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Using Your Basal Ganglia to Change Habits

If you have ever wondered why it’s so hard to upgrade the habits, practices and rituals that make up your time management system, then you need look no further.  Apparently, it has a lot to do with brain physiology:

Similarly, if you want to create permanent new patterns of behavior in people (including yourself), you must embed them in the basal ganglia. Taking on new patterns (also known as learning) often feels unfamiliar and painful, because it means consciously overriding deeply comfortable neuronal circuitry. It also draws on parts of the brain that require more effort and energy, such as the prefrontal cortex, which is associated with deliberate executive functions such as planning and thinking ahead.

This intriguing article talks about the need to establish new habits through repetition, and the neural pathways that are created when enough attention is placed on taking actions like re-labelling certain responses.

As I mentioned in a prior post, the hardest part of teaching new time management techniques is not getting the mostly common-sense concepts across to the class.  Instead, it’s helping them to implement the new habits, practices and rituals required to make an effective upgrade.

There is no simple and easy answer to this challenge – I get the feeling from reading this article and others that the research is in its early days, especially when it comes to making changes that don’t involve life-threats (like smoking or taking drugs.)  Nevertheless, the article makes some important points, even though it doesn’t describe the need to create an environment that makes habit change easy.

That’s the Way We (Used to) Do Business Around Here from the Strategy and Business Journal.

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A Bittersweet Day

It’s been a bittersweet day.

I have been listening to Steven Levy’s book: “In the Plex” and am finding it a fascinating and inspiring read. A part of what has inspired me is the clarity and simplicity of their purpose: “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

I felt challenged by it, and how big it is, and I was reminded of the days when I started writing about time management back in 2006. I actually called my first WordPress.com blog an “open-source” site for ideas and thinking about time management as my goal was to find others who were willing to do more than superficial thinking, and share some breakthrough ideas with them. I never intended to earn any revenue, or even teach a class.

I  naively thought it would easy to find others who were thinking along the same lines, and that we’d have fun making time management better. Strangely enough, it’s been easier to find the revenue than find the others who are willing to collaborate!

Yes, there are authors out there, but none has seemed to be willing to engage in questioning  the core ideas that underly their thinking. Some go so far as to say that nothing can be done to improve the systems described in their book!

So, I just kept writing and developing, driven by the idea that something was wrong about the limited options that were available to working people who wanted to get better. I was pissed at the one-size-fits-all credo, fueled to no small degree by the fact that I had recently moved to Jamaica, and become acutely aware of the cultural assumptions that were built into the materials I had read.

It’s all too easy to write a book that you think is for everyone, but is actually only for people just like you, in circumstances that mirror your own. Instead, there are huge differences in the way we manage our time depending on our:

  • profession
  • training
  • experience
  • national culture
  • environment
  • age and stage of life

I was appalled that after doing critical work on my own time management skills back in 1999-2003, that the field had made little or no progress, and offered no assistance to people like me who needed custom help. This emotion got me writing with a vengeance, but I realize looking back that I was actually on a mission, motivated by the kind of help I thought everyone should be able to access.

Now, a few years later, I am more clear on what that is:

To make time management improvements easy for people everywhere, forever.

Discovering this mission made up the sweet part of the day!

The bitter part came when I heard that Eli Goldratt had passed away that morning. He is best known for his Theory of Constraints, and his book: The Goal, which I read as a graduate student at Cornell, during my first summer at AT&T Bell Labs.

I literally could not put the book down, as it offered a compelling glimpse of the real world of manufacturing that my professors had been unable to approximate, in spite of numerous opportunities. I got more from reading that book than most of what I had learned in class.  In fact, I re-read The Goal recently in preparation for writing my own book – using his powerful business fable as my inspiration and role model.

And now he’s gone, but he left behind a host of admirers who helped make his books some of the most popular in the business-world. I can only hope that my book does something similar, and makes a contribution to accomplishing the mission I have set for the work here at 2Time.

