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The Lean Habit

russellpollari.com

3 pointsruss_poll4 comments

seeking to add to the discussion of how to cross-apply lean thinking to habit development, inspired by “What you want to do and what you actually do are not always the same.”

I’ve heard innovators say users can’t tell you what they want and use that a justification for abandoning the study of users. But I’ve found that users can tell you what they do, if they are interviewed thoughtfully and with concern for how they feel about telling you something as vulnerable as what they actually do. They yearn to do it, actually. Especially when they feel supported and heard.

On habits, seems like the same thing applies, but in this case you are interviewing yourself. Keeping a daily log of what you do feels tedious and intimidating. A practice I’ve found helpful is creating not just journals, but actual maps of the current reality of the thing you’re seeking to improve. Detailed. With artifacts. Like on a wall. And then a separate activity is to find the places in the reality that least map to the outcomes you are trying to achieve. And then, with these problems identified, you can ask the question: what is the simplest thing I can do now to adjust my behaviors in these problem areas in a way that accelerates my progress towards the outcome I want?” I think I’m going to try this out.

Interesting, do you have an example? This sounds more intimidating than a daily log (the mvp can be a single line on if you accomplished a habit or not).

Let me explain what I mean by intimidating, because I’m not talking about work-load. The work involved in mapping a current reality is much more intimidating—-in terms of load—-than daily journaling. But journaling—-which I’ve done: I have a box filled with written personal journals—-turned, for me, less into a faithful map of what I’d actually done and more into an effort to reconcile what had already happened to my goals. So if I had a hard day, I would try to recontextualize it, in my journal, in some positive light that showed how it ultimately contributed to my goals. And that became burdensome and painful ... hence intimidating to me as a concept now.

A current reality map, on the other hand, starts with the objective of forensic impartiality. I’m not doing it with any goal to validate my current approach. I’m just trying to actually see what is happening, with a bigger goal to see how what is happening is NOT aligned to what I want to have happen, so that I can innovate in a way that addresses that inconsistency.

And by framing it this way, it becomes more a process of innovation, which is less intimidating to me than the self-advocacy or self-defense or self-delusion I typically experience in journaling.

Good points. I think automating habit tracking as much as possible can help avoid the desire to recontextualize.

Keeping measurement as objective as possible as well. e.g. How many sentences did I write today?

I think you are describing something like this. In which there is less reliance on self-reporting.

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