Earlier this month, Merlin Mann wrote about one principle that is more important than we typically acknowledge: First, care. He begins by discussing the common challenge of staying focused on the important stuff. Staying focused is the easy thing, he reminds us: just do one thing at a time. Of course, he knows that an obviously tautological statement like that is not the solution, so he tells us what is: we must care more about the one thing we’re doing than anything else. If we don’t, then we’ll naturally flit from task to task without the sense of focus we desire. Eventually our lack of focus becomes the most important thing we focus on, but that just makes the problem worse. The only real solution is to care so much about something that the question changes from “How do I maintain focus?” to “How do I get rid of everything unrelated to the one important thing I’m working on?”
A False Start …
Fortunately, I read this article at just the right time – one month into developing my nightly post-mortem and planning habit. Because I actually did care about that habit, I recognized the truth in Merlin’s post. But I also recognized that the rest of my activities perfectly exemplify people focused on their lack of focus. And because I was less than a month away from starting a new habit, I knew what it should be: It was time to eliminate my focus issues.
Of course, I was thinking about it all wrong. And if you had actually read Merlin’s post, you’d know that. Go back, try again. The whole point of his post is that you cannot make eliminating distraction your focus. In reality, I needed to replace my bad habits with good ones. My bad habits consist of mindless internet surfing to a variety of sites. When I’m stuck on a problem at home or at work, I gravitate to a web browser and drown out my “stuckness” by reading all about politics, or watching movie trailers, or learning about some cool new technology, or following random news that isn’t really all that important. Oh, I usually get back to the problem eventually, and usually solve it … eventually. And then I go back to the mindless surfing.
Another False Start …
So I listed the triggers for mindless surfing, as well as the sites I would regularly visit. Once that list was in place I started thinking about what to replace it with. I came up with all kinds of ideas, ranging from practicing code katas, to working through my book reading list, to exercise, to doing a better job of reviewing and acting on my next actions lists, to cultivating my blog.
Over the last few weeks I tried to narrow this down. Okay … not really. What I really tried to do was come up with 8-9 small steps that replaced my lack of focus with 8-9 new habits. Focus Fail! Well, it wasn’t quite that bad, but I was trying to replace my lack of focus with a few different things, which would mean that I would still have a lack of focus. And of course, that made it hard to actually come up with the steps to take, and what I did come up with was unorganized and lacked, well, focus. And besides, it seemed about 10 times harder than my nightly post-mortem habit.
Lessons from False Starts …
However, in the process, I discovered some important benefits to Leo’s idea of anticipating the start of a new habit without actually starting it. First, you don’t jump into something prematurely. If I had tried to start with the ideas I had a week ago, or two weeks ago, I’m pretty sure I would have failed to keep up the changes. Oh I may have stuck with them for a few weeks, or even the whole two months, but the lack of natural cohesion would have eventually broken up the habit.
Second, it’s pretty easy to try out some of the ideas you have by doing “test runs”. Basically, I tried one of the small steps I would take for a day or two, just to see what it was like. Writing last week’s post on the habit creation process was one of these experiments. The key to this is to make sure your “test runs” are not a priority. My priority throughout was still the nightly post-mortem, but with my spare mental energy I also tried out some of the ideas I had, and some of them are even sticking. However, they are not my current focus, and if they fall by the wayside that’s ok. Other activities haven’t stuck at all, or were obviously not useful, so they won’t be part of my next habit.
What I re-realized just a few days ago is that I need one thing to focus on. I knew when I began this process what it would probably be: developing my blogging into a regular habit, rather than something I do once every few months. But at the time, I just didn’t care enough. I didn’t care enough to overcome my fear of failure. I didn’t care enough to push off the other interesting things I could be doing with this magical free time I’ll be creating for myself. Which wouldn’t be created, of course, if I maintained my current lack of focus. I didn’t care enough to commit myself and really do the hard work it will take to develop a blogging habit.
How to Care …
When I realized that, I discovered another important truth: Merlin’s instruction to “First, care”, can be spurred on by “Commit to something”. Caring is important. Caring about lots of different things isn’t going to solve your focus issues, however. But sometimes committing yourself wholeheartedly to something can increase how much you care. With the assumption that I’ll focus on this until I it’s a lifelong habit, and then go to work on the many other failings and weaknesses in my life, I can truly focus on it and nothing else. I can care about it more than anything else. I know I’ll get to the other stuff, eventually, which is no worse than before I made the commitment. And I’ll only get better at committing and following through with practice, thus increasing my chances of actually succeeding at all the other stuff.
So that’s my commitment – make blogging a regular habit. But what to blog about? I don’t know exactly. I’ve enjoyed writing this post and the last about habit development. I’m a developer at Fog Creek, and that means there are a bunch of technical topics that interest me also, and maybe Fog Creek needs another blogger. I could just as easily blog about religion or politics, both important subjects to me. I don’t have any active hobbies to write about as I’m not currently running, and don’t have the money yet for flight lessons. Writing about one of those hobbies, or another one, could help me get motivated to do more related to that. Or I could blog about blogging (like I am right now!) and the things I’m doing to get better at it. Or not.
I guess it comes back to the motivations I have for blogging, beyond the fact that I just committed to doing it. I want to blog to become a better writer, but I can do that with any topic. I want to blog to create a public reputation within the software and business communities I’m a part of. I want to blog to explore topics that are interesting to me, because forcing myself to express and understand those ideas is an important way that I learn. I spent a year and a half teaching a Sunday School class and learned more about the scriptures because I had to express myself well in order to teach. I’d like to have a similar experience with other areas of knowledge. I want to become an active part of at least one online community.
It’s that last point that will probably make this habit a little bigger than just blogging. I don’t want to just talk into my blog, disconnected from the rest of the humanity – I want to be involved in conversations. And that’s what I’m committing to. I’m still working out the individual steps, and over the next couple months I’ll be committing to those steps each week here on my blog.