To that end, today I set some big, hairy audacious goals:

  1. To offer the very best on-line time management training made possible by the latest technology.
  2. To enable coaches and trainers anywhere in the world to use Time Management 2.0 principles in their work with clients
  3. To give every working professional the idea that they can upgrade the way they manage their time whenever they want, regardless of changes in work, personal life or technology.
  4. To develop the 2Time site be the best single source for time management research, ideas and breakthrough thinking gleaned from all corners of the world.
  5. To find and work with the best minds in time management, and have fun coming up with new stuff!

As I read the tributes to his live and work, I suspect that Eli Goldratt would support these wholeheartedly.

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Hard Thinking in a Busy Schedule

I found another of Cal Newport’s gems that fits quite well into the 2Time way of thinking.  Getting Creative Things Done: How to Fit Hard Thinking into a Busy Schedule.

In this post he makes the point that the best way to get quality, creative work done is to set aside dedicated time in one’s schedule, which is the equivalent of 2Time’s Orange Belt level of skill in Scheduling.

The only difference of opinion I have with this excellent article is that it’s not only about hard, creative work that academics do.  Business professionals at all levels aren’t simply paid to do something without thinking.  Instead, managers hope that they are also working on their job, not just in their job… improving it, streamlining it, cutting costs, etc.

This kind of continuous improvement comes from using the kind of techniques he describes, which means that this skill has much wider implications on professional productivity than he indicates.

Here it is again:  Getting Creative Things Done: How to Fit Hard Thinking into a Busy Schedule

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Crazy Ways to “Save Time”

I have written a great deal about Blackberry abuse here on the 2Time website.  What I also try to emphasize is the fact that people who multi-task in dangerous, unhygienic, rude and unproductive ways develop these habits in order to try to save themselves time.

A new article at Insurance Networking News points out some of these insane behaviors, all of which relate to bad driving habits: 9 Most Common Distracted Driving Behaviors Revealed.

What will it take for us to see that it doesn’t make sense to engage in “time-saving” tactics that ultimately make things worse for us all?

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Makers vs. Managers

This is an interesting essay from Paul Graham that describes two very different mindsets to how one’s time is used throughout the day.

He distinguishes between managers who move from one activity to another from creators/makers who need to have large amounts of time to innovate.   Managers think in terms of hours, while creators think in terms of half days.

It’s an interesting concept, but I don’t believe it’s as cut and dry as he suggests.  Instead, I’d say that ineffective managers don’t create anything, and run around from one fire to another.  Those who are effective set time aside to creatively make things better, and they do it routinely.  They prevent problems from happening by virtue of the advanced problem-solving that they do, and are known for doing the kind of long-range planning that’s the cornerstone of good management.

Nevertheless, the way in which managers and makers think is different (even if it shouldn’t be) and he does a good job of separating the two.

Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule – click here to read the article.

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A Fascinating Account of Improvement

I read an interesting post written by Cal Newport over at the 99% blog entitled “A Day Without Distraction: Lessons Learned from 12 Hours of Forced Focus.”

The author makes a significant change in his time management system, by adopting the practice of working only in 30 minute increments.

While the 30 minute block is an arbitrary one there are some powerful lessons that he shares from scheduling a day in advance, and then executing it accordingly.  He calls the process he used “batching.”

At the end of the day, he finds himself in the flow state for extended periods of time, which is a must for professionals who do knowledge work.  On the other hand, he has a hard time implementing the practice, as it flies in the face of many of his established and unconscious habits.

This echoes what I have found in my research, and say in my classes.  The skill of Scheduling is critical to entering into the flow state in today’s working world.  There are simply too many distractions to contend with, and it takes time and advanced planning to have all the items necessary in order to start.

Here’s the link once again:  A Day Without Distraction: Lessons Learned from 12 Hours of Forced Focus.

