How to be diligent without Willpower
Have you ever been trying to focus, but you just keep checking your phone, unprompted, every 3 minutes? You have, Don’t lie - We all do it. You know that checking it serves no real purpose; there’s nothing that needs your attention, and ignoring the work isn’t going to finish it - you know these things, so why do you still check your phone? And why is it that when your phone is in another room, on your bed, in a drawer, or just out of your direct vicinity that you pay no mind to it at all? If you’re so addicted to your phone, why aren’t you rushing to grab it every third minute?
Inconvenience
When you start to pay attention, it’s insane to see the amount of impact even the smallest inconveniences can have. The phone you’ve been checking obsessively for the last two hours; now that it’s on your bed, it doesn’t exist and you haven’t thought about it for even a second. The concept “Make it obvious” was first introduced to me in James Clears Atomic Habits. Out of all the tools for building great habits that were outlined in his book, the inherently simple idea of making things you want to do easy, and making things you want to quit hard has been a game changer in my own life, and I’d like to share some of the practical examples that I’ve personally used.
Make doing the right thing easy
Completing Tasks
I always forget to do my laundry when it’s necessary. I’ll think about it, but don’t want to do it in the moment, so I do nothing and end up forgetting about it completely. That is, until I thought about how I could make it easy to remember. Now, when the moment comes that I think about needing to do my laundry, I take the basket and put it in front of my door. I didn’t have a reason to do the laundry when I thought about it, but now when I leave I won’t forget to do it because it’s obstructing my path.
Building Habits
In the same way, I made it easy to be a consistent programmer. There is a widget for the Github app that shows your 6 most recent weeks of activity. Each day that you add code to a project, you fill in a little green square, and as simple as it is, the objective of turning a gray square green pushes me to code, for hobby, at least once a day, and has been working wonderfully for 3 months. Some days I’ll make a small adjustment to something, or just add a sentence to a blog to fill this green square, but so long as I spend some amount of time identifying and changing things inside of my codebase each day, I’m pleased with that.
Levels of contribution
It’s important to understand the power of starting small, and be okay with contributions to your habits that don’t make a real difference outside of continuing the habit. Ideally, you should make your habit super easy to maintain so that you don’t have a reason not to do it on any given day. Even when you don’t the motivation, you can still force yourself to do one pushup, read one sentence, eat one healthy food, etc. If you set your threshold low, you’ll never have a reason to not continue, and can increase your output once the habit becomes automatic.
Make doing the wrong thing hard
Fixing my personal bad habit
Most people waste an unimaginable amount of time every day using their phone, and I’m honestly no exception. The fact that brushing my teeth takes 10 minutes because I’m trying to watch something at the same time is unholy. That being said, I’ve managed to cut my times significantly using one simple trick: Making the apps harder to reach. On iPhone, there are multiple things you can try in order to make the habitual act of opening and scrolling a conscious effort. You can first start by hiding notifications from the apps you want to use less. If that doesn’t work, remove the apps from your home screen, and if that still doesn’t work, you can force yourself to type the app’s name in a dropdown by removing it from Siri Suggestions. If you’ve done all that and still keep your bad habit, just delete the app and get rid of it all together. I used to use Instagram for up to 4 hours, daily. I was really just wasting away time watching videos and looking at people I don’t care about. After realizing all of the important time I was giving up, I simply deleted the app and just like that I had way more time in my day - and just like when I remove my phone from my environment, I didn’t think twice about once it was out of reach.
Apply this to yourself
Discipline can be an unreachable dream for many people, simply because they don’t know how to facilitate new habits, or drop bad ones. Creating small conveniences or inconveniences to your environment can greatly impact your ability to focus and accomplish your daily goals. When you start to understand that your habits are simply what you unconsciously tend towards, you can start forcing yourself to use more thought and effort for continuing bad habits, and less effort for starting good ones.
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