Category Archives: productivity

Be a Voter

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Which is better? To encourage someone to vote or to encourage them to be a voter?

If you want the person to actually vote, encourage them to be a voter. It’s been found that this framing is more likely to lead to action.

If you’d like to strengthen a behavior, weave it into your identity. And if you’d like to change someone else’s behavior, encourage them towards an identity change that includes that behavior.

Use this framing with yourself too.

Don’t just get up early. Be an early riser.

Don’t just make a difference. Be a contributor.

Don’t just do personal growth experiments. Be an explorer.

Don’t just post on social media. Be a blogger, podcaster, or YouTuber.

A similar framing shift motivated me to register to vote this year (my first time voting in any political election). Being encouraged to vote never motivated me to change, perhaps because it seemed like a pointless behavior. I decided to vote this time because I want to be a participant, not a spectator. Being a nonvoter in this election doesn’t feel like a good identity to embrace. This time I feel like I have to vote against stupidity in a way that didn’t seem necessary before.

I’ve found this framing especially helpful for leaning into long-term changes, like thinking of myself as an entrepreneur when starting my first business back in 1994. Being an entrepreneur is a stronger frame than starting or running a business. A behavioral frame lets you get a job when you hit a rough patch in your business, but an identity frame makes that option harder to consider.

Consequently, you may want to use behavioral framing when you’d prefer to keep your options open and give yourself more room to pivot. Behavioral framing is more flexible. If, however, you want to feel more committed and focused, so you can really invest in a particular path, identity framing is often the better choice.

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Raising Your Baseline

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In practicing the slow, shallow breathing approach from The Oxygen Advantage that I shared about during the past two days, I’m grasping that the key to this approach is to define a new baseline for my breathing and then keep synching back to that new baseline whenever I catch myself drifting from it.

The initial temptation is to sync back to my old way of breathing, which can happen automatically when I lose awareness of my breath. Then I might catch myself and practice consciously reducing my breath so I’m not over-breathing.

An aspect of this change that’s easier to catch is when I moderately exert myself for a short burst, like walking up a flight of stairs. My breathing becomes a little heavier afterwards, so I make a conscious effort to bring it back down quickly, ideally within no more than 2-3 breaths.

So it’s like I have a breathing budget, and I’m doing my best not to squander it. My budget for air this week is much lower than it was last week. And next week I’ll try to nudge it even lower.

I realized that a similar strategy also works for adjusting our emotional baselines.

Suppose you often feel depressed, frustrated, angry, anxious, or some other emotion you’d prefer not to feel so much. Pretend that you’ve suddenly been allocated a lower budget for feeling negative emotions, and you have to be careful not to squander it too quickly.

Imagine if life dramatically cut your negative emotion budget by saying: Henceforth you’re only allowed to spend half as much time in negative emotion territory.

How would you obey this mandate?

You need two pieces to succeed here:

  1. Frequent check-ins with yourself to see how you’re doing
  2. A quick recovery strategy to shift from the old behavior to the new one

Whenever you catch yourself experiencing some negative emotion, you must leave that territory and return to a positive or neutral baseline as quickly as possible. Otherwise you’ll squander your negative emotion budget too quickly.

Do you already have such a strategy? Do you know how to quickly shift yourself back to neutral or positive emotional territory? Can you do this within a few breaths?

If you don’t have such a method, then finding one ought to be a key strategic piece for raising your baseline. Being aware of negative emotions isn’t enough – you’ve also got to change them.

To practice reducing my breathing immediately when it’s too rapid, I do the opposite of the unwanted behavior. I deliberately slow down. I can’t breathe slowly and quickly at the same time, so by doing what’s incompatible with rapid breathing, I stop the rapid breathing.

It’s much the same with negative emotion. What’s incompatible with negative emotion? Positive emotion. So if you do something – anything – that makes you feel good within seconds, the negative emotion has to drop off. It can’t hang around while you’re feeling good.

Then the long-term challenge is to habitualize this recovery pattern by always practicing it at every possible opportunity.

