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Thoughts That Come Unbidden Department

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2,520 minutes in 138 days

2 January 2021 | Posted in: Thought That Came Unbidden

I started 2021 with six habit tracker programs installed on my phone. Not from any obsessiveness, because I discovered something interesting about myself last year: I’m one of those people who is motivated by continuity.

Like a stereotypical urbanite creative, I started meditating recently. To my credit, I actually started before “these trying times” way back in August 2019. And while I was inconsistent in my practice, I did it enough to get a taste. What I didn’t realize is that for me, someone prone to anxiety, it actually does what all those patchouli doused hippies claim meditation does.

It calms me down.

On days when I don’t get my morning routine – which consists of morning pages (thank you, Julia Cameron) and 10 minutes of meditation – I’m like an over wound toy. Jangling nerves and snappish replies, followed by the inevitable guilt and shame which just winds me up even more. In a year when nothing worked right, this actually did.

And the app I’m using, the orange dot one, taps brilliantly into two aspects of human psychology: streak theory (or the theory of sunk costs) and nudge theory.

Streak theory powers every frequent buyer reward program in existence. For continued action – such as buying a certain number of sandwiches – someone gets a small reward. In sophisticated programs, or in certain educational settings, longer streaks earn rarer rewards. Keeping a streak going taps into our desire to make our sunk costs, the money or effort we’ve already put into something, be worthwhile.

Nudge theory, for which Richard Thaler won a Nobel prize in economics in 2017, is a concept that says that subtle shifts in policy are more effective at getting people to make decisions that are broadly beneficial for their lives. Digital apps leverage nudge theory by pinging you several times a day with light touch, often humorous reminders to buy that sandwich or do that meditation session.

In the digital realm, apps use these pings, or nudges, to leverage your working memory. Miller’s Law tells us that the human working memory can hold 7 plus or minus 2 things on average, unless something comes along to push it out of your mind, you’re probably going to do that session, or get that sandwich from that place when it comes time for lunch.

Streak theory and using nudge theory in this way both have a dark side, though. Keeping a streak going can be a form of addiction. It can also lead to paying for things you don’t really need.

There is also a school of thought that says streaks alone, which are neutral, aren’t effective at forming habits. To form habits, we need behaviors to become ingrained. They need to be things we do without thinking about them.

This is where the habit trackers come in. It isn’t simply a matter of getting that badge or seeing that graph add one more point for my completed activity. I also need the reminders. I need to use the addictive, distracting nature of cell phones to my advantage.

If I’m going to look at the thing, it needs to serve me in developing better habits.

The other thing I’m doing is off-loading responsibility to the application for making the decision to spend time on something.

If I’ve got the app nudging me to do morning pages, do my meditation, drink enough water, and take my vitamins then hey, I’m just responding to this thing. It’s not really me making the decision to spend the time on those tasks instead of having back-to-back meetings and working an average of 4 extra hours a week.

Happiest Season (2020)

19 December 2020 | Posted in: Movie Review

Remember that time you thought “If Hallmark just made holiday movies that were a little bit less heteronormative, the holiday season would be perfect!” You were wrong. Happiest Season centers on Abby (Kristen Stewart) and Harper (Mackenzie Davis) as a couple who have gotten far enough along in their relationship that they’ve moved in together […]

Digital bankruptcy

5 December 2020 | Posted in: Thought That Came Unbidden

There is too much noise in the world. Too many news stories, sales, random email lists we can’t remember subscribing to, and apps demand our attention constantly. And I’m just talking about grabs that come from engaging with your computer, be it desktop or laptop. As recently as 6 years ago, people were doing research […]

Rules for survival

30 November 2020 | Posted in: Depression, NaBloPoMo 2020

Rules for survival come in all shapes and sizes. Some rules only apply to certain situations. Don’t bring up a problem without having a potential solution and never embarrass your boss in front of people higher up in the structure are two rules that primarily apply in the work place. Some rules for survival are primarily […]

By the numbers

29 November 2020 | Posted in: Depression, NaBloPoMo 2020

Height: 5′ 9″/1.75 meters Weight: 174 lbs/78.9 kilos Trips around the sun: 18,728 days, 6 hours, 33 minutes and 0 seconds Times I’ve been in physical therapy: 2 Degrees: 2 Professional certificates: 1 Full-time jobs held: 12 or 13 depending on how you count Books written: 6 Books read: too many to count Movies seen: […]