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More Than a New Tag-Line

I have a new tag-line at my site:  “The World’s Best Resource for Time Management 2.0”

It struck me a few days ago as I was looking around for resources to recommend for a class I’m teaching, that I had nowhere on the Internet to point them to better than my own site.  I don’t mean to brag, but the fact is I seem to be aggressively hunting down, processing and writing about the topic of time management at a pretty hot pace, perhaps as fast as any PhD student might do in the early phases of their research.

It’s not that I have all the ideas, even though I do have a long list of items that I want to address in new posts.  Instead, in the past few months I have found myself delving into the academic research and finding some good/bad news.  There’s some good thinking, but the bad news is that there has been little or no momentum or continuity of thought in the field.  It’s as if one or two papers are written by an author in a 3 year period, only to have them go off to do something completely different and unrelated immediately after publication.

It’s too bad, but I am determined to have this site become the single best source of time management research, wherever and whenever it’s been done in the world.

But I just don’t want a lot of depth for it’s own sake.  My eye is actually on the conversion of good ideas into upgraded habits that better the lives of working professionals around the world.  My mission is to solve the problem of unnecessary time-stress once and for all, and to bring the kind of peace of mind that we all want, in spite of having full lives, busy jobs and active families.  Fully committed, but balanced.

One thing you won’t find here… tired ideas that are repeated on hundreds of sites, buttressed by worn out cliches and superficial thinking.  There are lots of “top 10 tips for time management” floating around that say nothing new, leading many to think that they have already heard every useful message on the topic, and that there’s no need to continue listening.

All I can say is “stay tuned,” as there’s a great deal of work for us all to do to stay ahead of the increasing demands on our time, new technology and inevitable life changes.  It’s a time to pay more attention, not less, to this important aspect of our lives.

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Turning Off Email Downloads

This is an article written three whole years ago (such a LONG time) that advocates turning off email downloads to your smartphone:  Ten reasons to turn off email notifications to your phone.

It makes a great case for processing email in batches, rather than continuously, which is a better way to achieve the Zero Inbox.

I’m a lucky one, I think, in this respect. By writing about the process I was following to select a smartphone, I became determined to follow the habits he describes before I got my Blackberry.  I have been able to maintain a certain discipline about checking email, and rarely find myself doing so when I don’t have time to process all my messages.

My plan is simple:  if I find myself checking email at inappropriate times, I plan to do exactly what the author of the article auggest in order to prevent a bad habit from ever taking root.

One thing I have noticed is how many messages I delete right off the bat, which makes me realize that I need to unsubscribe from a bunch of newsletters and notifications that I don’t really read.

It’s a useful article — hard to believe it’s three years old given it’s relevance today.

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Escalating, Fool-Proof Habits

I have been tricked.  And I may need your help.

Perhaps the word “trick” is a bit too strong, but I’d love to hear what you think.

An unknown (but noticeable) number of people who take my courses appear to be following the statistic I recently read about trainees reverting to their old behaviors.  Apparently, the average is 87%.

I have been thinking about an experience shared by a friend of mine who used to be a personal trainer – not in time management, but in physical fitness.  She said that she eventually got bored with the profession because she felt that most of her job after the first two coaching sessions consisted of waking people and getting them to the gym.  In a way, she was forced to become a glorified nag.

Nothing wrong with that, and I can see that it could actually be effective in helping people lose weight.  At the same time, I can see my friend’s point.  A Masters degree  is generally not required in order to find a way to motivate a slow-moving client to get to the gym.

From the angle of changing habits, this kind of support is exactly what’s required.  In fact, I imagine that those trainers that are effective are able to craft a chain of “escalating interventions.”

Wat exactly do I mean by that term?

Many years ago I had a coach who agreed to work with me.  Due to an error, I missed the first appointment and when her contract came to me for signature, it had a proviso.  If I missed another session, her rate would go up by US$50 an hour.  If I were late once again, it would increase by another US$50 an hour.  (I’m not sure about the exact dollar amounts, but they were dramatic.)

In more than ten years of coaching sessions with her, I was never late.

