Clearer paths and sharper ideas (Crosspost)

I had the pleasure of going on the Clearer Thinking podcast with Spencer Greenberg for a pleasant chat about:

What are "forward-chaining" and "backward-chaining", and how do they connect with theory of change? What sorts of mental habits and heuristics prevent you from brainstorming ideas effectively? How can you harness feedback effectively to sharpen your ideas? From whom should you solicit feedback? How can you view your own products with fresh eyes? What are some common struggles people encounter when starting or changing careers, and how can they be overcome? Why are small experiments so under-used? How can we construct a sustainable work life? What are the best ways to rest and recover from overwork and burnout?

You can listen to the podcast here: https://clearerthinkingpodcast.com/episode/077

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Reinforcing Habits

Epistemic status: hypothesis based on >10 anecdotal examples 

Every month or so, I’ll get a client asking why their attempts to start a habit failed. They want to have an automatic action requiring minimal willpower. The client is usually familiar with at least one habit-building model. Most commonly Charles Duhigg’s Cue, Routine, Reward loop (in “The Power of Habit”) or CFAR’s Trigger-Action Plans (TAPs).

Their model may go like Duhigg’s story: he wanted to change his habit of eating a cookie each afternoon (motivated by watching the scale creep up). So he identified his cue (the time of day around 3pm), planned a new routine to replace the old one (talk to colleagues for ten minutes), and had a new habit. My client usually wants to know what thwarts their attempts to do likewise.

What’s missing from that example? 

I read The Power of Habit many years ago, and honestly didn’t remember Duhigg’s cookie story any better than my clients often do. So I was surprised when I revisited it and found Duhigg actually did a series of experiments to find what the reward was. Something sweet? Nope, eating a candy bar at his desk didn’t feel great. Just taking a break? Nope, taking a walk outside didn’t cut it. Talking with friends? Yeah, that felt rewarding. Based on his experiments, we can guess that getting a cookie each afternoon was a means for getting him to talk to his colleagues while eating it. Because the reward here was socializing, he could build a new habit that didn’t use the cookie as an intermediate step. 

This reward step is often neglected by my habit-struggling clients. They want the low-effort, automatic aspects of habits. They lack, however, anything to make those behaviors sticky. 

I think it might help to reframe habits as repeatedly-reinforced behaviors. Our brains, often subconsciously, have tied a particular action to some cue after repeatedly having that action rewarded. Simple patterns of cue, action, and reward in close proximity get reinforced, such as “it’s mid afternoon -> I’ll get a cookie -> rewarded by social connection.” 

Intentionally designing good habits is hard. By default, our unconscious habits are selected for rewarding behaviors. For example, when I’m feeling blue, eating chocolate and hugs make me happier. I don’t need to train myself to eat chocolate when I feel blue - this happens quite easily! 

On the other hand, you have to intentionally find the reward when you’re trying to kickstart a habit. In particular, you need to find the reward if you want your habit to happen automatically without willpower each time. A random desired behavior may not have an immediate reward, so you need to experiment. (I’m not guaranteeing that all behaviors can be made into habits - there’s a reason that doctors recommend “whichever exercise you’ll actually do” rather than a specific fitness-optimized routine.) 

Two similar actions can cause very different experiences due to small differences specific to you. Pullup hangs and RSI wrist stretches were both small actions that I repeated for brief reps three times a day. The pull-up hangs were motivating because I could see myself improve day to day - an extra second here, three seconds longer there. The RSI stretches quickly became demotivating because I couldn’t see myself making any progress even after a couple weeks of consistent use. 

Similarly, 7am yoga required financial penalties to get me into downward dog before the world warmed up. Walking a mile in the peaceful evening while thinking or calling a friend was a piece of cake in comparison. 

The best rewards are natural consequences of the action--i.e. the experience of doing the action reinforces the behavior. The reward might be enjoyment of the action, seeing progress toward a goal, a social status boost, consistency with your sense of self, connection, release from a worry, etc. Note, all of these are gut-level feelings, not “shoulds”. A System 2-level sense of “I should…” doesn’t seem to have the same rewarding effect. You actually have to find what feels rewarding. If you can identify and increase the reward, you can make the habit easier to sustain. This implies that the best way to deliberately change/start habits is to choose new habits with immediate positive outcomes, and make those benefits salient. 

On the other hand, you can also try to tack on a reward that doesn’t inherently come with the action, such as fist pumping the air or using financial penalties. Arbitrary rewards can be quite useful (particularly in situations when you just have to push through something unpleasant). However, financial penalties and other arbitrary rewards fall apart if you stop applying a bit of willpower to set them up each time. Rewards with a self-coercive element are also more draining/stressful to use for many people. (Not surprising - the rewarding habit is more pleasant than a financial penalty.)

