I’ve been using this system for more than a month, and I’m proud of how well it seems to be tracking and incentivizing the behaviours that matter to me, so I thought I’d share it!
I’m a PhD student deeply indebted to Cal Newport for turning my attention to deep work – serious, sustained focus on difficult ideas – as a critical life-activity to optimize for, particularly in academia. But it’s a tough thing to beemind! Especially since I hate manually entering data.
So, this is my current system: when I want to start working, I fill out an initiation sequence google form, which, via Zapier, submits a 1 to my “initiate deep work” goal. When I’m done working, I fill out a post-mortem google form, which, via Zapier, submits the “hours actually worked” number to my “work deeply” goal. (Those forms take you to copies of my forms, not the ones I use, so you won’t affect my goals if you submit data to them.) It’s simple, but powerful!
It doesn’t feel like “manually entering data” because I find the forms valuable tools in and of themselves. It’s easy to start filling out a form, and the questions transition me into a working frame of mind.[1] The recap, too, is a rewarding moment of reflecting on my accomplishment and giving myself permission to stop working.
I’ve already derailed on “work deeply” once, which seemed like proof of the goal’s measurement accuracy: when I saw the derail coming, I had to start rearranging my life to carve out true-work time, and strategizing around my mental focus. When I failed to do the sustained cognitive work I needed to do, I couldn’t fake it with make-work – I derailed.[2]
Even better, gradually dialing up the road on the “work deeply” goal will encourage me to gradually improve my focus and increase the length of my work sessions.[3] It also encourages me to be very intentional about my work: if I happen to get a lot done, it doesn’t ‘count’ unless I’ve set goals in advance.
I was really pleasantly surprised by the granularity of detail possible with the Zapier / Google Sheets / Beeminder integrations, so this general principle is probably adaptable to a very wide range of semi-qualitative goals! I highly recommend it.
[1] I recommend the ‘initiation sequence’ independent of everything else, actually, if it’s at all applicable to the kind of work you do – I could never have predicted the helpfulness of writing out the steps I intended to follow, for example, but it really improves the quality of my work when I’m shifting from routine to complex tasks!
[2] Yes, I could have lied to the form, but as we all know, that would have immediately destroyed its utility, so I refrained.
[3] Or, I suppose, to find a lot of 45-minute focused sessions throughout the week, but that is a fine outcome, too.
