Using internal Schelling points to plan better

A friend of mine introduced me to the concept of Schelling points, recently, and how they can be used to keep focused.

My friend has issues with keeping on task. Like me, he can spend hours procrastinating on something. I’ve done this for months and years, too; one of my essays in High School was turned in three years late. If you’re human (you never know what could be reading this), you’ve probably had similar issues.

Schelling points can help with this. In game theory, they are also called focus points. They are points that people fall back on when normal communication doesn’t work, and they are predictable. Classically, the example given to illustrate them is this: You provide two players with four squares, three red, one blue. You separate the players and ask them to try and pick the same two squares, without knowing what the other person has chosen. Almost always, each player will pick one red and one blue square. There’s no reason to highlight blue over red — but because it is more salient than the others, it is more likely to be chosen as the odd one out.

Another way of thinking about it is this: If you asked 100 people where to meet in New York City on a particular day, there is a statistically higher-than-random chance that multiple students will choose noon at Grand Central Station (personally, I’d choose the Empire State Building’s observation deck, but that’s just because I like An Affair To Remember too much). Thomas Schelling — the economist who came up with the concept — proved this with his own students.

My friend pointed out to me that Schelling points don’t have to be used between multiple people. You can have internal focus points. For instance; if you wake up every day at 8, you are more likely to have your morning cold shower (if you’re a Wim Hof fan) at 8:05am each day. This example is so simply it is almost naïve — of course, you’ll say, that’s just a routine. Why introduce Schelling points at all?

What if your goal is just ‘Write something’ daily? This is one of my goals. I often fail (as you can tell, from the frequent gaps in this list). Mostly, this is because I get side-tracked; I can’t choose something to write about; I decide to wait until ‘an interesting thought’ arises; or because I simply forget. However, if I were to imagine my day as ‘red squares’, where each square is an hour, I can ask myself the following question: at what time am I most likely to be mentally creative and willing to follow thoughts down the rabbit-hole enough to make them interesting?

Without failure, the answer is right after I meditate. That is when I am most mentally active. Even if I am supposed to be focusing on my breath, I always start a couple of dozen worthwhile threads I can follow up with later. I normally don’t.

If I choose the 30 minutes after my morning meditation as the blue square for myself, than I can say that that might be the best place to meet my goal and write something worth reading.

Focal points as ways to reconsider routines also work well when you consider ones which don’t fit into the normal day. For instance, yearly or monthly routines aren’t easy to calibrate with daily ones. This is one of the reasons that New Years resolutions often fail; you’re likely to set yearly ones when the new year starts over, but you’re unlikely to form a habit of making new years resolutions at other times. However, if you had to pick a handful of times that you’d like to get in a habit of setting routines, which would you pick?

Well, if you had to pick four times a year, you’d likely pick the Solstices. A dozen? The months. It becomes immediately clear that there are times that you can use to naturally schedule revolving goal setting or post-mortems. This can be an immense help, because the algorithm you’ve chosen to schedule these times is easy to run through again. When we fail at our goals, we often do so not because of the goal, but because we forgot the context we had when we set that goal. By making easily reproducible steps in our process of creating goals, it becomes easier to remember the context, and thus easier to achieve the goals.

This is, as always, a bit more of an opening than an ending. If you’ve got any thoughts, I’d love to hear them.