Just Seven Things

Exploring why and how we do what we do, and how we can do it better

Archive for the category “Habits and Routines”

01 Aug 2008

Good Habits, Bad Habits and the Breaking of Both

Deadly Habit by Sanja Gjenero

I’m continually interested by habits. Both good and bad.

In previous posts recently, I‘ve been thinking about the power of chaining, nudging and game playing. At the heart of these three areas is a fairly simple, lighter-touch approach to the creation of good habits and the removal of bad. This light touch approach I have frequently contrasted with more of a top-down, intellectually controlled approach.

Two thoughts have been rattling around in relation to habits, and I’m not sure how they fit in (if they do at all)

The Balance between Focus and Multi-tasking

Out of Focus by Billy Alexander

I commented yesterday on the challenging tension between multi-tasking and focus on GTD Times. I referenced how I use Mark Forster’s Do It Tomorrow methodology (see blogroll) to enable as much focus as possible during day to day working.

What’s been nagging at me has been catalysed by my reading of Guy Claxton’s Hare Brain Tortoise Mind.

In the book Guy argues that our ‘intelligent unconscious’ is a sophisticated nervous system that gets to know the world by the idiosyncrasies of our own experience: ‘a brain is plastic: it transmutes ignorance into competence….. categories and concepts are distilled from particular encounters so that, by a process of spontaneous analogy, ‘what I do next’ can be informed by records of ‘what happened before”.

It ‘registers its patterns and develops and coordinates skillful responses’

The Psychology of Game Playing… continued

Kid's Game 5 by Adrian van Leen

Further to a series of posts on game playing, it was great to be able to add to the different tools after reading a post on Mark Forster’s blog about Chaining.

Mark explains ‘There is a simple method called “Chaining” which can greatly increase your chances of success. It takes the form of competing against yourself to produce the longest chain of days in which you succeeded with your goal.

For example, if your goal is to practise the piano daily you manage to carry this out for two weeks and then miss a day. You have made a chain of fourteen days. Now your aim is to beat your record of fourteen days.’

Great links on the comments, including one from Janine Adams to http://www.dontbreakthechain.com./

I’m still fascinated though why game playing is so effective in helping us change. Why is it so core? I thought about a number of different nature/ nurture sources, and will explore these further in weeks to come. Steve Nichols’ article on Game Psychology provides a fascinating primer before then.