I’m doing my best to not let myself over-breathe. Whenever I notice that I’m doing that, I immediately take conscious control of my breathing and slow it down. If I don’t do this, my baseline won’t shift, and I won’t really get to test and experience the results on the other side.

Initially you may have to consciously take control a lot – like dozens of times per day – but if you stay as consistent as you can, you’ll raise your baseline, and the new behavior pattern will become your new default.

Where else could you apply this idea? You could use it for productivity habits, eating habits, early rising, and lots of other areas of life. The key is to develop a rapid strategy for shifting your behavior in a way that’s incompatible with your old baseline. Then apply that shifting behavior every time you catch yourself running the old pattern.

To really create an effective change, the old behavioral baseline must become unacceptable for you. In order to progress to a new baseline, you must eventually regard your old baseline as out of bounds and below standard, even if it still feels normal. This is a simple approach I’ve used repeatedly times for doing personal growth experiments and also for making long-term changes. To embrace the new, there must be some willingness to say: The old behavior is dead to me.

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Time Logging Insights

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For the month of September, I maintained a daily time log, as described in the post called Long-Term Time Logging. Now I can share some insights from what I learned.

In this case it actually wasn’t that helpful to see where my time went. I was pretty aware of that already, so reviewing the logs didn’t give me many insights there. My logs matched up pretty closely with my assumptions and expectations.

What was surprising was what gave me the most joy. At the end of each day, I asked a simple question and briefly answered it at the bottom of the day’s time log. That question was:

Do I love this day?

I had assumed that by asking this question, it would help me become aware of which days I felt best about, and then I could deliberately embrace more of those positive patterns. That turned out to be true, but the surprising part was what actually created a day I loved versus a day I didn’t love.

I figured going into this that I’d love my most productive days. If I got a lot of work done, that should give me a sense of accomplishment, and then I’d feel great at the end of the day, right?

Wrong actually. My most productive day was the day I appreciated the least. Looking back, I was pleased that I got a lot done, but that satisfaction was so much at a mental level. That mental satisfaction didn’t reach into my heart and make me feel like I could genuinely say I loved the day.

The days I loved most when I reflected back on them had more to do with being than with doing. All that was required for me to love the whole day was to recall one delightful event from it, and these events were usually very simple and not particularly effortful.

One Delightful Event

Even if most of the activities of a day were routine or so-so, if I experienced one delightful event during the day, I would always feel a heartfelt sense of appreciation for the day when I reflected back on it afterwards. So my appreciation ultimately came down to simple moments.

Mostly these delightful events involved something new – usually not wildly different but with just enough novelty to create a special memory for that day.

Here are some examples of small but delightful events that made me reflect back on the day with feelings of love and appreciation:

  • Running a different route than I’d run before, along a new street that had just recently been paved on the western edge of the city. The streetlights were working, but the sidewalks and landscaping hadn’t been added yet. It felt special to be one of the first people to run down a new road that wasn’t open to car traffic, like it was my own private running route. On one side was a wall with newly built houses behind it, and on the other side was open desert. (See the photo below, taken during my first run down that street.)
  • Playing some new video games with Rachelle, especially A Short Hike and Untitled Goose Game – the goose game made us laugh a lot.
  • Going to the Apple Store with Rachelle, getting new Apple Watches, and chatting with the employees. The store had been closed for many weeks and just reopened last week, so the vibe was upbeat and happy.
  • Returning a monitor that broke (while under warranty) to that same Apple Store and getting a replacement for it, which made me appreciate it more.
  • Going for a longer than usual run with new running shoes one morning.
  • Cleaning up some parts of the house to restore them to a nicer state of cleanliness and order.
  • Watching Cobra Kai with Rachelle. The show is set in an area where I used to live, and it reconnected me with fond memories of martial arts training.
  • Discovering some useful insights during journaling sessions.
  • Participating in a weekend intensive with a coaching group on Zoom.
  • Connecting with CGCers during coaching calls.
  • Attending a live script reading of The Princess Bride with many of the original cast members, along with more than 100K other people.
  • Listening to Kevin Smith’s Tough Sh*t audiobook, laughing a lot, and loving all the geeky references.
  • Yummy sex.
  • Having a good dentist appointment and chatting with the hygienist. (I actually like going to the dentist since the people there are so friendly and down-to-earth.)
  • One day when I exercised for 150+ minutes – it felt good to move a lot.
  • Attending a diversity committee call for the Transformational Leadership Council – nice to connect with like-minded friends who care.
  • Watching the final episode of The Good Place with Rachelle and seeing her getting teary-eyed at the end.

