The habit of habit engineering | Hacker News Reader

The habit of habit engineering

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181 pointsseapunk47 comments

"make a spreadsheet", "listen to this podcast/audiobook", "INBOX ZERO", "check out this cool new app" (which turns out to be fundamentally the same as the last app)

I feel like everything I've seen on this topic in the past 10 years is the same stuff over and over.

I used to be young and spriteful, and I'd to get giddy at the prospect of "the new way" to form habits and improve whatever it was I wanted to in my life, but now I'm just a jaded old man with the same problems. I've made some token improvements here and there but I'm willing to wager that if you pick up this spreadsheet today you won't be using it a year and a half from now.

It really surprises me that no real ground has been broken on this subject in recent years. We seem to be obsessed with the topic but it's a constant problem with a fairly stagnant set of solutions.

Turns out planning isn't useful in any way until you assess current situation clearly. Turns out assessing current situation isn't easy at all. There is no single clear and easy fix to this.

Planning isn't useful if you do not intend to take action based on it.

I call it the meta-habit of habit tracking.

And from all the tricks, this one is the closest to life-changing.

I did it for a few years, then stopped, and I can tell you my life was better when I was actively working on my habits.

Now I'm going to get back to it before it's too late.

The problem, is that's not how our mind work. Our brain keep the habits that are rewarding period. If you use your willpower you will get tired of them and you will find a way to stop.

I am trying https://www.selfauthoring.com/ from Jordan Peterson. In this case, it's not about habits, but by writing about your worsts and best parts and thinking about how your life can be better or worst relative to what you do with them.

You make the reward/punishment apparent and you let your mind do build the habits for you.

I would take anything Mr. Peterson produces with a pinch of salt, as his advice and theories stem from the assumption that one can't change human nature.

I've never engaged with anything by Jordan Peterson, but that assumption sounds perfectly reasonable. Taking human nature to mean "the way people tend to respond to stimuli as a result of evolution", then I don't see that changing in a short time scale like a single lifetime.

It can[1] but most people including Peterson himself do not care. He alludes to this in his book's introduction.

[1] http://www.actualfreedom.com.au/sundry/floggedmisconceptions...

This is not to say that his advice is useless. I think it can be useful from certain contexts in life. But for any ultimate achievement in what is humanly possible one needs to look beyond what he professes to be possible.

It will change when techies and psychologists and sociologists deeply collaborate. Right now its just a bunch of half baked experiments based on half baked understanding of human psychology.

I think many of the habit creating methods tend to forget that habit creation should be easy and not test your willpower.

For example, I spent years trying to reduce my weight and in spite of balanced diets, group motivation etc I failed a lot. Then one day I read about keto. I enjoy eating fatty foods a lot, so relying on fats as energy seemed easy. Eventually when I started my diet, it was like a walk in the park. I enjoyed my every meal and never felt like I was being forced to do something.

On the other hand, for stuff like mediation I tried the method mentioned in the thread. Complete the habit, mark it in a habit tracker. It worked great.

But, later due to a family emergency I had to travel and those were two stressful weeks. In those weeks, completing the habit and then tracking felt like a chore. It was at that time I realized for better or worse I saw these things as checklist items and not habits.

Lately, I have been trying the Tiny Habits method from BJ Fogg. The premise of this method is to make habits automatic and not rely on trackers or alarms to complete them. And instead of relying purely on will power day by day to complete them think of the smallest step possible. It works great for the three habits I have started with.

> In those weeks, completing the habit and then tracking felt like a chore.

I've noticed this with a lot of my habits. At some point you have so many amazing and useful daily habits that doing the habits becomes a massive drain on time and attention.

That means the habits are no longer beneficial. Time to drop some of them. Pruning is important and not often talked about in the self-improvement literature.

The first one I dropped is meditation. I get much better benefits from a 30 minute run than I do from 10 minutes sitting still in a chair. And it's easier to make time for running than it is for sitting in a chair. Plus running is meditative too.

And so on. I find that habits that are getting harder and harder to stick to are telling me "Hey psst, I'm not useful anymore"

> ...habit creation should be easy and not test your willpower.

I couldn't agree more. I tried going to the gym to stay in shape, but it was touch-and-go.

Then I discovered that I enjoyed rugby and open water swimming, and that changed everything: exercise was no longer a chore, it was fun! And that makes a world of difference.

