Hello there, friend!

yesterday, I arrived at a big writing insight/experiment, which will also frame my future newsletters:

If you want to simultaneously:

• write daily, but not for longer than an hour or two

• publish at least once a week

• be reasonably satisfied with the quality of your output, and

• give each topic the depth you feel it requires...

…there's a way.

Ship the drafts.

When you're getting close to your chosen deadline, just do some basic polishing on what you have and ship that. You can then return to the rest and ship the draft of the next part and again and again until you're ready to publish the whole article.

This way, you’ll benefit from the push of weekly deadlines without feeling too hung up on the quality – they’re just drafts, who cares. Plus, people like to see how the proverbial sausage is made.

I'm not yet sure whether it's better to ship just the "most ready" part or publish everything you have when you reach the deadline. The first option would give your audience more novelty with each draft, the second would let them see how your writing evolves.

Both could be fun. I'll let you know how the experiment goes.

And with that, here’s the current draft of my next article (semi-polished part first):

From practices to habits

Read more. Exercise more. Doomscroll less. Eat better.

Everyone has aspirations for various habits and practices, but most of us struggle with performing them consistently.

If you want that, you need to get intentional with designing these behaviors. And for that, you need to understand how behavior works.

The behavior formula

The key elements of behavior are motivation, ability, and prompt. Simply put, motivation is how much you want to do something, your ability is how easy or difficult something is for you, and a prompt is anything that reminds you to do the behavior. This so-called Fogg's behavior formula (from B.J., Fogg's book Tiny Habits) can be expressed as B=MAP and graphed as below. If a behavior falls within the area under the curve, you will perform it given the prompt. If it falls outside, you'll skip. What the curve shows is that the more motivated you are, the harder things (i.e. lower ability) you're able to perform, and conversely, the easier something is for you, the less motivation you need (caveat with something becoming so easy it's boring).

Motivation doesn’t work

Of these three building blocks, motivation is the one that everyone understands to play a role in consistency, and consequently, it's also the go-to block for most people for trying to improve the consistency of their routines. Unfortunately, it's also the least efficient point of intervention. The main problem is that motivation is infamously changeable, meaning that if your consistency depends on you feeling highly motivated all the time, you're doomed to fail. Improving your ability and prompts, on the other hand, offers reliable outcomes. In addition, if you're only relying on motivation, the ability and prompt elements offer better marginal returns on your attention – if you fix them, you'll do more for your consistency than higher motivation alone could. And because consistency is what we're after with habits, let's turn to these two elements now.

How to raise your ability

The ability element is composed of three main aspects – your knowledge and skills, the affordances of the environment (i.e. whether your environment has what you need for the action), and the difficulty of the action itself. Running is easier if you're already quite athletic, but it also helps when there isn't a snowstorm raging outside, you have comfortable shoes, and you don't consider only a marathon-level effort to be worth your while.

This gives you three options for increasing your ability. Of these, developing your knowledge and skills is in general the most difficult and lengthy, developing the affordances of the environment is second, and lowering the difficulty is the easiest. And that means that lowering the difficulty is where you should start.

The difference between practices and habits

Here I need to reiterate the difference I draw between habits and practices. There's a reason why the two household names of habit design, James Clear and BJ Fogg, named their books "Atomic habits" and "Tiny habits", respectively – the atomic, tiny routines that take minutes at most are qualitatively different from the longer, more intentional and more effortful ones. That's why I prefer to call the former habits, and the latter practices.

The difference between these two types of routines is rooted in difficulty– whereas habits are almost effortless, practices can be some of the most challenging things you do. This is why you can perform habits almost wholly on autopilot and fit them virtually anywhere in your schedule. It's also why most habits cannot by themselves lead to significant positive outcomes – for those, you need practices. And the more ambitious the goal, the more demanding the practice.

However, practices start with habits. Why?

Spearhead habits

To paraphrase James Clear says, a practice needs to be established before it can be improved. The biggest challenge for any new practice is to wedge itself into your busy schedule and overwhelmed attention. For that, you need to perform it consistently, to allow your subconscious to create an association between the prompt you chose and the practice you're trying to establish. That's operant conditioning in practice.

However, we already discussed that your level of motivation is changeable and that consistency therefore mustn't depend on being highly motivated all the time. This means that you need to adjust your ability to a level where a practice is safely under the behavior curve no matter how low your motivation dips. You need to stack the odds completely in your favor and make the practice laughably easy, so easy that you could accomplish it even on your worst day, like when you're extremely busy and exhausted at the same time. In other words, you need to downscale the practice to a habit first, and start with that.

Such habits can be as simple as doing the first minute of the full practice, which is why I call them spearheads – they're the sharp tip that can easily puncture your schedule. Instead of reading a chapter, read just one paragraph or even a sentence. Instead of a full workout, just do the warm up or even just get into your training clothes. The point here isn't to do the full practice in its perfect form, but to forge a link between the prompt and the spearhead.

If you can do that, you'll also discover another property of spearheads – they make the follow-up much easier.