September was a pretty happy month for me, probably because I paid extra attention to happiness. I realized that big accomplishments don’t fuel my happiness as much as I thought, but small delights do.

A nice morning run, an insightful journaling session, a fun video game – these are all good ways to create a day I’ll appreciate. But what seems to help the most is including some form of novelty in a day. Newness made me happier than routine.

It’s more special to play a new video game than one I’ve played many times before. It’s more special to try a new brand of running shoes that I’ve never worn before. It’s more special to go a slightly different direction instead of following a familiar route.

It’s okay if my experiences are rooted to familiar places and situations, but one little twist in the direction of novelty somehow makes me appreciate the experience – and the day – more than I otherwise would.

Just running down a different street instead of running one of my standard routes can make a meaningful difference in how I feel about the whole day. I could have the laziest day ever, but if I just had one new experience that day, it elevated my relationship with the day. That surprised me. I didn’t think novelty was so meaningful.

Work-wise I felt better about the days when I didn’t use a system or routine to get things done. I had more appreciation for the days when I went with the flow of inspiration, especially when it led to engaging with work a bit differently. This makes me really curious about how to leverage this further. Would I be more productive if instead of trying to systematize my approach to work, I went in the opposite direction and did something to make each day truly unique?

Note that having a routine and embracing novelty are not necessarily contradictory approaches. You can follow a structure and still include some novelty, like how many movies adhere to genre standards and then try to add some unique twists. A good structure often becomes invisible, so you’ll probably notice and appreciate the novel aspects more.

What I gained from this 30-day experiment is a greater respect for small delights created through novelty. When I feel a nudge to lean in the direction of doing something new, I’m more likely to trust that impulse now. When I have that thought to run a different route one morning, I trust that it serves a good purpose. Doing something even slightly new makes the activity more memorable, and it’s the memory that I appreciate.

I’m less likely to appreciate a very routine day because the day is harder to remember. When reviewing my time log entries, it’s hard to recall the details of a day filled with familiar items, even when I have a written record of the activities for that day. When there’s even one item that’s semi-unique though, I somehow remember the day with a smile.

Another realization is that newness stimulates more growth. Running a familiar route isn’t as stimulating for my body and mind as running a new route. Would I improve faster if I ran different routes more often instead of sticking with my familiar favorites? Probably.

I encourage you to do your own time logging experiment for at least a month, so you can discover your own insights, which won’t necessarily align with mine. Some readers have started their own logging practices within the past few weeks, and they’ve been emailing me to say that they’re finding it valuable too.

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Sliding Bad Habits Into Good Ones

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As a follow-up to yesterday’s post on Honoring Your Hidden Goals, consider that hidden goals are similar to hidden habits. In each case the hidden aspect means that some part of you is finding a way to meet a need or desire that you’re not necessarily acknowledging.

When you identify hidden habits, you can also trace them back to their needs and desires, and then you can devise more deliberate ways to satisfy those desires.

It’s likely you have some habits you may identify as bad or problematic, but they’re actually serving you well.

Think of a bad habit as a good habit in disguise – as a habit with some negative side effects.

For instance, I love cuddling my wife in bed, but this desire can easily make me want to linger in bed longer each morning, such as by sleeping in super late – like until 6:30am or even an ungodly 7am.

At one point I did have this habit, which interfered with my other desire to get up at 5am and go for a pre-dawn run to start my day (which I love). But the cuddle-sleep habit does serve a nice need as well – human connection, touch, some extra happiness, and a happy wife who also loves to cuddle.