Her “escalating interventions” set a very high bar for me, and it only worked because I was deadly serious about the game I was playing.  In my training programs, I want to do something similar, and use whatever means I cam to make a difference.

After a one day program, for example, I might offer 3 kinds of interventions, to help people in their habit changing.

Let’s imagine that the activities involve the following actions to be taken over a ten week period.
a) writing a weekly report and sharing it with the instructor, and someone else from the program
b) updating an on-line  daily checklist that involves mastering some new habits, while getting rid of some old ones
c) consuming a single piece of content from my blog 3 times per week and writing a summary of no less than 3 lines

I could imagine offering participants 3 mutually exclusive games to play with respect to this assignment:
——————
No-Game: I don’t want to play a game and want to be left to myself. (I imagine that most participants will choose this option.)

Bronze Game: If I miss a weekly report, or 2 consecutive weekday checklists, or a single summary I pay US$50 to a company or organization that I despise

If I miss 2 weekly reports, or 4 weekday checklists or 3 summaries, I pay US$100 to the instructor’s favorite charity

Gold Game: If I miss a weekly report, or 2 consecutive weekday checklists or a single summary, I pay US$500 to a company or organization that I despise

If I miss 2 weekly reports, or 4 weekday checklists or 3 summaries, I pay US$1,000 to the instructor’s favorite charity
—————–

(The latter two games use principles built into the site Stickkit.com, which uses a service to  encourage people to change their habit.   I would also borrow the principle of using an impartial referee.)

At the end of the program, I could offer these games to participants, and give them the opportunity to take advantage of the feelings of high motivation that felt at the end.  I could also offer them a way to cancel the agreement within 3 days with no penalty, just to make sure they are serious.

What do you think?  I am really curious to see what effect this might have, and until I have some experience, I’d love to hear what you think!

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Should We All Use Lists?

I read a recent article in the GTD News in which David Allen noted that he often gets told by others that he has too many lists.  Click here to read “Why Lists are a Dirty Word.”

The critics go a step further and imply that there’s no way that many lists could work for them.  He notes that “my educated guess is that 99 percent of people’s responses (to lists) are some version of “Yuck! Back Away!”

His hypothesis is that people have this reaction because 1) Lists are hard work, 2) Lists are scary and 3) Lists are disappointing.  The article goes on to show that these reactions are ill-informed, and with more understanding these feelings would be alleviated.

I think there’s more to this than meets the eye.

My observation of users at very different levels of skill is that multiple or long Lists are useful for some people, but not everyone. Allen doesn’t address this fact in his article, and might be attempting to prove that taking this approach should fit everyone.

In one instance, a person might be unwilling to use multiple lists because this technique doesn’t work once the number of time demands becomes too large.  I have shown in prior posts that different techniques must be used due to the lengthy reviews that are required by lots of items in lists.

In the 2Time system, Yellow Belts use lots of lists.  Both White Belts and Orange Belts (who are lower and higher in skill) might respond with a “Yuck!”, but for very different reasons.   White Belts would be unhappy about the use of a brand new tool, while Oranges would be unwilling to downgrade their current system, simply to use more Lists.  (Quite a few years ago, I unwittingly made this change myself, and saw my capacity to manage time-demands plummet before hastily switching back.)

With a more complete picture, both sets of users can make better decisions, and get past the “Yuck!” in order to make informed changes to their time management systems.  This is the kind of choice that all professionals must make when they discover a tip from a guru, read a book, find a new gadget or discover a new piece of productivity software.

It’s a delicate dance, and users must be ready to switch back to what they were doing if they discover that the changes they are attempting to make have an adverse impact.  This reality is one that’s not acknowledged in the article, but it would help users to see that Lists aren’t meant to be either accepting or rejected in total, but used an an upgrade when they produce individual results.

 

Mission Control Productivity, FranklinCovey, GTD and Getting Things Done are registered trademarks of the David Allen Company (davidco.com.)  2Time is not affiliated with or endorsed by the David Allen Company, Mission Control Productivity or FranklinCovey.