One popular example is temptation bundling. The idea is you only give into a temptation while also doing a desired activity, such as only watching TV while exercising. However, a common outcome is someone tries to watch TV exclusively while exercising, only to have some part of their brain point out that nothing is stopping them from watching TV in bed…

In contrast, here are few examples of people using natural rewards to reinforce habits:

  1. According to Nate Soares, “When I was quite young, one of the guests at our house refused to eat processed food. I remember that I offered her some fritos and she refused. I was fairly astonished, and young enough to be socially inept. I asked, incredulous, how someone could not like fritos. To my surprise, she didn't brush me off or feed me banal lines about how different people have different tastes. She gave me the answer of someone who had recently stopped liking fritos through an act of will. Her answer went something like this: ‘Just start noticing how greasy they are, and how the grease gets all over your fingers and coats the inside of the bag. Notice that you don't want to eat things soaked in that much grease. Become repulsed by it, and then you won't like them either.’"

  2. Tara Mac Aulay: “I found that going to lift weights with friends is surprisingly good, because I get to have a good chat with them for an hour, and it's not strenuous enough that you can't have a conversation. But if I was to go on a bike ride with friends or something else where you can't talk, it's not as nice. And my main exercise is probably just walking and dancing. I go out dancing a lot on my own, to go and see music artists that I enjoy, and I just dance like a crazy person until I'm really tired and then I go home, and that's amazing.”

  3. I struggled for a while to brush my teeth consistently. I eventually paid mindful attention to the feeling of stuff on my teeth. The little layer of course film when I hadn’t brushed after eating, and the polished silk of freshly brushed teeth. I started getting annoyed at the texture on my teeth, and then brushing was easy.

Experimenting and paying close attention to what feels rewarding seem to be common elements behind the successes above. 

A couple ideas if you want to try using natural rewards to build habits for yourself:

  • Run experiments to find what you enjoy enough to easily make a habit. You can track these formally, or just note which are easier to do repeatedly.

  • Use Soares’ technique of focusing on the experience of minute details that attract you to habits you want, or make unwanted habits less desirable. For example, pay attention to how much better you feel when you don’t have an important email hanging over your head, compared to when you were procrastinating.

  • Use this CBT Pleasure Predicting Worksheet to increase your awareness of how much you enjoy activities. This sheet works by highlighting discrepancies between expected and experienced enjoyment.

Five Whys

Five Whys is a technique I borrowed from Lean methodology for getting to the root cause of a problem. As shown in the example below, I use the method to identify many possible solutions to a particular productivity problem.

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Measuring Progress

I’ve noticed a set of related issues that kept coming up in sessions with clients. So, I’m writing about them over the next few posts for others who struggle with the same topics. This one is my heartfelt rant to all of the caring people trying to improve the world who are burdened with the persistent, negative feeling of never doing enough.

Lily always waits until the last minute before the deadline and then feels terrible that she produced a crappy piece of work. She feels guilty when she’s procrastinating, but repeatedly fails to start early enough to do a good job.

Paul thinks he should produce a blog post each week, but settles for one a month. Yet, he often misses his deadline and feels guilty that he can’t manage even this small goal. He dreads starting the next post.

Norann sees her coworker easily completing tasks that Norann struggles with, and feels anxious that she’s not good enough. She has to force herself to work but still never feels like her projects are good enough.

These people all have one thing in common - they feel guilty that they aren’t doing enough. But doing work doesn’t make them feel better. Doing work just makes them think about the fact they are failing to meet their goals.

The default way to escape that cycle is to not think about work.

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Five Ways to Prioritize Better

I’m going to let you in on a secret of productivity.

Those people you admire, the ones who make you wonder how on earth they accomplish so much?

Those people might work more hours than you or be more talented or more passionate. Or they might not.

But they probably work on better things, in better ways.

Now, before you protest that that’s the same thing as being talented or smart or hardworking, let me unpack that claim. Working on better things means they carefully choose what’s worth caring about, and what they won’t give a fuck about. Working in better ways means they carefully choose to do the most important actions to accomplish those goals.

In short, working on better things, in better ways is prioritization. Prioritizing well is the common thread behind successful people.

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Eight Productivity Tools

Here’s a roundup of my eight favorite productivity tools.

I wrote this up for a client a while ago, and I’ve since received feedback that it was helpful. I’m sharing the unpolished version here so you can experiment on your own if you’re looking for new tools.