These mixed feelings were easy to resolve by sliding the habit of cuddle-sleeping into a different form. Instead of doing this in the morning, we often enjoy a 20-minute cuddle-nap together on the couch, usually shortly after lunch. This siesta gives us a nice midday connection and refreshes us for the afternoon, but it doesn’t interfere with my early riser habit.

Here are a couple of other examples of sliding problematic habits into better ones:

If you have a habit of over-checking the news lately (i.e. doomscrolling), maybe it’s because you like consuming content. Maybe you like learning something new each day. So you could experiment with sliding this into a deliberate content consumption habit like reading books, listening to audiobooks, listening to podcasts, or working through online courses. See if you can increase the quality of the content you consume each day. Many highly successful people swear by the habit of reading a lot each morning to start their workday, sometimes for 2-3 hours – they just do their best to make it purposeful. If you could slide this habit towards a more structured approach that involves higher quality content, it may be worth keeping.

Maybe you check social media a lot because it satisfies your desire for human connection. Of course it can also be shallow and distracting. Where else could you slide this habit to make it more beneficial? Perhaps you could invite people to join you on one-on-one calls to connect. Or you could continue using social media, but nudge yourself to do a live video each week to push further beyond your comfort zone, so it’s more of a growth experience for you. Alternatively, you could slide this habit towards five or six days per week instead of seven, so you have a day or two of screen-free time each week. Or you could slide towards meditation or a personally meaningful spiritual practice. For instance, the Submersion course includes daily lessons to help you improve your relationship with life, so you can feel more connected each day.

Whatever you’re doing that feels like a bad habit, look into what hidden need or desire it addresses. Does it give you a break? Help you relax? Make you feel more informed or connected? If the habit was all negative, you’d probably drop it, so you’re keeping it in your life for a reason.

Then see if you can raise your standards above and beyond what the hidden habit is realistically doing for you. If a habit helps you feel social, for instance, what would be a higher standard for socializing? Perhaps you could connect with smarter people, more depth, more impact, more ripples, more playfulness, more edginess, etc. Could you satisfy this desire in a more growth-oriented way without making it overly complicated?

Sometimes it’s best to start with a minimal slide. See if you can elevate the habit slightly, and then lock it in at the elevated level. You could keep checking the news, but add one lesson from an online course immediately afterwards (or right before). One way to do this is to create a tab group in your web browser for your favorite news sites, and then add one extra tab to that group for an online course you’d like to complete. As you work through (and close) the news tabs, you’ll soon reach the online course tab, and then you can do just one lesson of that course each day along with your news checking.

You can also slide good habits towards better ones. I did this with my morning runs this year. I gradually increased my running distance, just sliding it forward a little more week by week, till I was running double the distance I was running before. Now I’m doing something similar but with speed instead of distance, pushing myself to go a little faster on some of my runs. It’s a little slide forward each week, and it adds a lovely growth element to what I’d previously been regarding as a maintenance habit.

Another way to slide a habit forward is with appreciation and acknowledgement. Thank the existing habit for what it’s doing for you, even if you semi-dislike it. Thank it for the connection, the relaxation, the pleasure, the information, the satisfaction, the entertainment, etc. Don’t over-focus on the negative side since that can blind you to the needs and desires that still matter to you – and which you might lose abruptly if you tried to immediately drop the habit.

Sliding a habit into a better one is easier when you acknowledge the hidden needs and desires that habit is satisfying. Instead of demonizing the habit for being all bad, recognize that it’s actually serving a purpose. And accept that if you want to replace a problematic habit with a better one, it’s wise to keep fulfilling the habit’s beneficial purpose.

Broaden your awareness of what you actually care about by looking for the hidden needs and desires behind your so-called bad habits. Maybe you care a lot about being entertained, being informed, feeling connected, feeling secure, and so on. Maybe these aspects of life are more important to you than you’re willing to admit. It’s fine to value those parts of life, and it’s easier to fulfill those desires in more aligned ways if you acknowledge that you do indeed value what they’re doing for you.