What worked for me was making the habbits as small as possibile, at least in the beggining. Want to medditate in the morning? Start with 1 minute for 90 days. Streching after waking up? Sure, do 1 rep of 1 exercise for a week and then add another rep etc.

Turns out that for me the most difficult thing to do was to smart small so that I do not stop when my initial optimism fades. I got around it by thinking that I would still be better off after doing 1 rep of a single exercise a day for a year then not doing any at all (which was what happened at earlier attempts).

The best way of tracking that has worked for me over the years has been automatic tracking. For example my fitness band automatically tracks my workouts and gives me the summary, it automatically tracks my sleep too, my meditation app automatically tracks my meditation sessions, writing a blog as a part of completing the understanding of something new I learnt automatically tracks my learnings. Keeping things simple and automated is the best way to go as far as tracking is concerned.

Good article. Never heard the term 'habit engineering' before - this topic is mostly plastered with the word productivity.

I also deal with this a lot, like many others, mostly centered around logging activity, saving information and todos. I started logging my daily activity and expenses in a simple keyword-based txt format since 10 years, coupled with an ordered way to store photos, automatic pc/mobile time tracking, and service backups (chat logs, social media, etc). I started to write a simple open source platform to review all these on a unified interface, but time is short and there's always something more important.

Shaping habits sounds intriguing and rather different to this. Exemplified with the last sentence above, hard-coding specific time for 'habits' could be more effective, but it's also rather brittle if you don't have an orderly strict daily routine. This is super subjective - great systems can serve as toolboxes for everyone to compose what they need.

But the whole topic is really interesting, a wide intersection between self-development/meditation and technology. I'm really interested in the systems of others - wish 'habit engineering' or a similar term would be widely known to distinct complex lifestyle routines from the sea of generic 'productivity tips'.

> I also deal with this a lot, like many others, mostly centered around logging activity, saving information and todos

I used to preserve and organise all my digital life as well, but at some point I found it really liberating to just let things go. Storage might be cheap, but maintaining a comprehensive archive takes effort which could be better spent on future projects. In fact, I realised that treating historical data as ephemeral helps me achieve more and obsess less about perfection.

Of course this is just my personal opinion, different approaches work for different people.

Agree. I've spent a lot of time quantifying and logging parts of my life in the past, but I wasn't using the data to guide future action. So anything I track that isn't helping me achieve something, I now stop tracking.

Its trivial and easy to log this data, just use the data export on each service (GDPR helped a lot). The time investment is in mining this data meaningfully, and I also get this type of sentiment as well.

I've been using Habitica + Anki for a while now and I'm quiet sure that this is by far the best of what I picked up this year.

https://habitica.com/ https://apps.ankiweb.net/

Came here to say this.

Any tips on using Anki for remembering texts such as theory etc. (those not in question-answer format.)

Use cloze deletions! https://apps.ankiweb.net/docs/manual.html#cloze-deletion

I've gone one step further and have built a simple CRUD app for all the things I'm tracking.

I find this easier to update from my phone than a spreadsheet.

I'm a big believer in 'streaks' as a form of motivation and I've got simple views in my app for representing this for habits.

I use the same app for more general tracking of my life, it's not just for habits.

Having all the data in a database makes querying and understanding this data easier for me.

I'm not suggesting this is for everyone. It only works if you know a framework pretty well. I know rails and it has a pretty good scaffolding feature to bang out forms and basic views in minutes making it faster than creating a spreadsheet for me.

Do you store all values into a spreadsheet?

Nah,they the rails app runs on the free tier on Heroku with a postgres db.

I do that too: tracking time I spend at work. Peter Drucker recommends to keep a log for a while and then to review how you’ve spent your time.

Still, looking at this blog, it kind of feels weird, in the sense that through this approach we’re creating machines rather than humans. Perfect performance as life goal seems creepy

"Still, looking at this blog, it kind of feels weird, in the sense that through this approach we’re creating machines rather than humans."

Totally agree. this is why this approach isn't easy to be accepted by the wide audiences.

" Perfect performance as life goal seems creepy" Creepy is a harsh word, this word is abused by Americans. I understand what you try to say. may I use the word " a little bit of disturbed"

Thanks. Creepy is probably indeed a bit harsh

Comments on the thread (https://twitter.com/ali01/status/1078647601371799554) are generally useful.

I’m using my Pavlok to break old bad habits and remind myself to do new things (but not both at once). A few shocks really gets my monkey mind to alter it’s behavior...

