Deliberately Choose Your Dependencies w/Kaizen
The essence of much of what we do when we architect systems is to choose and arrange the system’s dependencies in such a way that makes the system resilient to failure. A well-known principle in this regard is to avoid Single Points of Failure, whereby the failure of one dependency would take down the entire system.
As basic as this seemingly common sense principle is, I am regularly astounded to see how poorly we do this in practice in our personal lives, by way of the habits we allow ourselves to have (my own included, of course). I believe that by failing to deliberately choose our habits, we unwittingly build dependencies on external people/pleasures/substances/etc for underlying needs, usually decreasing our overall resiliency.
This year, I’ve been experimenting with applying the kaizen approach to change various habits with strong results. The approach: identify a habit I want to change or build, set a measurable daily goal for practicing the habit, and record my daily successes and failures on a whiteboard next to my desk so that I see my progress in real time. I’m further experimenting with using kanban to build a habit pipeline in order to track progress on a macro level, and may write a post on that once it becomes more concrete. For now this is what works for me:
The goal here is not perfection, but progress (in this sense, self-forgiveness is critical — another worthy post topic). As with all nontrivial tasks, start small, and relentlessly take forward steps, no matter how small.
Being thoughtful and deliberate about the habits and dependencies we build for ourselves allows us to architect our own lives in such a way that aligns with our overarching goals.