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Honoring Your Hidden Goals

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When you look back on the past calendar quarter, consider what you actually got done, even if your actions and behaviors didn’t align well with your stated goals. Your time went somewhere, so where did it actually go?

Use the lens of seeing everything you did as an accomplishment, even if your main achievement was watching Game of Thrones. Instead of beating yourself up for what you didn’t do, take a deeper look at what you did do.

So then your achievements might actually look like:

  • Watch Game of Thrones.
  • Spend two hours per day on Facebook.
  • Exercise sporadically, averaging about 30 minutes per week, mostly Yoga with Adriene videos.
  • Gain 10 pounds of fat.
  • And so on…

Now consider what goals you would have set at the start of the quarter if you wanted to match what you actually did during those three months. Take a step back from the actions, and see if you can connect them with a grander meaning. Why did you do these items? What did you gain from them? These are your hidden goals.

For example, your hidden goals based on the actions above might be:

  • Take a break from the world each day with a deep dive into fantasy entertainment.
  • Leverage the benefits of online socializing each day, so I can feel connected to people while also keeping my distance, thereby allowing me to have plenty of flexible alone time.
  • Let my body go a bit, so I can use that as a reason for not going out as much instead of having to focus on the virus situation. Also give me a reason to continue staying home even when the virus situation clears up.

Try to put a semi-positive frame on each hidden goal. Consider that you may have done what you did because you overlooked important desires that weren’t represented in your stated goals.

Maybe you actually did want to spend more time alone. Maybe you did want more downtime. Maybe what you actually did wasn’t just procrastination – maybe your actions were purposeful in ways you didn’t necessarily see as you went through the quarter.

Use what you learn from this while considering your goals for the next quarter. Would you like to elevate one or more of your hidden goals to give them a better form of deliberate expression?

For instance:

  • Do a deep dive into fantasy by reading all of the Harry Potter books in order.
  • Do a 30-day challenge of inviting a 30-minute Zoom call with a different Facebook friend each day, so I get to connect with people more deeply.
  • Go vegan for the next 90 days, and spend about two hours every Saturday experimenting in the kitchen with different recipes while streaming appealing Netflix series in the background.

By noticing where your time actually went and considering that it may have been purposeful, you can reveal desires that you may have been denying, and then you can give those desires more conscious forms of expression.

You may also discover that your hidden goals reveal hidden fears. Perhaps you’re not feeling ready to face your other goals, and you need to build more readiness first.

Sometimes our stated goals are overly narrow. Other desires still demand expression, and if we ignore them when setting goals, they’ll just express themselves through less conscious behavior patterns.

If you give more deliberate expression to your hidden goals, you can potentially satisfy a wider range of desires. Balancing your goals can help you balance your behaviors and therefore your results as well.

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Advancing Your Goals and Your Processes

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As we’re coming to the end of the third quarter of 2020, how are you feeling about the progress you’ve made during the last three months? Are you satisfied or dissatisfied? Or do you have mixed feelings?

I like to review each closing quarter to reflect on what I actually got done. Usually I’m pleased when I see what I completed and experienced. This is relatively easy for me since I habitually maintain a log of accomplishments and experiences on a quarter-by-quarter basis, so I review this list at the end of each quarter. I find it more useful to compare one quarter’s progress to the previous quarter instead of measuring progress against my actual goals. Then I can see if I’m improving quarter by quarter.

After this little review, I look ahead to the next quarter and think about what I’d like to experience next. Several days ago I set my goals for the fourth quarter of this year, so I can start thinking about them well before the quarter begins.

One feeling I have about the upcoming quarter is that it’s time to advance. The past quarter involved a lot of small projects, and in the new quarter I’m ready for bigger ones. The two big ones are to create and publish a new deep dive course on creative productivity and to write the first draft of a novel.

I’ve created courses before but never on this particular topic. I’ve never written a novel before. So these are both advancement goals. Just engaging with them involves stepping into new territory.

I love advancement goals because they aren’t just more of the same. They stretch our characters. They dance with risk. They require exploration and experimentation. And they deliver such a sweet sense of accomplishment afterwards.