However, don't fall for the trap of thinking that you always have to do at least as much as last time. This requires some humility – you might think that the habit is worthless by itself, or that you'd be a loser if you weren't disciplined enough to do the full practice immediately. And look, if you can actually pull off starting a consistent practice with full intensity from the start, more power to you. But don't fool yourself into thinking that's the only way or the best way. A bad day WILL come, and if you're not able to drop your expectations then, you will skip. And when skipping becomes a possibility, it lingers as a temptation for much longer.

How many times did you go all out on a new practice, only to skip it when you didn't have the time or energy such intensity required, and then watch more and more excuses pop up every time you think of returning to it until you conclude that now is not the right season for this practice and you postpone it indefinitely? Was the satisfaction of the initial effort really worth it?

Remember, you get no points for willpower, only for consistency. It's much easier to maintain a practice than to restart it. And for that, not scoffing at the spearhead habits is essential.

(now the unpolished part)

Bad prompts

However, the biggest culprit of failed habit aspirations is most often something far more inconspicuous – a badly chosen prompt. To recap this is the thing that reminds you to do the habit.

A number of different things can play this role – a paper note on the fridge, a notification on your phone, or simply a train of thought that ends with you remembering the habit.

That said, while all these can work, not all of them work well. In fact, the above are examples of bad prompts that would for sure lead to inconsistency.

Relying on "just remembering" simply doesn't work. And even when it does, you have no guarantee of remembering the habit in the moment when you can actually perform it – it's no use remembering to take food supplements when you're in a meeting and the supplements are in your home.

Next, there are reminders. They are more reliable, which is already a step up from just remembering, but if you ever tried them, you experienced the problems yourself.

In the case of visual reminders, you get used to them very quickly, which makes them lose their power. This is especially the case if you come across the reminder more often than you want to perform the habit.

For example, a reminder to take supplements posted on the fridge would quickly become too familiar, as you likely open the fridge many more times than you actually want to take the supplements.

This can be somewhat counteracted by making the reminders more dynamic – for example, placing the reminder in a different place every day, or by making the reminder interactive, i.e. including in it a way to mark the habit done.

Timed reminders (e.g. an alarm) are almost the same – you quickly get used to them and start ignoring them. However, the key problem here is that, because you can't guarantee that your daily schedule will be always identical, you can't guarantee that the reminder will go off when you're able to perform the habit.

This will again lead to the reminder losing its potency as you keep piling up the times when you ignore it. Sure, you can snooze and try to reschedule, but (1.) you won't always feel like doing that, and (2.) you can't guarantee that the new time will work better.

Good prompts

What you need is to find a way to anchor habits in your schedule without relying on the schedule being always the same. And the way to do that is tying habits to already existing routines.

There are many such anchors that occur reliably and predictably, but not always at the same time – waking up, brushing your teeth, your daily meals, going to the bathroom, etc. Any action that's virtually impossible for you to skip is a good candidate for becoming an anchor.

Next, you need to match the desired habits with anchors that already occur in circumstances conducive to the habit – if you want to start reading more, finishing dinner is probably a better anchor than arriving at the gym.

Notice that the anchor doesn't have to occur every day, but rather as frequently as you want to perform the habit – if you only want to make time for reading 3 times a week, and you go to the gym 3 times a week like me, then returning from the gym would be a more natural anchor, as it wouldn't get "corrupted" as a prompt by days when you don't want to follow through with the habit.

That said, if you don't have a better anchor than one that occurs more often than you want to do the habit, there's a simple enough solution – perform just the habitual part that won't take longer than 2 minutes, e.g. read one sentence in the book.

However, screening anchors for the right environment they occur in needs to be coupled with screening for TEA – which anchors happen when you have the time, energy, and attention (TEA coinage credit goes to Ondra Mrkus) needed for performing the habit?

For example, I don't want to read in the morning, because the morning routine would be too long. On the other hand, writing in the morning is perfect, because I have the most energy and focus. In addition, writing is pretty much the most difficult thing I do, so it feels great to check it off early.

This is why prompt selection is so important and can in fact be challenging – you are balancing several criteria. You need to find an anchor that occurs in the right environment, with the right frequency, at the right part of the day.

What this points to is that designing the environment to be more conducive to you following through with the habits is an essential element of habit design. And it is much more reliable than trying to work with your motivation, as a well-designed environment is not as changeable.

Last week’s dig-ups

Philosophy & Sense-making

• I really enjoyed two recent episodes of The Symbolic World podcast

  • In this episode, Jonathan Pageau and Jacob Howland talk about the lack of proper orientation in our pursuit of technology, which will lead to our leisure being filled with things like sex robots, rather than self-transcendence

  • In this one, Jonathan talks about the essential role of recurring actions (i.e. “ritualized behavior”) what they are oriented towards in generating meaning. The higher the values our habits and practices are aimed at, the more meaning we can derive from them and the stronger intra- and inter-personal integration they afford

Reflection

• This time, the “editorial” preceding the article was very much the reflection. To be honest, editing is a pain. I think I got much better at first getting my thoughts on the page, but editing and structuring them into a (semi-)coherent whole is still a struggle, so this post by Tim Ferris really struck a chord

And that’s it! Let me know any comments, questions or suggestions – this time, I’m especially curious whether you think I should send just the semi-polished parts or everything?

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you here next time

Take care

Chris