You can never go wrong with lights

28 November 2020 | Posted in: NaBloPoMo 2020

There’s something comforting about lights in the dark. It appeals to our most base instincts around self-soothing. Light, we think, gives as more control and more control equals a higher chance of survival. Most winter festivals are about lights. You see it all over Europe where Christmas markets with their colorful lights, food stalls, and […]

Differential consumerism

27 November 2020 | Posted in: NaBloPoMo 2020

Last night I had a dream that I was at dinner with Janet Yellin of today and Michael Madsen circa 1995. My brain can be a real asshole sometimes. The Janet Yellin bit roots squarely in the fact that today is Buy Nothing Day. I’ve written about Buy Nothing Day multiple times in this blog […]

Gratitude matters

26 November 2020 | Posted in: NaBloPoMo 2020

There are at least half a dozen reasons why I tend to focus on the negative aspects of any event. For practical, daily impact, the why of me tending that way isn’t important. What matters for daily life is steering that tendency into something else. I admit I was skeptical. There is so much bullshit […]

Calculated risk

25 November 2020 | Posted in: NaBloPoMo 2020

Medical professionals, amplified by the news media, have been vocal about their opposition to holiday gatherings this year. Who can blame them? The pandemic is out of control. The pandemic is out of control because Americans don’t want to do what is necessary, and they aren’t trained to think about systems and consequences. I know […]

More thoughts…

Calculated risk

Medical professionals, amplified by the news media, have been vocal about their opposition to holiday gatherings this year. Who can blame them? The pandemic is out of control. The pandemic is out of control because Americans don’t want to do what is necessary, and they aren’t trained to think about systems and consequences. I know […]

Venn diagram with three circles overlapping in a small section in the middle. Left circle labeled fast,top circle labeled good, right circle labeled cheap. Additonal information references shading where good and fast overlap to say get your wallet. Where good and cheap overlap to say be patient. Where fast and cheap overlap to say lower the bar. And where all three over lap to say nope.

Good, fast, or cheap shouldn’t be a life or death decision

There is this saying in tech that there are three major factors governing quality, cost, and time. Sometimes you can mitigate a compressed timeline by adding more resources – aka: people – to a project. There is a tipping point in any project, though, where more hands isn’t going to matter if you have an […]

The dream is always the same

One of the great gifts of “these trying times” is the realization that depression isn’t my primary problem. Anxiety is my primary problem. The scientific method tells us that now probably isn’t the best time to consider that a hard conclusion given the amount of generalized anxiety in 2020 what with the pandemic and the […]

Sunday clip show: Beautifully drawn self-care

Yep, it’s another clip show. It feels shitty to do this and I still have to. I’ve been running 45 minutes late all week. And by the end of the day on Wednesday I’d already worked two 10-hour days this week. Did I mention I’m rolling over 20 hours of uncompensated overtime into the last […]

Scatterday

I’m fortunate to be able to work at home full-time. I’m even more fortunate that Large Financial Institution forecasts on the pessimistic side. Our C-suite has looked at the COVID numbers. They’ve also looked at our Q3 all-employee survey in which 56% of us said we’d be perfectly fine only coming into the office for […]

It’s not a preference

Created to mourn and memorialize the lives of transgender people lost between October 1 and September 30 year over year, November 20th is Transgender Day of Remembrance. This year’s day mourns the lives of 432 people across the globe – 53 in the U.S. alone – lost to violence, medical neglect, or suicide – because, […]

Beginnings and endings

The sun is coming up as a write this. Out my window clouds tinged with orange striate a sky so lightly blue it is almost white. Today is beginning, at least here anyway. Sixty-one years ago today my maternal grandfather’s life ended. There aren’t a lot of details in the family lore. My mother’s older […]

Just one more hole

It’s funny how even when you like and trust your boss certain things trigger suspicion. In the past couple of weeks I have spent a good chunk of time at work reviewing resumes and sitting in on interviews for a contractor position in my specialty area. Even though this position isn’t for my direct team, […]

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