Less waste, better habits
Cut the non-valuable parts of your work
I’ve been reading a great series on Medium about the idea of background operations, and the fourth article in the series on waste got me thinking about how it applies to sticking to long-term habits.
In this case, the concept of waste comes from the Toyota Production System (yes, I am applying another manufacturing process to personal productivity). This process recognized that there was work that was “value creating,” meaning it actually contributed to the final product, and there was “waste,” which did not. From the original publication, waste was broken down into seven areas: processing, correction, overproduction, inventory, waiting, material movement, and motion. The point was to reduce waste to as little as possible, ideally none.
Turning back to habit formation, one of the ideas about creating long-term habits that will stick is to have tasks that you can get into as easily as possible. Anything that is a setup step for starting to do the actual habit work is waste; it doesn’t contribute anything to the end result.
The three aspects of waste that I think translate very well into the realm of habits are waiting, material movement, and motion. Waiting means you cannot do your habit work right away; you either need to wait for something to start up (a computer, for example), or your habit requires some equipment that you can’t have with you all the time. Material movement means that you need to move things into place in order to be able to do your habit work. And motion simply means you need to go someplace in order to do your habit work.
As I’ve demonstrated before, even small amounts of waste — like having to take my locksport setup out of storage to work on it — can be disastrous for keeping habits going. These three forms of waste add time to getting into the valuable habit work, thereby creating a block to even starting. Especially in the early stages of forming a new habit, you want as little as possible to keep you from working the habit. Waste is the enemy.
Figuring out how to cut out things like motion, material movement, and waiting involves writing out the process of the habit: the work you do for the habit, and then once you have that, what setup is required to do that work. You will probably not be able to get rid of all of the setup — zero waste is an ideal, but not necessarily possible — but this will make it very clear what is involved with your current habit, and possible setup tasks you can eliminate.
To return to the locksport example, after realizing my mistake I described in the article above, I thought about all of the things I needed to do to start actually practicing. It was:
- Decide which lock I’m going to work on.
- Pull out practice locks and pick case.
- Find and pull out picks from pick case.
- Remove keys from practice lock.
- Start practicing.
1–4 are waste; they don’t make be a better lockpicker, and they create blocks to getting started. Each is easily solvable:
- Pre-choosing which lock I am going to work with well beforehand.
- Have that prechosen lock out in my physical work space.
- Having my picks prechosen as well, and in the same place as the lock.
- Removing the key from the lock and storing it someplace else (the lock is a convenient place to store the key, but a terrible place when you want to work with it).
With those done, all I have is me, the lock, and my picks, ready to go whenever I am . Drop them in my pocket, and I am ready to do my habit any time, anywhere. That is the power of removing waste from your habits.
This is the post for Day 43 of my 90-Day Blogging Challenge. Check out my Medium page for past articles, and follow me here or on Twitter for links to future articles. Clap for this post using the button below, and share far and wide. Thank you!
