Tag: habit formation

Some Do Math, Some Plan To Write

Keith McNulty starts his day, every day, by solving a math problem:

Every morning before I start work I tackle a math problem. I schedule 30 minutes to solve this problem, and if I don’t succeed I stick with it the next morning and subsequent mornings until I have solved it and I am ready to move on to the next.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/start-your-day-math-keith-mcnulty-eqsye/

He does it for a variety of reasons, all of which he mentions in the rest of his blog post, but in the main, he does it to exercise his brain, and to give him the confidence to start the rest of his day.

I’m totally on board with the idea, except my plan is to write a blogpost here on EFE to start my day. And the reasons are the same – it is to exercise my brain, and to draw interesting connections across different things I’ve been reading or thinking about, and to give me the confidence to start my day.

And when things go well, I wake up knowing what I am going to write about, and how I am going to go about it. Those are the good days.

But there are other days, such as this one, when I wake up without knowing what I am going to write about. And then it is a case of reading blogs and articles, bookmarked tweets and conversations on WhatsApp and Signal, and multiple cups of chai or coffee, and the hope that inspiration strikes.

Sometimes it does, and we’re off to the races.

But on other days, I might read about something that depresses me.

Maybe I will read about the inevitability of World War III. Or I’ll read about the many mistakes that all of us did during the pandemic. Or I’ll read about a war taking place in some part of the world, or about the hubris of some politician somewhere… as you can imagine, there is a long list of topics to choose from if I want to read about something that depresses me. The trick then is to quickly read something that cheers me up, but this is, alas, a trick I cannot always perform.

But worst of all are the days when I just don’t feel like writing. Not because I’ve read something depressing, and not because I don’t know what I am going to write. I just don’t feel like writing.

It happens to the best of us!

And so what should one do on days such as these, when inspiration just won’t strike?

Well, one could choose to give up and not write for today. Or one could keep going through unread blogs, until one comes a blogpost written by one of the best of us. Who just so happens to have written a post about, well, not being able to write:

I remember getting stuck on a plot problem while writing my second novel. I just couldn’t sort it out. I tried everything. Walks. Swims. Crosswords. Even rounds of golf. Seriously. Nothing. This was a devastating block. Finally, in despair, I started a diary, a journal, into which I poured all my frustration. It went something like this.

“Dear Diary, I am mad. Hopping mad. I just can’t solve this problem. I have to get x to do y without z knowing. I have tried making sure that z is out of the way, but that doesn’t work because …”

On and on like that, typing furiously at this diary, until …

“Of course I could always do something mad like have x go out of the house late one night and … oh my god, yes that would work. And then a could tell b that y was not there and z would be none the wiser. Actually that would make complete sense and I could…”

The details are irrelevant, but the point is I solved a writing problem by writing. If you see what I mean. I couldn’t solve the problem by talking to myself, by muttering curses, by walking or approaching the 5th green with a nine iron. But I could solve it by writing about it. Priming the pump if you like.

So maybe writing only happens when you are physically producing the words, whether by pencil, biro, pen or keyboard.

Maybe.

https://stephenfry.substack.com/p/words-words-words

Far be it from me to correct Stephen Fry (the horror of the idea, even, let alone actually doing it), of course. But based on my experience of having written this post, and the enjoyment I derived from having read his, I would recommend removing the final word from the excerpt above. For that is how writing happens!

Maybe.

Lenny’s Newsletter on Reigniting Duolingo’s User Growth

I’ve written about Duolingo before, and I have no doubt that I will write about it again.

Why? Because I am a very lazy person, and I appreciate all the help I can get when it comes to building good habits. Writing daily on this blog is a good habit – it is, alas, not one that I have perfected yet. Taking my dog out for a walk everyday is a good habit – a necessary one for the dog, and so also for me now. Practicing a language (currently Italian) daily on Duolingo is a good habit, and while I’m not at 1435 days yet, I’m a little more than halfway there, and hey, that’s progress!

Exercising daily is a habit I’ve tried to build and failed at (one day, one day). Eating healthy on a daily basis is a habit I don’t want to build, but eating mostly healthy on a weekly basis is something I’ve more or less succeeded at – and that’s good enough for me. The point is that given that I’m so lazy, building up a habit is the only way to stick at doing something. And anything that helps me enjoy getting into a habit is, to me, a fascinating thing to study.

