I’ve been reflecting a lot on my inability to develop habits and unpacking what’s underlying that. There is something about my executive dysfunction + anxiety that makes me hostile toward them. I wanna be clear that this isn’t disabling from my perspective and I’m not complaining, just noodling through it. I know many folks with ADHD issues far worse than this, and I’ve long ago figured out enough self-interventions to appear as a simulacrum of a human with habits, it’s just frustrating.
I feel like people talk about habits like some magic thing that happens if you just do a thing regularly enough for a while, but I honestly don’t understand that experience. Anything I do regularly or “on auto pilot” is a direct result of past-Lincoln having carefully laid a breadcrumb trail to provide a path of least-resistance to now-Lincoln, not something I am predisposed to do. Why did I get to the dojo on Tuesday again? The full list of micro-interventions in the week leading up to it would be exhausting to write or read, frankly, but they are scattershot — no two weeks of interventions look exactly the same. On average, it works out.
If you look at any 30-day sequence of my year, I dunno what I could say I did every single one of those 30 days besides breath, eat, & sleep.
Expectations + enforced time limits will cause my compliance regularly, but that isn’t the same as a habit. For instance, I had a 2-year streak on Duolingo, but my god that thing worked to keep me in a “streak,” especially as I faded in my last 6 months of growing disillusioned with it. Accountability buddy? It just devolves into enforcement. I downloaded an app called “Streaks” to try to build habits, and I was genuinely excited to try it, but I think I mostly resent it — as I inevitably do any system like this. It feels like unsuccessfully negotiating with a petulant child to eat broccoli. I do not see a solution down this path; maybe it’s time to accept broccoli isn’t on the menu.
Taking stock of the challenge, I’m:
- near-immune to gamification
- resentful of box checking
- *nable to form self-reinforcing habits
- avoiding second-party involvement
Now, let’s flip the script. What’s working in my favor?
First, I believe there’s a lot of value in time investment — practice, writing, meditation; the day-to-day grind of it all. I know there is strong causation from repetition and experience creating outcomes I want. My more-regular attendance in sparring classes over the last few years has had noticeable impact not only on my skill in class, but my reflexes. Many years of people management & executive experience significantly changed my perspectives and made me a more effective leader. I know it all matters. I am just not convinced my progress hinges on, y’know, whether I skipped a particular day (or week!) on this list.
Second, I am a sucker for tracking data, building spreadsheets, and evaluating trends over time. If you’ve followed my journeys, you know I have compiled decade-spanning employment data for 2/3 of my most recent employers that is more accurate than their own records. I don’t think “data driven” gets you anywhere but in a ditch, but the data itself is incredibly interesting to investigate and be curious about what needs attention.
My conclusion? I min/maxed wrong.
I used lightweight solutions for tracking a signal I didn’t intrinsically care about (streaks) rather than a system with enough data for me to be invested in its maintenance. It turns out it’s not a useful feature (for me) to be able to quickly record I “did it”, or get notification reminders, or watch a thing satisfyingly fill-in, chime, buzz, & turn gold. And minimizing my interaction with the data to be superficial gamification makes me value it less, it seems.
What do I actually care about? Time invested recently. Maybe the last 30 days on a rolling basis? That makes sense, to me. That feels like it matters. And that’s something that improves every time you add to it rather than starting you back at square one. It also only goes down because time exists (previous work rolls out of the 30-day window), not because you “messed up”. When your feel-bads register at 10x the impact of your accomplishments, that matters a lot.
Looks like I need another spreadsheet in my life.