That said, most of the stuff in this post is pretty basic. So if you’re already pretty happy with your productivity tools, probably best to skip this post.

But if you are looking for new tools, here are my favorites roughly ordered by how often I recommend them to clients (and use them myself - I use the first six basically every day).

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Lewis Bollard on self-experimentation, zero distractions, and hyper focus

Here’s an interview with someone who’s invested in perfecting his daily routines - Lewis Bollard. Lewis leads Open Philanthropy’s strategy for Farm Animal Welfare. Prior to joining Open Philanthropy, he worked as Policy Advisor & International Liaison to the CEO at The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS).

Lewis shares how he used lots of informal mini experiments to refine his daily routine for sustainable peak performance.

  • He tracked when he got work done and when he didn’t to discover his optimal routine - heads-down hyper-focused mornings, slower paced afternoons, and taking evenings completely off.

  • He tried working twelve hours in a day when looking for how much he could sustainably work - which is closer to eight hours (while possible, twelve hour days kill productivity the next day).

  • He tried taking a break to meditate or exercise - did he achieve less those days? Nope, he got just as much done.

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Tara Mac Aulay on happiness and work, self-experimentation, and prioritization

How closely do happiness and productivity overlap? Does being happy make you more productive, or does being productive make you happier? Or maybe both?

I’m pretty convinced that there’s a positive correlation between the two, despite productivity’s familiar grit-and-bear-it reputation. However, I remain uncertain how tightly the two are correlated and which way the causal arrows point.

My guest today seems to have this all figured out, at least for herself. Today I’m joined by Tara Mac Aulay, the CEO of Lantern Ventures. Tara was previously CEO of the Center for Effective Altruism.

Tara’s run dozens, if not hundreds, of experiments in her life. Everything from working many highly planned hours, to not planning her work at all, to testing how much social time leaves her energized, to gamifying admin work. Through running these experiments - and comparing the results with her prior predictions - Tara’s found ways to make productivity feel fun.

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Self-experiment: Does working more hours increase my output?

After writing up my research on limits to working, the sheer spread of possibilities amazed me. I genuinely wasn’t sure if I would be able to tell the difference between a day with four hours of deep work and one with eight hours. Surely we could narrow down the hypothesis space from that!

So, I designed a simple experiment. I would do one hour of deep work each day for two days, then two days of four hours each, and finally two days of eight hours each.

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How long can people usefully work?

I hear a lot of theories around how to work optimally. “You shouldn’t work more than eight hours a day.” “You can work 12 hours a day and be fine.” “It’s important to take weekends or evenings off work entirely.” “It’s best to immerse yourself in your work 24/7 if you want to be an expert.”

Perhaps most well known is Cal Newport’s claim in Deep Work that “For a novice, somewhere around an hour a day of intense concentration seems to be a limit, while for experts this number can expand to as many as four hours—but rarely more.”

Many of these theories are asserted with surprising confidence...especially since they contradict each other. At least some have to be wrong or more nuanced, and it matters which are right.

I coach Effective Altruists who want to maximize the good they can do. So they want to know how much they can work before additional work is wasted (or just less valuable compared to extra time doing other things). They also want to know how much they can work before risking reducing their long-term productivity -- burning out from working too hard is a lose-lose for them and the world.

So, I dug into these questions to see if I could find an answer.

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High Variance Productivity Advice

Despite being literally inapplicable for half the population, my post on birth control and productivity was one of my most popular facebook posts. In that spirit, here’s a roundup of my favorite weird productivity tips that aren’t for everyone.

I chose hacks that several people rated as extremely high ROI…and that other people rated from “meh” to “absolutely awful.” Basically, this is my list of tips that I don’t think everyone should try. But since most blogs try to only give generally good advice, maybe you’ll find something new that is fantastic for you.

Attempt them with a spirit of experimentation and caution. A few wins can be worth a lot of useless experiments, but be careful about large negative impacts; try 10 experiments that each have a 10% chance of going horribly wrong, and you’ll probably have a bad experience.

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How time tracking can help you prioritize

According to this hypothesis, frequently measuring time will improve prioritization by improving the outside view on how long tasks take. (Though we still often optimistically expect the next task to be completed faster than the last.) Anecdotally, I’ve found time tracking to improve people’s ability to plan (especially if they had difficulty planning before), and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that GiveWell/Open Phil encourage their employees to track their work time.

Most importantly, better predictions kill the “I can do everything” impulse. This impulse often feels like “Everything needs to be done, so it doesn’t matter which order I do it in” - a dangerous false trap that can seriously decrease productivity. Knowing how little you can actually do in a day reduces that impulse, so you naturally prioritize better. 

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