Creatures of habit
Habits can be very powerful tools. Or they can be a bane of our existence.
Most of our lives are driven by habits. My morning routine involves getting a coffee, getting in front of the computer and reading. When one of these aspects is missing for some reason (like I’ve ran out of milk for my coffee, or have to run an errand before I can sit down), I get noticeably upset. I’m sure each of you have your own little ceremony that you perform each morning, and are similarly upset when you’re prevented from completing it as usual. This pattern continues throughout the day — the way we commute to work, how we get lunch, how we do all the stuff that normally requires doing. Even if we lead a very adventurous life with each day being different, we develop routines and may feel bad if we can’t perform them.
That’s because there are many advantages to automation (as any software engineer will attest). When we recognize a recurring pattern, we long to develop the most optimal strategy to deal with it, and then automate it. It frees our brains from having to make the same decisions again and again, and enables us to focus on more important stuff.
Habits are really easy to form, and they form almost without our participation.
“That’s not true!” — you may think, “I can’t seem to develop that habit of working out.” You’re right. That’s because while habits are easy to form, they are difficult to change. When we’re trying to develop a habit of working out, what we’re really doing is changing our current habit of going home and watching TV, or whatever (in)activity we perform when we’re not working out.
Once we release our software to production and our customers get used to it, we can’t simply change it on a whim without upsetting everyone. It takes hard work to introduce changes (ever heard of change management? It’s called that for a reason). Same way, once a habit sets in, it takes hard work to make any modifications to it.
It pays off to be conscious of this when starting something new — an activity, a relationship, a team, a company. The habits that will inevitably form in association with this new thing will be there with us for a while.
At Rhosys (for those of you who didn’t bother reading my bio, it’s the company I run), I made it a point to hire a (very) junior developer as one of the first few people who joined. Not because it would make us super productive in these crucial early days, but because I want everyone in the company to have a habit of learning new things and helping others learn. With this little foresight we got some good habits for free. Other companies that I worked for didn’t always pay attention to how things were done in the beginning, and they had to roll out costly change programs or slowly exchange their workforce (also costly), because the prevailing habits of their by then established workers were getting in the way.
Just like we design our software before we start mashing the keyboard, it makes sense to design our habits — they are also programs, after all. If you do it right, you have an automated helper that works to your advantage.
Originally published at bytesandsenses.wordpress.com