Link for the curious like me: https://pavlok.com/

It's a wristband that gives you electric shocks.

I realize I've actually used one before, while playtesting a VR game which used this to give "damage taken" feedback. I was pretty bad dodging hits despite the motivation.

Wow!! Do you know what Vr game that was? I’ve always wanted to integrate Pavlok with vr

It was a friend's prototype for a class in game development, actually, so it's not available publicly. I did find it was a little disorienting to get shocked in the right wrist even when hit on the left side - something to keep in mind if you ever want to develop it!

Founder of Pavlok here! Thanks for using it :) Have you tried any of our habit formation apps, like Gratitude or Morning routine?

You can use redeem code “TEST_MORNING” to unlock the morning routines if you haven’t yet :)

As usual, not even a word how to stay motivated despite distractions. Like, other people (I don't mean internet social networks) and occassional illness.

We're not supposed to "stay motivated despite distractions".

If somebody close to you dies e.g. it's ok to mourn them, before picking up.

If a family member has an issue, it's ok to drop our productivity while helping them out.

We don't have to be perfect performing machines 24/7 -- nor does it matter in the end, when we'll all be in the grave.

As for lesser everyday distractions, the suggested "habit forming" is precisely a way the author proposes to stay motivated in face of them.

Exactly. All this nonsense here about discipline tells me people haven't really even started. We're not meant to be machines. Test habits that shut find useful, as well as motivational tools that you find useful. But don't try to force yourself into a schedule each day that makes you miserable.

For me the best way has been to slowly try to change my habits, eg from juice and soda to was and from tea and coffee to caffeine free tea. There's no need to be perfect, just to slowly try to shift your habits in a generally better direction.

The first step is to realize it is not about motivation, but discipline. Relying on motivation will never last because motivation ebbs and flows. Motivation doesn't help you do things that you don't want to do even though they need to get done.

Discipline is hard and requires daily practice. There really is no trick. Alarm goes off, get up. You know you should workout every day, so workout. That project you're pushing off, do it now. With that said, if there are any tricks, I find a routine and focusing on the long term helps.

IMHO, discipline is one of the purest expressions of free will that we have. Instead of letting our subconscious cause us to meander through life, we make decisions for what is best and act on them.

Great article. I would appreciate a breakdown of the provided spreadsheet, for example I'm unsure of what "Weight" is supposed to be.

Who wants to create an app with me? Simplify the stats and streamline the data entry, then provide a way to lock down certain apps to a given time-limit a day, which cannot be passed without logging/completing a certain percentage of your daily habits/goals.

It comes from the OKR obsession of Google.

You "weight" your different outcomes so you can come to a single score were the outcomes are weighted based on their priority to the organization.

My go-to tool for creating habits has been Moleskine Weekly notebook.

You get 2 pages for each week. I draw a table on every Sunday, then I check in every night.

Weekly notebook is better than freestyle, because the empty pages remind me I need to fill them in.

It's also just the right size for traveling - so I take it everywhere with me.

Totally on board with this idea! I've been experimenting with similar things, and I wrote my perspective here: http://b.knrz.co/whats-the-right-thing-to-do

Similar stories have been shown on HN before as well, and I find them fascinating because I just cannot imagine using the methods presented myself (e.g. any kind of managing/planning/checking large parts of one's life with a notebook of some kind). However this obviously does work for other people, to the point I sometimes have the impression there's two kinds of people: those who can use a system like this, and those who don't (and this doesn't have a fixed correlation on person's 'output'). I do get stuff done and know what you mean with focussed work etc, and I do have mental equivalents of todo-lists and habit-tracking and whatnot but if I write them down it just doesn't work and/or I loose interest. Especially todo-lists like you have with set items per day are a complete disaster. Both because I shift things around on the go in whatever way I feel like and because I often have new ideas which have to go on the list leading to more shifting, eventually making the process feel like a waste of time because 'manage todo-list' becomes a major entry on the todo-list.

You show 2 screenshots on your blog post. What app is that?

By looking at this list https://www.lifehack.org/668261/best-habit-tracking-apps

the screenshots match 'way of life' #24

As the other commenter noted, it is indeed Way of Life :-) [0]

[0] https://wayoflifeapp.com

Or: Don't Break The Chain! as Jerry Seinfeld would put it:

https://www.writersstore.com/dont-break-the-chain-jerry-sein...

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