterday I wrote a blog talking about the merits and advantages of forming productive habits. In particular, I'm currently trying to make it a habit to wake up at 7am to write a blog before going to work.

The idea is that just like I brush my teeth before I go to sleep each night, I will wake up and write a blog before I go to work each day[1]. Just like clockwork.

I was successful on day 1 (yesterday), but later in the day I wondered, "In forming habits, could it be just as important not to do the activities at other times in the day?"

At around 10pm last night, I had an urge to write a blog. But I thought twice, and decided to defer the task until this morning. I thought that writing a blog at that time could be detrimental to my overall effort in habit formation.

There are two reasons why I think that performing the task outside of the defined timeframe or locational setting for the habit could be detrimental.

The first reason is burnout. Most of the activities and tasks that we're going to try to make a habit are difficult or unattractive things. If given a choice, we'd rather not do these things (at least at the earlier stages of habit formation). If the tasks were easy and nice and friendly, why would we be trying to form a habit in order to increase productivity in that area in the first place?

Let's say that my goal is to form a habit to go to the gym three times a week. If I decide to go to the gym on a whim on a fourth day, then I will surely be more physically tired on my next regularly scheduled workout. Even if I do manage to go, I will have surely beat the odds to make it happen. The task would have become more difficult because of my ad-hoc action to go work out on a fourth day.

Similarly, if my goal is to write a blog once a day in the morning, then writing another blog in the afternoon is likely to leave me more weary of the act come next morning. Whereas the extra gym session will have caused physical fatigue, the blog writing will have caused mental fatigue. This reasoning seems reasonable to me, at least at the moment.

The second reason is routine replacement and the subsequent excuses. Take the gym example, where I am scheduled to go to the gym on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Let's say I go to the gym on Thursday; it's very possible that come Friday I will say, "Hey, I went to the gym three times already this week. I'm not going to go today". For the blog example, I may wake up the next day and say, "Look I've already written an extra blog. It's okay if I don't write one this morning."

In the short term, we got the same productivity out of doing the task outside of the defined time for the habit. The problem is that when we skip the task on the regularly scheduled time, it makes it that much harder to make it routine. It makes it that much harder to have the action be a natural, low friction habit for us. When we make an excuse not to do the tough act once (for the legitimate reason of having already done the act earlier), then we set ourselves up in the future to make an illigitimate excuse. We'll be more likely to say "I just don't feel like it today. I'm going to let it slide."

Breaking the pattern seems like a slippery slope to me. I've broken patterns in the past before, and I'm hoping to avoid it this time, particularly for the blogging effort.

We'll see where it takes me. So far, so good.