With advancement goals I find it particularly important to frame them carefully. The process of achieving them is at least as important as the end result. I want the process of advancement to feel wondrous and rewarding, like Indiana Jones exploring a new temple in search of hidden treasures.

So the advance isn’t just about reaching the end goal. It’s important to advance the process too – to engage with life in new ways that feel purposeful and meaningful. Using the same old process to achieve a new result-based goal seems boring and not as growth-oriented. A machine can run the same algorithm repeatedly. As a human I want the process to grow and evolve with me each time. A stale process may be fine for a Roomba but not for a human being.

I don’t just want to create a new course and write my first novel. I want to advance the way I create courses, and I want to advance into fiction with a sense of appreciation and discovery. Ten years from now I want to remember that I loved creating the course and loved writing the novel. I want the memories of enjoyment and appreciation and wonder, not the memory of being stuck in a dull or stressful process. Remembering some struggle is okay too – I’d rather struggle a bit than be bored.

Is it really an advance if you’re seeking a result, but your process feels like a step backwards in terms of lifestyle enjoyment? Are you advancing towards a goal while feeling like you’re simultaneously retreating into stress, worry, and attachment? If so, can you really call that an advance?

When you advance towards a new goal, be sure to advance your process too. Set goals not just for outcomes but also to explore and improve your relationship with life. Make it part of your goal to advance your character too. Make it part of your goal to create memories you’ll cherish for years.

Don’t just advance towards a new goal. Also advance the way you set and achieve goals.

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Studying Your Actual Behaviors

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Observing your behaviors and responses like a scientist observing apes in the jungle can be useful for spotting opportunities for growth and improvement.

While it’s tempting to see yourself as a conscious human being making fresh decisions each day, you can also benefit by seeing yourself like an animal or robot responding to stimuli in a pre-programmed or instinctual manner.

Observe your own stimulus-response patterns, as if you never really had a choice in between. Then consider that you can get different behaviors from yourself if you change the stimuli. Give yourself different inputs, and watch your behaviors change automatically.

Then your personal growth challenge isn’t to try harder or to push yourself to be more disciplined or to do a better job of doing what you think you should do. Your challenge is to determine the right stimuli that will trigger your automatic behaviors to get you moving in the right direction.

Pay less attention to how you want to be or how you believe you should be, and pay more attention to how you actually are. Note how you actually behave. Then you can make decisions based on your real behavior patterns to get results instead of hoping that you’ll somehow behave better than you actually do.

As a simple example, I used this mindset to lose 20 pounds in the past four months, and it was pretty easy. I didn’t push myself to change my eating habits. I didn’t try harder. I didn’t have to exert more discipline. I simply changed the inputs to trigger different behavioral outputs. I started food logging, which gave me the additional input of observing which foods and how much I was eating each day. This took only minutes per day and was super easy to maintain as a habit. Upon seeing that extra data each day, my brain automatically updated its models and changed my behaviors, which in turn altered my results. So I changed the stimuli which in turn generated different responses.

By giving myself a little more input attached to every meal, my internal circuitry responded differently. I didn’t have to be or become anyone different. I didn’t have to try to change my behaviors. All I had to do was change the input patterns in a very modest way. Once my brain had a little bit more data, that was enough for it to respond with different behaviors.

Sometimes you can achieve better results by taking your ego and identity out of the picture. See your brain as a pure stimulus-response creature. Imagine that your behaviors are pre-programmed and automatic, and you can’t really control them consciously day by day. Notice that you just react to events most of the time. Then observe that you can change those events to create different inputs for your brain to chew on, and this can cause you to output different behaviors and therefore get different results.

Then it’s just a matter of experimenting with the inputs to see how different changes affect your outputs.

Don’t beat yourself up for not responding differently than you already do. Just observe: Okay, this is how my brain responds to these inputs. Then if you want different results, look for ways to perturb the inputs till your brain starts outputting different behaviors, which will naturally lead to different results.

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Becoming More Resilient

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Your Most Valuable Minutes

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Create Your Day

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