Which is why I have no doubt I will write about Duolingo again.

Lenny’s newsletter is worth reading in any case, but his latest post is really very, very good. It’s not written by him – this one is a guest post by Jorge Mazal – but that’s all the more reason to read it. If you’re interested in learning about metrics, user retention, driving growth, this article is self-recommending – and that would be a good reason to read it carefully.

But even if you are not interested in any of those things, it still makes sense to read it. My framing of my own incentive while reading it was “Can this article teach me how to gamify my life?”, and from this perspective, it is an eminently readable article.

I had a very interesting conversation with a friend this past Sunday, and his take on habit formation and productivity techniques was that this has perhaps been taken a little bit too far in today’s day and age. I actually agree with him on that point – we try to wring every little bit out of every little hack, to our overall detriment. But that being said, I think it makes sense to take a look at our own lives and ask to what extent we could make our lives a little bit better along dimensions of our choosing. To each one of us goes the right to choose which dimensions, and to each one of us goes the right to choose how to improve our life along those dimensions, and finally, to each one of us goes the right to choose the magnitude of improvements.

But once you’ve answered those questions – which dimensions, how to improve, and to what extent – you could do with help regarding tips and tricks re: Making It Happen. And that’s where this article is worth reading.

My key takeaways:

  1. Gamification matters, and it helps. Try gamifying those aspects of your life that you want to get better at.
  2. A blind CTRL-C CTRL-V of gamification done well elsewhere is a pretty poor way to go about it. Think carefully about which incentives matter to you, and design your gamification strategy accordingly.
  3. These three questions are a good way to frame this:
    Why is this feature working in this product? | Why might this feature succeed or fail in my context? | What changes do I need to make to make this feature succeed for me?
  4. Compounding the benefits of a habit is an excellent, always underrated idea.
  5. We like to win. Set up a competition for yourself, and make sure there are tangible rewards (and punishments!)
  6. Reminders help, but don’t end up irritating yourself out of a habit.
  7. Streaks are a great way to compete with yourself (related to pt. 5), and preserving that which you have is a great motivator (the endowment effect matters)
  8. The social aspect matters – get other people to join you on your journey (hello to all of my friends on Duolingo, and thank you!)

Duolingo, Gamification and Habit Formation

I got “promoted” on Duolingo recently, and today’s blogpost is about how weirdly happy I feel about it.

I am an incredibly lazy person. We all are to varying degrees, I suppose, but I’m convinced that I do putting off and procrastrination better than most. There are a few things that I do with enthusiasm and something approaching regularity (writing here being one of them) but with most things in life, tomorrow is a better day for me than today.

There is a very short list of things I am compulsively addicted to doing on a daily basis, There’s Wordle, for example. Reading blogs, for another. The NYT mini crossword, and some other stuff. But there is a clear winner on this list: Duolingo.

On Duolingo I have a 753 day streak, and counting. That is, I have practised on the Duolingo app for 753 days and counting. And it’s not because I am awesome at showing up regularly – it is because Duolingo has incentivized me to show up regularly, and here’s how they do it.

First, peer pressure. Duolingo allows you to follow people in your contact list who are also on Duolingo, and it’s a two way street. That is, they can follow you too:

AshishKulk is my user ID on Duolingo, and please feel free to “add” me to your network if you are so inclined. I can always do with more peer pressure! Knowing that my friends are practising more than I am is a great incentive to try and keep up – which, of course, is what peer pressure is all about.

The score-keeping mechanism in Duolingo is XP. The app tells you how much XP you “acquired” on a daily, weekly, monthly and all-time basis.

Each of these frequencies is gamed differently. For the all time streak, you can check where you rank among your friends (I’m third, if you’re wondering). For the monthly score, Duolingo hands out “badges” if you earn a certain number of XP in a month:

For weekly streaks, you get promoted to different “leagues” based on how many points you score on a weekly basis. It is a double edged sword: you also get “demoted” if you don’t practise enough in a week. The leagues start and finish every Sunday afternoon India time, and I’m typing this out on a Sunday morning – wish me luck!

