I have a lot of things that I want myself to do: work out, learn more math, finish the beta version of my open-source project, learn chinese, read GEB, get this blog off the ground, ...

And while most of the things that I want myself to do are things I enjoy doing (most of the time; once started), my default path of behavior isn't always doing the thing.

I think changing one's typical behavior / habits, for an extended period of time, is honestly just really hard. Our habits can be annoyingly robust to change. Yet being able to say things like, "I want to get more in shape, so I'm going to start working out 4 times a week" and actually being able to follow through is really awesome. It feels great to set goals and have the confidence that you'll actually do it.

Right around this time of year, people start setting New Year's resolutions. With an initial burst of motivation, people follow them for a bit, but almost always peter out and go back to their typical routine. This highlights two important lessons:

  1. It's not about Motivation. Motivation is super changeable. Whenever you're making a plan to get yourself to do something and it relies on you being more motivated than usual to do the thing, that should be a major red flag. It's tricky for us to imagine how we would act in mental states other than the one we're in now. So when we're super motivated in the moment, it's easy to imagine making all the right choices a week later. But it won't happen like that. Instead, you need to engineer your life so that it's easier to do the thing. Ideally so that the thing becomes the default option.
  2. Keep trying. If you really want to do something, don't limit yourself to one shot at the beginning of the year. Every time you don't do the thing, try again the next day. Don't beat yourself up.

How to make doing the thing closer to the default option?

  • Social accountability is great! Right now the thing I'm pushing myself to do is post thoughts to my blog. I have a blurb on the home page (that I knew a few friend would see) that says "Over winter break, I'm aiming to post a writing or mini-project to this website every 2 days."
  • Add more stakes. Social accountability is good, but I also like tools like beeminder, which will charge you money if you go off track from your goal. Here's the one I'm using to write blog posts (I would not be writing this right now without it).
  • Engineer your environment. This one is big. If there are things you can do now that make it (1) easier to do the thing, and (2) harder to do things that are not the thing, you make it so much more likely that you will do the thing at game time. For me, this is things like severely limiting / modifying applications that are designed to be addictive.
    • Deleting apps from your phone or adding hard time limits is good.
    • On the web, you can use tools like BlockSite to do something similar.
    • You can also modify applications to be less distracting. While YouTube has the potential to be a time-waste, I value being able to watch educational content. My solution is to use the Minimal YouTube extension to re-style YouTube.
      • You can do this for applications that don't have a bespoke extension using StyleBot, which lets you easily add custom CSS to websites. (I used this for YouTube before finding Minimal YouTube)
  • Make it part of your identity. It's much easier to do things that align with how we think of ourselves. Aligning the thing with who you think you are is really powerful. By doing the thing more, it will start to become part of your identity, but you can also push this further by ex. telling others about the thing.
  • Bound it. For some reason, I find it easier to do something (or stop doing something) if I tell myself it's just for some bounded period of time. It's not forever, just the next few weeks. Oddly enough, this is how I accidently became vegetarian. I tried it for a day on a whim, and then enjoyed continuing the streak just a bit longer until it became the default action. I wasn't planning on doing this, but in hindsight it was super easy because I was able to avoid pushing through all the inertia of deciding to "become vegetarian."
  • Lower your bar. Things are easier to do when you make them less intimidating, shorter, and, well, easier. It's not cheating. I've been wanting to seriously start a blog forever (and have made several attempts), but it's never stuck because my bar has been too high. Inspired by this great post on why you should start a blog, I've lowered my bar. Even though I want to get better at writing in the future, I recognize that right now the best action is just to start (and I'm pretty convinced that quantity is a great road to proficiency).
  • Be kind to yourself. I'm generally convinced that problems are easier to solve when you have high self-esteem and respond kindly to your mess-ups. It's easier to try again, and it's much easier to learn when you don't attach your day-to-day performance to your self-worth. The best metric to focus on is always improvement (and some moving average at that).

Books I liked

Both Atomic Habits (more self-improvement-y) and The Power of Habit (more science-y) are worth reading.

Lesser known is The Motivation Hacker, which is a superbly delightful nerdy story plus guide that's probably contributed most to the thoughts I spewed above in listicle form. It's less than 200 pages and can be read in one sitting. You should read it.