Habit overcomes hard
This is the second of a series of short posts on philosophy and habits that is my version of honoring National Novel Writing Month. You can read Part I here.
What is habit takes precedence over what is difficult.
Most of us at some point have had the experience of having to learn a new skill for a job. Initially, our productivity is terrible. The first few hours of working with some new software, researching an unfamiliar industry or speaking a foreign DSL is uncomfortable and even disheartening. However, we accept this difficultly because the time horizon of a job is long. We adjust. After a couple weeks what is hard is now habit.
Learning new skills without some forcing function (ex. your job security) is hard. The forcing function forces creation of a habit. Without a forcing function, habit creation is more difficult.
I believe the answer to this problem is to create the forcing function. The simplest way I know of is several day “goal sets” that mandate a minimum amount of time for practicing the habit.
I usually start with three days because this is a long enough time period to feel significant. I’ve seen this first hand learning new programming languages, libraries or frameworks — after Day 3, the gains are solid enough to be encouraged enough for another three days.
A legitimate concern at this point is how to make sure the minimum amount of time is not wasted. I want to be upfront in saying I do not worry about this until I’ve met the first few goal sets (so 10–12 days). Deliberate practice takes careful planning and some subject expertise, so I don’t believe it’s fair to be say, determining what power chords you’re going to perfect when first picking up a guitar. The key concern is getting past that first week to two week period where you’re most likely to quit.
Another good strategy I think worth mentioning here is replacing or supplementing dead time with habit building time. Examples of dead time:
- Reading news
- Social media
- Commuting (ex. buy a book on the thing you’re trying to learn on Kindle and read while on plane, train, etc.)
This replacement / supplement strategy is also a nice “double win” because it 1) does not change your schedule (no need to allocate time) and 2) improves the habit-building process.
In summary, I believe building habits with no obvious forcing function starts with getting the first small time period right (be it three days, five days, two weeks). If this initial time period is a success, the probability of a real habit forming is significantly higher.
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