I was the most interested in chapter 16 (“How to Stick With Good Habits Everyday”) this week. This was well said on page 201:
Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit.
In the past, I’ve used the fine print for my Beeminder goals to specify a “minimum allowable data point”. For example, I only log cardio time for workouts longer than 10 minutes. My instinct is to set my minimum allow progress to the smallest increment I’d feel good about. I wonder if that’s a mistake.
James Clear talks about the days where he can only do one push-up in terms of maintaining both identity and progress. He makes the argument for maintaining progress in terms of physical fitness on page 201:
Sluggish days and bad workouts maintain the compound gains you accrued from previous good days.
I can see how maintaining identity (I’m an exerciser! I exercise every day!) is boolean. Just doing one push-up is at least some proof of personal commitment. In most domains, though, you probably won’t really maintain your progress unless you cross some threshold of effort. To the extent that goals should serve both purposes, I think I’ve convinced myself that I shouldn’t have a minimum data point size, but instead bake the minimum effective dose into the slope of the yellow brick road.
The discussion of Goodhart’s Law (people tend to optimize toward whatever they are being measured on, to the exclusion of the original goal) got me thinking about my Complice weekly review and why it’s been so useful.
If you aren’t a Complice user, the weekly review interface presents a text field for each of your goals. The field is prepopulated with a set of standard questions to answer during the review. @malcolm provides standard retrospective fare as a reasonable default (what’s going well, what isn’t, what are you going to change), but you can also customize the review questions goal-by-goal. For my area-of-life goals, I tend to use custom questions as a qualitative check on the outcomes I want.
For example, I have a Complice “Health & Wellness” goal, whose first three review questions are:
- How did you feel physically this week?
- How was the quality of your attention?
- How did you feel emotionally this week?
I use Beeminder to track the set of activities that I believe are causally related to how I answer these questions: time meditating, minutes of cardio, strength workouts, hours of sleep, servings of fruit & vegetables, grams of sugar, etc.
After answering the first three, I ask “What practices can help?” This prompts me to think about prioritization and optimizations for the week ahead. Because I’m starting from a qualitative appraisal of the prior week, I’m giving myself a chance to think in terms of what James Clear calls “non-scale victories” (i.e. the health benefits you get from from diet and exercise besides weight loss.)
My review process has been working really well to help me avoid Goodhart’s Law traps. I wonder if those who’ve been maintaining Beeminder journals in the forum have found similar effects.