And the daily basis is perhaps the best gamification of them all, because you end up in a contest with yourself. How long can you keep your daily streak going? Like I said, mine is at 750 odd days, and I got “promoted” for it:

There are also daily quests, friend quests, stories involving characters that build a more personalized, relatable learning experience, and recently, learning paths that use spaced repetition to make sure that weaker concepts are revised and firmed up over time. You can “buy” streak freezes to “protect” your streak in the Duolingo store. These artefacts can be “purchased” using “gems”, and that’s yet another gamificaiton story.

Long story short, the Duolingo team goes out of its way to try and keep you hooked on to learning, and I’m here to tell you that it has definitely worked in my case.

And that’s the point of this post, really. I think Duolingo to be an exemplar when it comes to gamification, but the meta-point here is an obvious one: how do we all go about gamifying activities in our life that we wish would turn into habits? How about a Duolingo experience for exercise? Meditation? Learning cooking? Financial habits?

There are those among us who can build out habits in their lives without gamification, of course, and I envy them for it. But for those of us who are paashas of procrastination, such a tool can help us get better at showing up more regularly.

I speak from personal experience when I say this, though: Duolingo has done it better, and been more effective, than any other habit forming app that I have tried.

Now, excuse me while I go and try to stay in the Diamond League!

Hajjar Awesome!

The phrasing of the title is because of English August, a book I read long ago, and still remember very fondly. And it’s sort of a pat on the back for myself because I completed a thousand posts on EFE. Well, strictly speaking this is post number 1003, but let’s round it off to an even thousand today.

My friends and colleagues, past and present, will be happy to confirm that there are few folks lazier than me, and I’ll happily admit to it myself. Which is all the more reason to celebrate this, because to keep this going for a thousand posts over five years is an achievement of sorts for me.

We started this blog on a whim sometime in June 2016, my wife and I, without having a very clear idea about what was to come of it. I started off, as I almost always do, with a large amount of enthusiasm, and as with everything else I do, said enthusiasm petered out soon enough. But since June 2018, I’ve been fairly regular, averaging about a post a day.

There have been periods of radio silence last year, and the reason is that I went through extended bouts of “but what is the point?”. Not jus the point of writing on the blog, but doing anything at all. It was that kind of a year, and I will not beat myself up over feeling that way, and about breaking my streak. Excreta, as the poet says, happens.

And there have been periods of radio silence this year too, but the second wave was devastating for all of us. We have all suffered losses, immediate family or extended. But for all of our sakes, let’s not dwell on that anymore. We’ve all had enough of it.

What have I learnt from writing these thousand posts?

