Common failure modes in habit formation

WRT S.M.A.R.T. goals, Nick Winter says in the motivation hacker:

When you do pick your goals, forget the advice about SMART goals. Use Piers Steel’s slightly improved CSI Approach. Your goals should be Challenging (if they’re not exciting, they won’t provide Value); Specific (abstract goals can leave you vulnerable to Impulsiveness, since it’s not clear what you need to do); Immediate (avoid long-Delayed goals in favor of ones you can start now and finish soon), and Approach-oriented. (As opposed to avoidance goals, where you try not to do something, you should instead reframe it positively as an attempt to do something—it just feels better.)

Nick Winter knows about habit formation

If you have bad feelings every time you think about habit X due to past failures you are only reinforcing the act of not thinking about habit X.

Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner!

It took me a long time to figure that out. If you feel bad when you're trying to solve your problems, you are going to avoid solving them.

And thank you, I was just thinking about habit formation with respect to personal character development as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would have it. Why don't I do useful things as much as I could? Why are there so few people who do? Some of it is bad attitude, but much of it is just bad habits, or other habits.

Regarding "Going too Big too Fast", I always feel the need to constantly remind myself that for any given skill I need to go from "bad" to "average" to "good" rather than just from "bad" to "good". This seems to be related to certain psychological theories regarding the ego. For whatever reason, my mind is okay with "I am physically weak, but I will eventually put in effort to remedy this condition", and "I have worked incredibly hard and it has paid off and now I am super-strong", but "I have put in a significant amount of time and effort and now I am about as strong as the average person" seems kind of pathetic.

In writing this I'm noticing similarity to SMART goals. Perhaps adapting that would be better since it's already nice and memorable.

SMART goals are kind of dumb. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-constrained. The problem is that specific, measurable, and time-constrained basically just mean "specific", and attainable and relevant basically just mean "realistic". So it's redundant, but it's also missing two other key characteristics. A better four-point criteria for goals is:

• Specific - clear success/failure condition
• Realistic - "write a book", not "write a New York Times bestseller"
• Challenging - the goal should reflect the upper bound of your capabilities, this is because people rise to meet whatever expectations they give themselves
• Motivating - you should feel emotions when you think of your goal, and it should be tied to your long-term goals and abstract values

This is all directly out of some book I read, by the way, but I can't remember which one.

Since people are listing criteria for goals, I'd like to put forth the "steps" that motivational speaker Zig Ziglar describes (which I believe to be related to, although not necessarily based on, the research summarized in the paper Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation—A 35-Year Odyssey published in 2002).

Ziglar describes a study (on Harvard grads, I believe) where they asked them about their career goals and then found out how many had done most or all of the following steps (answer: ~20% and ~2% respectively).

1. State what the goal is.
2. Write it down.
3. Write down why you want to achieve it. (I do a brief goal-factoring tree for this)
4. Write down what potential obstacles are in your way ("if you don't have obstacles, you'd already be there")
5. Write down who can help you reach the goal. (people, groups, organizations)
6. Make a list of what you need to know to reach the goal.
7. Develop a plan of action to reach the goal.
8. Set a date at which you plan to have met your goal (or, I suppose, to reevaluate).

In the study, which was longitudinal, they determined that the people who had done all of these steps were way more likely to have succeeded. Personally, I've done this several times and found it very helpful. More on that below.

Random thoughts:

• My apologies for not citing the actual study, but my exposure to it is only through Zig, who refers to it in a recording (I had to transcribe the steps as typed here).
• Obviously in the aforementioned study there could be selection bias for "who cared enough to do these steps" but I'm pretty sure someone has tested it as an intervention as well.
• Any goal for which you can do this is probably also SMART, but the reverse isn't remotely true.
• One of the best parts of these steps is they don't actually require a lot of work. Now, learning what you need to know to reach the goal may require work, but it's work that was on your path anyway. Someone complaining about this might do well to revisit the Litany of Gendlin.

Upon consideration, Step 7 looks like it could be a fair bit of work, but I think even having a basic outline/story there totally counts. At any rate, I used the related Pick Four system for my album-recording project last year, and my album plan was about 120 words long and written without pre-planning, yet it revealed several steps that I had left implicit, which if I hadn't thought about them at the start would have been left too late. One of them was figuring out exactly where I'd be recording. It would have been easy to think I could do that after practising & choosing which songs to record, but it ended up being completely critical to do them in parallel.

I found Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit a useful and enjoyable read on habit building, although it is a little Malcolm Gladwell-esque. Anyone here read it, and if so, what did you think of it?

Becoming too task oriented as well is a bit of trap. As you tick off lots of unimportant tasks, you pat yourself on the back on how effective you are. You risk adding more and more tasks without considering how they fit in with your goals. (This might be what unconsciously goes in the mind of students and writers when they spring clean their houses instead of writing or studying.) Having said that, having a plan that you then act on (and not ignore) is better than not accomplishing anything at all.

I'm not sure how easy a "Plan B" is. If you can anticipate the ways in which your plan fails, why not just incorporate them into "Plan A"? Alternatively I would suggest adding a little flexibility. Evaluating the outcome of your plans should help also. But I really like the "Granularize" and "Quantifying Results". I wish you had written this three months ago. It explains why I'm having so much trouble accomplishing a task. (Develop a marketing plan for an app to be specific.)

Additionally, I especially suffered analysis paralysis by chasing perfection. I'd spend hours shifting tasks around and feel guilty that I spent so much time not getting stuff done. It was for this reason that I built an app to automate my planning process. (Shamful Plug . Currently free for all LessWrong readers.) As a time saving device it's been ok, but it's real benefit is in knowing that I've committed to accomplishing certain tasks and being able to refer to the plan when I get behind or ahead. There's also nothing better than being able to add tasks at odd moments when they pop into your head, instead of sitting down later and thinking "what did I have to do again?".

So I'll finished then on an obvious note: Whatever process or tool you use, you need to record it and not rely on your memory. Because you're more likely to only remember the urgent tasks and delay the important ones.