  1. As David Perell pointed out on Twitter recently (as have others), if you take care of the quantity, the quality will take care of itself. Some of my posts have been atrociously bad, some have been about me trying to find my voice, and a lot have been of fairly middling quality, at best. But there are some that I am genuinely proud of, and remember very fondly indeed.
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    My learning has been to show up (almost) everyday, without fail. It doesn’t matter if people read what I have written or not, comment or not, share or not. The writing is its own reward. I may have said this before on these pages, but if you’re a student reading this, please: write. Or make videos, or Instagram posts (or stories, or whatever one calls it), or tweet, or make a podcast. But put your work out there, and that regularly. Trust me, it does wonders for you.
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  2. I haven’t bothered with measuring anything. I don’t add identifiers to outbound links, I haven’t installed Google Analytics, I don’t do affiliate links, and I don’t advertise anywhere. I try to respond to whatever comments folks put up, whether here on the blog, or on LinkedIn and Twitter. If you have written a comment and I have not responded, my apologies! I have also automated the sharing of these posts on Facebook, but I (quite literally) haven’t logged in to Facebook in years.
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    My learning has been that quantifying stuff is strictly optional. I write everyday (well, almost), and even that is not a measure or a requirement. It’s a choice. Who is reading this, is the readership going up over time, which social media site drives the most traffic to my website – I don’t know any of this. And it doesn’t really matter. I just write.
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  3. Writing these thousand posts has made me painfully aware of how little I know. Nassim Taleb has made famous the concept of the anti-library, and in that sense, writing on this blog is a daily reminder of how much remains to be read, learnt and written about.
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    My learning is that writing is a humbling experience, and that becomes truer the more you do it. And that’s a good thing! Think of it this way, you don’t write to show how much you know. You write to understand how much there remains to be learnt.
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  4. I don’t schedule my posts too much in advance. The most I’ve ever managed is a couple of weeks or so, and that because I was due to go on vacation. Otherwise (and this includes today) it is a case of get up, arm yourself with coffee, and think about what to write. That has its disadvantages, because an unmarinated blogpost doesn’t acquire the depth of flavour it could have otherwise. But it also has its advantages, because I am the kind of person who works best when panicking a little bit about upcoming deadlines.
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    My learning is that habit formation is a real thing, not just management speak. If you do something for long enough, it becomes a habit, but better – it becomes a habit you’re unwilling to break. And you end up finding the time one way or the other to keep at it. And that, in and of itself, is worth it.
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  5. The more I write, the more I remember stuff I’ve written. This is not a statistically valid observation, and I haven’t analyzed it, but I do think that I increasingly link to posts I’ve written earlier. I don’t say this to show how much I’ve written in the past, but to explain that I’m able to “connect the dots” better. I now understand better how what I’m writing about today can be thought of as an aspect of something I’ve written about earlier (or vice versa). My understanding of the world, such as it is, is definitely better than it was earlier. That’s a healthy profit right there!
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    My learning has been that writing is a way of teaching myself to think, to see the larger picture, and to make connections between topics that I would not have otherwise. And for that reason, I highly recommend it. It is not for me to say if I have become a better writer. That is for others to judge. But I can think better for having written these posts, that I feel (mostly) certain about.
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  6. I wanted to celebrate the thousand posts by coming up with a book based on on what I would have called some of my best work here. I even spoke about this with some of my friends and students, all of whom were very kind with their encouragement. But on reflection, the “could’ve been a blogpost instead” argument was much too strong to go up against. A book ought to be a book, not a vanity project.
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    But spinoffs is a good idea, I think. And for that I would like your help. What can I do more of? Less of? Add a weekly podcast that reflects in greater detail on what I’ve written that week? I’ll happily admit to not having the faintest idea about where I’ll find the time, but that’s one possibility. A day of the week dedicated to book reviews? God knows it’ll force me to read more books, and get better at writing about them. What else? Please send in your suggestions, and I really do mean that.
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  7. I don’t have any desire to turn this into a newsletter (Substack, or Revue, or anything else). One, because I’m lazy. I can’t bear to think about the nightmare of moving over into another system and all of what that entails. Plus, WordPress, which is where this is hosted, is just fine by me. Except for the new block editor style they have. I loathe it, and it is far too buggy for my liking. But I’ve gotten used to it now, and I’ve quite literally adopted the way I write to its idiosyncrasies, so why invest in changing now? (You want examples? Those little “..” signs that you see throughout this post are there because I don’t know how to introduce spacing between points otherwise. Pah.)
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  8. I cannot tell you about the number of people I have gotten a chance to meet and work with as a direct consequence of this blog. Students, professors, folks from the corporate world, people who work in think tanks, research organizations, and more besides. I often tell students that putting your work out there is a great way to build out your network, and I don’t say that without basis. It quite really is true. That ought not to be the reason to write, but it is a positive externality spillover, and a very welcome one. I’ve built my community as a consequence of writing this blog, and I am very thankful for it.
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  9. There are opportunity costs, of course. Those never go away.
    1. Maybe I could have written more academic papers? I don’t necessarily want to, and I’ll explain why in a blogpost one day, but I certainly could have.
    2. Maybe I could have read more books? This one hurts, because I really could have, and I really would have wanted to. But I think the takeaway is becoming better at time management. In other words, do both, but sacrifice something else in my day. Meetings. I would love to “sacrifice” meetings.
    3. Made more podcasts? Learnt a new skill? Made more videos? Traveled more? Again, I think the answer lies in learning how to get better at becoming more productive.
    4. So a promise to myself (and I’m old enough, and perhaps cynical enough, to already come to terms with the fact that I’ll probably end up breaking it): read more books, create more podcasts, make more videos, and attend less meetings.
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  10. Thank you for reading! I hope to do this for years to come, and I’m grateful that you have chosen to read whatever it is that I put out on these pages. If you have any feedback or suggestions for me, I would love to hear it. Again, thank you very, very, much 🙂